Whether by accident or design, the location of their northbound path was a lucky or a shrewd one. Scarcely anywhere else would there have been so few Indians to disturb them, nor could their experience easily be repeated. The depredations of the tribesmen, their begging of the drovers, their demands of tribute of all the northbound herds were still in the future, since as yet the Indians had not learned of the northern passing of the white men which was to come in a great wave in the ensuing years; and since not many tribes knew this herd was passing. The Del Sol men were pioneers.
How rich, how wildly alluring, this unsullied world which now was all their own to enjoy! Their wild cattle now advanced quite usually in sight of an almost continuous spectacle of wild buffalo, wild horses, wild deer. At times the herd had to be held while a body of buffalo was parted by rifle fire to let them through. There seemed no end to the animal life of the region into which they came. It was all so different from Texas now that they felt themselves strangers in a foreign land.
Their next river was the Cimarron, one more stream heading down from the high, dry buffalo plains of the Panhandle to the sandy reaches and the flat loam lands to the eastward. Making down out of the strip of scrubby timber which they encountered below their crossing, the herdsmen made short work of the Cimarron, which was at so low a stage that the carts were driven through and the cattle did not have to swim at all.
Their start had been approximately at the thirtieth degree of latitude. They had now reached, just above the Cimarron crossing, the parallel of thirty-six, which later represented, as well as any arbitrary delineation, the vague dividing line between the southern and the northern ranges.
Above them now by one degree of latitude lay the south line of Kansas; between, the narrow unsettled and unorganized east-and-west tract so long known as the Cherokee Strip or the Cherokee Outlet. The existence of this strip of land was proof that the greatest range of the buffalo lay yet farther to the west, in the short-grass land; for forty years before this time the Cherokees had fought the Osages to secure an outlet over their land to the buffalo range beyond. But of all these things also the Del Sol men were ignorant or careless. They did not know where they were.
Roll along, little dogies, roll along! You broke one of the greatest paths in all the world! You carried the South into the North! It was you who ended the war!
“Roll along, little dogies, roll along!”
The lazy song of half-somnolent riders, ragged, lean, brown, rose on the afternoon air of one more sunny day after sunny day. By this time the herd had but one more considerable stream, the Salt Fork of the Arkansas, between it and the main stream of the Arkansas. The men now all were studying geography as best they might, for gradually they all had concluded that Texas was far behind them, and that they were in a world they knew not.
“She’s shore a perty country, Miss Taisie,” said Jim Nabours when they paused for their noonday rest, the first stop north of the Cimarron. “It looks to me like folks could almost live here, some day, though I don’t see no cows nowheres.”
He could not dream that within a few short years there would be cattle under fence in all that country; that long before that time abundant strays would run wild as wild horses; that even then stretched illimitedly the great upper range, wholly undiscovered, soon to be clamoring for cows, to carry on a business which was then an unsuspected thing.