"The braiding of a hundred minor pathways, the Long Trail lay like a vast rope connecting the cattle country of the South with that of the North. Lying loose or coiling, it ran for more than two thousand miles along the eastern ridge of the Rocky mountains, sometimes close in at their feet, again hundreds of miles away across the hard table-lands or the well-flowered prairies. It traversed in a fair line the vast land of Texas, curled over the Indian Nations, over Kansas, Colorado, Nebraska, Wyoming and Montana, and bent in wide overlapping circles as far west as Utah and Nevada; as far east as Missouri, Iowa, Illinois; and as far north as the British possessions. Even to-day you may trace plainly its former course, from its faint beginnings in the lazy land of Mexico, the Ararat of the cattle range. It is distinct across Texas, and multifold still in the Indian lands. Its many intermingling paths still scar the iron surface of the Neutral Strip, and the plows have not buried all the old furrows in the plains of Kansas. Parts of the path still remain visible in the mountain lands of the far North. You may see the ribbons banding the hillsides to-day along the valley of the Stillwater, and along the Yellowstone and toward the source
of the Missouri. The hoof marks are beyond the Musselshell, over the Bad Lands and the coulees and the flat prairies; and far up into the land of the long cold you may see, even to-day if you like, the shadow of that unparalleled pathway, the Long Trail of the cattle range. History has no other like it.
"This was really the dawning of the American cattle industry. The Long Trail now received a gradual but unmistakable extension, always to the north, and along the line of the intermingling of the products of the Spanish and the Anglo-Saxon civilizations. The thrust was always to the north. Chips and flakes of the great Southwestern herd began to be seen in the northern states. Meantime the Anglo-Saxon civilization was rolling swiftly toward the upper West. The Indians were being driven from the plains. A solid army was pressing behind the vanguard of soldier, scout and plainsman. The railroads were pushing out into a new and untracked empire. In 1871 over six hundred thousand cattle crossed the Red river for the Northern markets. Abilene, Newton, Wichita, Ellsworth, Great Bend, "Dodge," flared out into a swift and sometime evil blossoming. The Long Trail, which long ago had
found the black corn lands of Illinois and Missouri, now crowded to the West, until it had reached Utah and Nevada, and penetrated every open park and mesa and valley of Colorado, and found all the high plains of Wyoming. Cheyenne and Laramie became common words now, and drovers spoke wisely of the dangers of the Platte as a year before they had mentioned those of the Red river or the Arkansas. Nor did the Trail pause in its irresistible push to the north until it had found the last of the five great trans-continental lines, far in the British provinces. The Long Trail of the cattle range was done. By magic the cattle industry had spread over the entire West."
By magic, also, the cattle industry called to itself a population unique and peculiar. Here were great values to be handled and guarded. The cowboy appeared, summoned out of the shadows by the demand of evolution. With him appeared also the cattle thief, making his living on free beef, as he had once on the free buffalo of the plains. The immense domain of the West was filled with property held under no better or more obvious mark than the imprint of a hot iron on the hide. There were no fences. The owner might be a thousand miles away.
The temptation to theft was continual and urgent. It seemed easy and natural to take a living from these great herds which no one seemed to own or to care for. The "rustler" of the range made his appearance, bold, hardy, unprincipled; and the story of his undoing by the law is precisely that of the finish of the robbers of the mines by the Vigilantes.
Now, too, came the days of transition, which have utterly changed all the West. The railroad sprang across this great middle country of the plains. The intent was to connect the two sides of this continent; but, incidentally, and more swiftly than was planned, there was builded a great midway empire on the plains, now one of the grandest portions of America.
This building of the trans-continental lines was a rude and dangerous work. It took out into the West mobs of hard characters, not afraid of hard work and hard living. These men would have a certain amount of money as wages, and would assuredly spend these wages as they made them; hence, the gambler followed the rough settlements at the "head of the rails." The murderer, the thief, the prostitute, the social outcast and the fleeing criminal went with the gamblers and the toughs. Those were
the days when it was not polite to ask a man what his name had been back in the States. A very large percentage of this population was wild and lawless, and it impressed those who joined it instead of being altered and improved by them. There were no wilder days in the West than those of the early railroad building. Such towns as Newton, Kansas, where eleven men were killed in one night; Fort Dodge, where armed encounters among cowboys and gamblers, deputies and desperadoes, were too frequent to attract attention; Caldwell, on the Indian border; Hays City, Abilene, Ellsworth—any of a dozen cow camps, where the head of the rails caught the great northern cattle drives, furnished chapters lurid enough to take volumes in telling—indeed, perhaps, gave that stamp to the West which has been apparently so ineradicable.