CHAPTER I. 



RANCHING IN THE BAD LANDS. 



HE great middle plains of the 

 United States, parts of which 

 are still scantily peopled by men 

 of Mexican parentage, while 

 other parts have been but recently 

 won from the warlike tribes of Horse 

 Indians, now form a broad pastoral 

 belt, stretching in a north and south line 

 from British America to the Rio Grande. 

 Throughout this great belt of grazing land almost the 

 only industry is stock-raising, which is here engaged in on 

 a really gigantic scale ; and it is already nearly covered 

 with the ranches of the stockmen, except on those isolated 

 tracts (often themselves of great extent) from which the 

 red men look hopelessly and sullenly out upon their old 

 hunting-grounds, now roamed over by the countless herds 

 of long-horned cattle. The northern portion of this belt 

 is that which has been most lately thrown open to the 

 whites ; and it is with this part only that we have to do. 



