Ranching in the Bad Lands 9 



in size; on some there may be but a few hundred 

 head, on others ten times as many thousand. The 

 land is still in great part unsurveyed, and is hardly 

 anywhere fenced in, the cattle roaming over it at 

 will. The small ranches are often quite close to 

 one another, say within a couple of miles; but the 

 home ranch of a big outfit will not have another 

 building within ten or twenty miles of it, or, indeed, 

 if the country is dry, not within fifty. The ranch 

 house may be only a mud dugout, or a "shack" made 

 of logs stuck upright into the ground; more often 

 it is a fair-sized, well-made building of hewn logs, 

 divided into several rooms. Around it are grouped 

 the other buildings log-stables, cow-sheds, and 

 hay-ricks, an outhouse in which to store things, 

 and on large ranches another house in which the 

 cowboys sleep. The strongly made, circular horse- 

 corral, with a snubbing post in the middle, stands 

 close by; the larger cow-corral, in which the stock 

 is branded, may be some distance off. A small 

 patch of ground is usually inclosed as a vegetable 

 garden, and a very large one, with water in it, as a 

 pasture to be used only in special cases. All the 

 work is done on horseback, and the quantity of 

 ponies is thus of necessity very great, some of the 

 large outfits numbering them by hundreds; on my 

 own ranch there were eighty. Most of them are 

 small, wiry beasts, not very speedy, but with good 

 bottom, and able to pick up a living under the most 

 adverse circumstances. There are usually a few 

 large, fine horses kept for the special use of the 



