HUNTING TRIPS OF A RANCHMAN 



CHAPTER I 



RANCHING IN THE BAD LANDS 



THE 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-rais- 

 ing, 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. 



The northern cattle plains occupy the basin of the 

 Upper Missouri; that is, they occupy all of the 

 land drained by the tributaries of that river, and by 

 the river itself, before it takes its long trend to the 



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