6 RANCH LIFE AND THE HUNTING-TRAIL 



When the northern plains began to be settled, such a ranch would 

 at first be absolutely alone in the wilderness, but others of the same sort 

 were sure soon to be established within twenty or thirty miles on one side 

 or the other. The lives of the men in such places were strangely cut off 

 from the outside world, and, indeed, the same is true to a hardly less 

 extent at the present day. Sometimes the wagons are sent for provisions, 

 and the beef-steers are at stated times driven off for shipment. Parties 

 of hunters and trappers call now and then. More rarely small bands of 

 emigrants go by in search of new homes, impelled by the restless, aimless 

 craving for change so deeply grafted in the breast of the American bor- 

 derer: the white-topped wagons are loaded with domestic goods, with 

 sallow, dispirited-looking women, and with tow-headed children; while 

 the gaunt, moody frontiersmen slouch alongside, rifle on shoulder, lank, 

 homely, uncouth, and yet with a curious suggestion of grim strength under- 

 lying it all. Or cowboys from neighboring ranches will ride over, looking 

 for lost horses, or seeing if their cattle have strayed off the range. But 

 this is all. Civilization seems as remote as if we were living in an age 

 long past. The whole existence is patriarchal in character : it is the life 

 of men who live in the open, who tend their herds on horseback, who go 

 armed and ready to guard their lives by their own prowess, whose wants 

 are very simple, and who call no man master. Ranching is an occupation 

 like those of vigorous, primitive pastoral peoples, having little in common 

 with the humdrum, workaday business world of the nineteenth century ; 

 and the free ranchman in his manner of life shows more kinship to an 

 Arab sheik than to a sleek city merchant or tradesman. 



By degrees the country becomes what in a stock-raising region passes 

 for well settled. In addition to the great ranches smaller ones are estab- 

 lished, with a few hundred, or even a few score, head of cattle apiece ; 

 and now and then miserable farmers straggle in to fight a losing and 

 desperate battle with drought, cold, and grasshoppers. The wheels of 

 the heavy wagons, driven always over the same course from one ranch to 

 another, or to the remote frontier towns from which they get their goods, 

 wear ruts in the soil, and roads are soon formed, perhaps originally follow- 

 ing the deep trails made by the vanished buffalo. These roads lead down 

 the river-bottoms or along the crests of the divides or else strike out 

 fairly across the prairie, and a man may sometimes journey a hundred miles 

 along one without coming to a house or a camp of any sort. If they lead 

 to a shipping point whence the beeves are sent to market, the cattle, 

 traveling in single file, will have worn many and deep paths on each side 

 of the wheel-marks ; and the roads between important places which are 



