182 AT THE SIGN OF THE STOCK YARD INN 



before him in Kentucky, together with his evident 

 determination to try and find something better 

 adapted to Kansas needs, that opened up to my 

 mind for the first time a vision of a way out from 

 the thralldom which was slowly but surely relegating 

 the Shorthorn of song and story to the bovine 

 scrapheap, so far as the needs of ordinary farmers 

 and feeders were concerned. The mere traffic in 

 pedigrees was having its inevitable result. Commer- 

 cialism had completely displaced constructive breed- 

 ing. The old excellence was dying hard, however. 

 Such a cow as old imported Lally 8th by 7th Duke 

 of York in the HAMILTON herd was a great Short- 

 horn in any age, and she was not alone. Still the 

 bulls that were up to standard were few and far 

 between, and so when this great man of whom I 

 write left Kentucky in the early spring of three and 

 thirty years ago for his Kansas home, a new era in 

 the world's Shorthorn cattle-breeding had been 

 unconsciously ushered in. His parting words were: 

 "If you can locate any good young cattle of this 

 GRUICKSHANK blood for sale, wire me at once." 



In an earlier sketch I have alluded to various 

 debts, agriculturally speaking, we owe to our neigh- 

 bors of the north. Canada was now to become the 

 source of the blood that was about to revolutionize 



