EANGE HOUSES. 235 



range cattle began to take on extended propor- 

 tions, and each cattle baron strove to breed a 

 line of cow ponies that would serve him well 

 under any and all circumstances. The necessity 

 of the situation developed a strain of hardy, 

 fleet ponies, capable of sustaining great effort 

 and hardship on scanty rations the cow pony, 

 of no particular breeding as a mass, yet pos- 

 sessing stamina second to none. Running at 

 will on the open range, the production of these 

 ponies was governed by the inexorable law of 

 natural selection in so far as their environment 

 was concerned. All sort of stallions were 

 turned loose on the range, picked up their bands 

 of mares and got them with foal. The progeny 

 fended for itself, survived or dropped out as 

 the case might be, leaving only the best to 

 reach maturity. In time the holdings of the 

 range breeders became very great and prices 

 of both the broken and the unbroken were very 

 low compared to what native-bred horses 

 brought farther east. The supply was limitless, 

 the use practically limited to cowpunching. 



Desultory improvement, attempted with pure- 

 bred stallions of the meanest sort, proved that 

 it was no great trick to engraft the individual- 

 ity of almost any pure-bred sire on the ranger. 

 But the price to be obtained for the unbroken 

 progeny was so low that most of the rangemen 

 bought only stallions for which they had to pay 

 trivial prices. It would not pay, they said, to 

 put much money into stallions to turn out on 



