OF A RANCHMAN 57 



they possess ; but these are all mere tempo- 

 rary excrescences, and the true old Rocky 

 Mountain hunter and trapper, the plainsman, 

 or mountain-man, who, with all his faults, 

 was a man of iron nerve and will, is now al- 

 most a thing of the past. In the place of 

 these heroes of a bygone age, the men who 

 were clad in buckskin and who carried long 

 rifles, stands, or rather rides, the bronzed and 

 sinewy cowboy, as picturesque and self-reli- 

 ant, as dashing and resolute as the saturnine 

 Indian fighters whose place he has taken; 

 and, alas that it should be written ! he in his 

 turn must at no distant time share the fate of 

 the men he has displaced. The ground over 

 which he so gallantly rides his small, wiry 

 horse will soon know him no more, and in his 

 stead there will be the plodding grangers and 

 husbandmen. I suppose it is right and for 

 the best that the great cattle country, with its 

 broad extent of fenceless land, over which 

 the ranchman rides as free as the game that 

 he follows or the horned herds that he 

 guards, should be in the end broken up into 



