882 THE PEOPLE'S FARM AND STOCK CYCLOPEDIA. 



I will now tell of one or two other herds. A. B. came to 

 Kansas about the same time that I did. Invested all of his avail- 

 able money in a herd of one thousand head of Texas yearlings, 

 and undertook to winter them on the range. The story is soon 

 told. Without food or shelter for the grass was buried in ice 

 and snow the miserable creatures perished by the wholesale, 

 arid when spring came nine hundred and twenty-five were dead, 

 and all would have been had not the man sold out and fled the 

 country, leaving the remnant in better hands. 



There were scores of herds but little better off, yet the 

 owners were not wholly to blame, for at that time the " tender- 

 foot" was told repeatedly that cattle wintered beautifully on 

 the range, and came out fat in the spring. The writer well re- 

 members being asked by passers by that fall, "What are you 

 cutting so much hay for ? you will not want the fourth of 

 it." The winter range lies west in the region of buffalo-grass 

 and of unlimited acres, but not east of the one hundredth 

 meridian. 



I will write of one more herd for the lesson there is in it. 

 C. D. was a Texan with a number of large herds, some five 

 thousand cattle in all. One of these herds was wintered quite 

 near my own, and contained one thousand fine large steers, every 

 one of which should have lived had they been cared for as they 

 might have been. But the man in charge, with plenty of hay, 

 simply let the stock run to the stacks, and not half of them 

 could get a mouthful, while one-half of the hay was wasted, 

 and the poor dumb creatures stood and starved and died by 

 the hundreds, while the men being paid to care for them 

 were off at the nearest saloon or bagnio steeping themselves 

 in whisky and crime. These are not fancy pictures, but actual, 

 hard facts. 



The news of these disasters spread, and men came from all 

 the Eastern cities and bought up the hides, in many instances 

 just as they were on the carcasses of the dead animals. A 

 novel way of stripping off the hides was adopted to expedite 

 the work. An expert would skin the head and partly the 

 legs; one team of oxen or horses was hitched to the hide and 



