COW-PASTUEBS AND COW-PATHS 45 



croach on another's did he do this but once hav- 

 ing set up his claim he must needs defend it with 

 his life if necessary, and so all our land titles rest 

 originally on force or fraud, never on equity. It 

 was a far cry from the time when men merely 

 herded their animals until they began to till the 

 ground on any considerable and systematic scale. 

 In the days when animal-keeping merely supple- 

 mented hunting and root-digging, there were no 

 large fields and no rotation of crops and no regu- 

 lar sowing and reaping. This at least seems to 

 have been the rule among all Old- World peoples. 

 The American Indians, on the contrary, among the 

 most advanced tribes grew considerable areas of 

 corn and beans and even planted orchards, but save 

 for their dogs seem to have been without domesti- 

 cated animals. The probable explanation is that 

 almost all the animals of our farms today are of 

 Asiatic or European origin and in all North 

 America, with the exception of the bison, there 

 would seem to have been no large easily domesti- 

 cated grazing mammal. 



Unquestionably the first cow-keeper relied solely 

 on pasture, and only after considerable advance- 

 ment did he develop foresight enough to provide 

 stores of food against times of scarcity, such as 

 drought in summer or snowbound winter months. 

 It must be confessed that some cattle ranchers in 

 our own western states have hardly gotten beyond 

 this same primitive practice, and every year their 



