Colorado Agricultural Experiment Station 
BULLETIN 87. JUNE, 1904. 
Cattle Raising on the Plains. 
By J. E. PAYNE. 
History in Brief. In 1867 a Massachusetts editor, when 
traveling from Omaha to Denver by stage, spoke of the country 
from Fort Kearney to Denver as 400 miles of uninhabitable space. 
The whole country between a short distance west of Omaha to the 
Rockies was considered a desert by nearly all hunters and travel¬ 
ers. Notwithstanding this the same men today will say that that 
country then supported more roving buffaloes than the number of 
cattle now kept on the same area. Between i860 and 1875 the 
buffalo were driven out of this space and the Indians were sub¬ 
dued so that it was comparatively safe for men to keep cattle 
there. Cautiously at first, and recklessly afterwards, men went 
into the cattle business, until in the eighties the tally books of 
the various outfits whose cattle ranged eastern Colorado summed 
up nearly half a million head. The most of these cattle were 
owned by large outfits, supporting high-salaried officers and em¬ 
ploying superintendents and foremen to do the real work. These 
large companies took possession of the open water along the 
streams and soon it became an unwritten law among them to 
allow each ten miles of open water and the valley adjoining it, 
and from the stream half way to the nearest open water on an¬ 
other stream or in another localitv. It was the custom then to 
j 
allow the cowboys to run their own cattle with those of the com¬ 
pany and have them cared for the same as if they belonged to the 
company. The care consisted usually in rounding up, counting 
what could be found, branding the calves, and selecting animals 
to be sent to market. 
For sometime all the range was entirely open and cattle 
whose owners lived 011 the South Platte might drift to the Big 
Sandy, or possibly as far as the Arkansas river. Under this sys¬ 
tem it was impossible to improve the range stock, so in the 
eighties the large companies began to fence large pastures and use 
pure bred bulls of the beef breeds. The pasture method was quite 
