294 
D. E. SALMON. 
time in the past, I have endeavored to call attention to our true 
condition in regard to this disease, but the light-headed corres¬ 
pondents, not only of our agricultural journals but of our great 
dailies, have been so industrious in the dissemination of their 
peculiar opinions—opinions arrived at by a sort of intuition, and 
at hundreds of miles from a case of the disease—that many have 
become skeptical in regard to the way in which the affection is 
transmitted, or even as to its existence. But the stock raiser in 
Missouri, Kansas or Indian Territory, who repeatedly and clearly 
traces his losses to crossing the trail of a Texas herd, or to the 
pastures which such a herd has infected, has no such skepticism ; 
nor had the farmers of the great States of Illinois, Indiana, Ohio 
and Kentucky, when, in 1867 and 1868, they saw not merely 
thousands, but tens of thousands of their native cattle swept away 
by this pestilence. 
The excitement which followed this destruction has long been 
forgotten, however, and the majority of our farmers have never 
even heard of Texas fever, and so every year certain individuals 
of a speculative turn of mind invest in the cheap cattle of the 
South, and graze them immediately upon pastures which are also 
occupied with their native animals. When the heat of July and 
August has enabled the germs deposited upon the soil to multiply 
sufficiently, the susceptible native cattle are infected and die, and 
we are then told of a new and strange disease of the most re¬ 
markable virulence. This is the substantial history of hundreds 
of cases which have occurred, and are continually occurring in 
North Carolina, Virginia, Vest Virginia and other States, and 
which have furnished the text for the many absurdities lately 
written, not only by the penny-a-liners, but, I am sorry to say, by 
those as well who claim to be veterinarians. 
How important it is, then, that our farmers should accept the 
fact, that in a vast section of our country—a section more than 
six times the size of England and Scotland combined, and two 
and a half times the size of France—we have a terribly fatal in¬ 
digenous cattle plague, permanently located; and that all cattle 
taken to this district are liable to be infected, while those taken 
from it, though apparently unaffected themselves, are capable of 
