May 27, 1911.] 
FOREST AND STREAM. 
817 
The Crime of the Modern Range. 
I remember the good old days, the wild old 
days, the days of the buffaio, of the long horn 
steer, of the Indian and of the wild mustang. 
In the good old days of the unfenced and 
unfurrowed West, now gone and gone forever, 
a man could turn a bunch of cattle loose to rustle 
and winter as best they could and not be guilty 
of a very serious crime. 
Then every stream was unfenced, the brush 
and open springs furnished water and shelter, the 
range was covered with high native grasses with 
plenty of seeds that stood far above the average 
snow fall, and the cattle seldom suffered from 
lack of either food, water or shelter. Then in 
the winter storms they could drift for miles up 
or down a well-timbered stream until they found 
both food and water. 
Once in about ten years a hard winter would 
hit us and the cattle would die, but then we 
were pretty sure of nine years of plenty, and 
the cattle business paid a fair rate of interest. 
Those hard winters were really a blessing in 
disguise to some men who thoroughly under¬ 
stood all kinds of stock business, for those win¬ 
ters covered a multitude of losses. When the 
foreman or manager of an Eastern capitalized 
stock ranch had a silent partner in an adjoin¬ 
ing State or Territory that would work brands 
and brand the calves of the tenderfoot stock 
company, the foreman when asked where his 
herd was could blame the hard winter and not 
get mobbed or shot. Our skins were rather 
tough then, and we did not view the matter as 
the traveling preacher has since taught us to. 
We were young then, and it takes a young 
man for war, and an old man for reflection, 
and we are gradually getting older and conse¬ 
quently more enlightened or more chicken- 
hearted. In those days most of the dead stock 
seen in the spring after the worst winter would 
be some old cows, young heifers or young calves. 
Now, all the old conditions are changed. 
Slowly but surely the rancher, the small stock- 
man, the dry land farmer and the overflow from 
the East have encroached upon the once wild 
free range. 
The old-time cow puncher, tired of night herd¬ 
ing, of riding bucking bronchos and stove-up, 
stiff saddle horses over the badger holes and 
rough country, sees a spring of open water and 
a fine brush patch that he knows will be a fine 
place to keep a little bunch of stock. He takes 
up this place, that is the cream of the range 
country. 
Then the sheep man comes along and takes 
up his 160 acres of the most favorable water 
and shelter. The sheep owner hires many men 
of easy conscience and reckless habits to take 
the best of the water and shelter—that which 
will prove of most benefit and profit to the sheep 
owner. The herder goes on a drunk and the 
sheep owner buys his homestead and birthright 
for a few hundred dollars. All these claims are 
soon fenced with barbed wire that is cattle and 
horse proof. Soon every stream, from its source 
near the setting sun to the wigwams of the pale¬ 
faces of the corn-raising East, is fenced with 
barbed wire, and the water and shelter and food 
—the long, seeded grass of the old range—are 
gone never to return. 
Now comes the dry land fanner, and he is 
the limit, for he will argue that he can make 
a fortune raising winter wheat on 160 acres of 
hill land that in the old days would barely sup¬ 
port a long horn steer, and so now with the 
shelter and the water, the summer range is about 
gone. 
What folly, what belief in luck is it that 
prompts the range man of the present day to 
turn loose thousands of cattle to starve and 
perish upon the open prairie drifted up against 
barbed wire fences and mired in the snow of 
the deep coulee? 
The small farmer with a small bunch of cattle, 
a small stack of hay and shelter and sheds is 
compelled to do things that makes his heart 
bleed. He cannot afford to feed and shelter 
stock owned by other people who will never 
reimburse him. In self defense he must drive 
all cattle but his own off on to the open range. 
Big three and four-year-old steers have stag¬ 
gered into our sheds this winter which it is 
simply inhuman to attempt to drive away. T 
cannot afford to feed them, I cannot afford 
every day to commit crimes that would make 
a savage blush by beating, bruising and cruelly 
treating animals that can scarcely stand. The 
course of these large stockmen is unjust to the 
small man who wants to raise a few cattie and 
expects to feed and shelter them. He must 
spend a great deal of time with saddle horse and 
all means in his power to keep the big range 
man s starving steers from eating his hay and 
crowding his own cows and calves out of their 
legitimate shelter. 
Is it not time that a man should be responsi¬ 
ble to someone when he abuses the finer sensi¬ 
bilities of a whole community by having hun¬ 
dreds and thousands of staggering, famine- 
stricken, shelterless dumb animals roaming about 
bearing his brand and not a shed nor a pound 
of hay to help them? 
A man who in a rage takes a club and beats 
a ho rse to death in some communities is taken 
in hand and sentenced to a term in jail that 
gives him plenty of time for reform and reflec¬ 
tion. How about a man who condemns a thou¬ 
sand or several thousand of cattle to die of 
abuse and starvation ? 
Under the old condition it may have been just 
and profitable, but a young calf in two feet of 
snow and the mercury at 25 below zero was not 
the most pleasing spectacle. 
Under present conditions there is no earthly 
justification for such work. To be compelled to 
live thus makes a man and his family a pack 
of wolves. J. B. Monroe. 
Sportsman’s Day. 
The afternoon of Thursday of next week, 
June x, has been denominated by the executive 
committee of the New York Zoological Society 
as Sportsman’s Day, and members of the society 
are invited to the Zoological Park, to view the 
National Collection of Heads and Horns in the 
Administration Bui'ding there on the afternoon 
of that day. The occasion is one that will be 
taken advantage of by many big-game hunters. 
As recently stated, there is on exhibit'on there 
the great head of a white rhinoceros ki led by 
Colonel Roosevelt, while among the African 
trophies of peculiar interest are the record pair 
of elephant tusks given years ago to the collec¬ 
tion by the late Charles T. Barney. Hanging 
on the wall of the staircase is the extraordinary 
narwhal skull armed with a pair of long tusks. 
Usually only one of a pair of narwhal tusks is 
developed, the other being very short or not 
showing at all. In the hall is a partial albino 
muskox head, while in the crowded rooms above 
are many heads and horns of a multitude of 
game animals from all the quarters of the globe. 
THE TOP RAIL. 
One day while practicing wing shooting with 
a companion, he threw a target rather high, and 
as I aligned the gun I saw a glint of white be¬ 
yond the target. Again, as the fragments of the 
broken asphalt saucer spread and fell, from 
among them a flash of white appeared like a 
tiny scrap of paper floating in the air. Then my 
companion saw it, and we watched it intently. 
Apparently it was a great swan bound for the 
Gulf of Mexico. A mile high and two miles 
distant, perhaps, still its slow and regular wing 
strokes could be seen quite distinctly after the 
eyes had become accustomed to the long focus. 
Had a thousand swans passed over at that 
distance, I doubt if we would have seen them; 
for this one was observed only because the gun 
happened to be aimed at it. Thus hordes of 
migrants pass over us unseen, particularly at 
night, and only at long intervals and generally 
in an accidental way do we see those that pass 
over on the clearest day. A wedge of geese 
often looms large when one is looking at some¬ 
thing else. Look away, then back, and at first 
they are difficult to find, but this done, the eye 
holds them readily until they are finally swal¬ 
lowed up in the distance. 
* * * 
If a story from Louisiana be true, it proves 
once again the fallacy of shooting first and in¬ 
vestigating afterward. It is said that John 
Davidson, one of a launch party on the Hanson 
canal, filed with a rifle at a box lying along¬ 
shore. It was a box of dynamite, and when 
it exploded, the launch was wrecked, one of its 
occupants, a young woman, killed and the three 
others injured, the shooter the least seriously 
of all. Property damage was more widespread 
and extensive. Shots of this sort never miss the 
mark, but those who fire them are seldom hurt. 
* + * 
I referred not long aeo to n camper who 
stammered. This reminds me of one of Nor¬ 
man Duncan’s sea yarns, in which one of the 
fishermen is burdened with the name Moses 
Shoos. Moses asked a maiden to marry him. 
and she was willing, but when she tried to pro¬ 
nounce his name she was appalled, for she 
lisped. When she reflected that she would have 
to call herself Mitheth Motheth Thooth she 
hesitated, hut as that was her first and only 
chance, she did not let a little impediment in 
speech prevent the wedding. 
Grizzi.y King. 
