were mainly supported by the government. The supervision of
their affairs was vested in a board of commissioners created in 1869 and
instructed to treat them as wards of the nation--a trust which
unfortunately was often betrayed. A further step in Indian policy was
taken in 1887 when provision was made for issuing lands to individual
Indians, thus permitting them to become citizens and settle down among
their white neighbors as farmers or cattle raisers. The disappearance of
the buffalo, the main food supply of the wild Indians, had made them
more tractable and more willing to surrender the freedom of the hunter
for the routine of the reservation, ranch, or wheat field.

=The Cowboy and Cattle Ranger.=--Between the frontier of farms and the
mountains were plains and semi-arid regions in vast reaches suitable for
grazing. As soon as the railways were open into the Missouri Valley,
affording an outlet for stock, there sprang up to the westward cattle
and sheep raising on an immense scale. The far-famed American cowboy was
the hero in this scene. Great herds of cattle were bred in Texas; with
the advancing spring and summer seasons, they were driven northward
across the plains and over the buffalo trails. In a single year, 1884,
it is estimated that nearly one million head of cattle were moved out of
Texas to the North by four thousand cowboys, supplied with 30,000
horses and ponies.

During the two decades from 1870 to 1890 both the cattle men and the
sheep raisers had an almost free run of the plains, using public lands
without paying for the privilege and waging war on one another over the
possession of ranges. At length, however, both had to go, as the
homesteaders and land companies came and fenced in the plain and desert
with endless lines of barbed wire. Already in 1893 a writer familiar
with the frontier lamented the passing of the picturesque days: "The
unique position of the cowboys among the Americans is jeopardized in a
thousand ways. Towns are growing up on their pasture lands; irrigation
schemes of a dozen sorts threaten to turn bunch-grass scenery into
farm-land views; farmers are pre-empting valleys and the sides of
waterways; and the day is not far distant when stock-raising must be
done mainly in small herds, with winter corrals, and then the cowboy's
days will end. Even now his condition disappoints those who knew him
only half a dozen years ago. His breed seems to have deteriorated and
his ranks are f