. Always, when we use these words, we think of buffalo
plains and of Indians, and of their passing before the footmen and
riders who carried the phantom flag of Drake and the Virgin Queen from
the Appalachians to the Rockies--before the men who eventually made good
that glorious and vaunting vision of the Virginia cavaliers, whose party
turned back from the Rockfish Gap after laying claim in the name of King
George on all the country lying west of them, as far as the South Sea!

The American cow country may with very good logic arrogate to itself
the title of the real and typical frontier of all the world. We call
the spirit of the frontier Elizabethan, and so it was; but even as the
Elizabethan Age was marked by its contact with the Spanish civilization
in Europe, on the high seas, and in both the Americas, so the last
frontier of the American West also was affected, and largely, deeply,
by Spanish influence and Spanish customs. The very phraseology of range
work bears proof of this. Scores of Spanish words are written indelibly
in the language of the Plains. The frontier of the cow-range never was
Saxon alone.

It is a curious fact also, seldom if ever noted, that this Old West of
the Plains was very largely Southern and not Northern on its Saxon
side. No States so much as Kentucky and Tennessee and, later,
Missouri--daughters of Old Virginia in her glory--contributed to the
forces of the frontiersmen. Texas, farther to the south, put her stamp
indelibly upon the entire cattle industry of the West. Visionary,
impractical, restless, adventurous, these later Elizabethan
heroes--bowing to no yoke, insisting on their own rights and scorning
often the laws of others, yet careful to retain the best and most
advantageous customs of any conquered country--naturally came from those
nearest Elizabethan countries which lay abandoned behind them.

If the atmosphere of the Elizabethan Age still may be found in
the forgotten Cumberlands, let us lay claim to kinship with yonder
roystering heroes of a gallant day; for this was ever the atmosphere
of our own frontier. To feel again the following breezes of the Golden
Hind, or see again, floating high in the cloudless skies, the sails of
the Great Armada, was the privilege of Americans for a double decade
within the memory of men yet living, in that country, so unfailingly
beloved, which we call the Old West of America.

Chapter II. The Range

When, in 1803, those two immortal