youths, Meriwether Lewis and William
Clark, were about to go forth on their great journey across the
continent, they were admonished by Thomas Jefferson that they would in
all likelihood encounter in their travels, living and stalking about,
the mammoth or the mastodon, whose bones had been found in the great
salt-licks of Kentucky. We smile now at such a supposition; yet it was
not unreasonable then. No man knew that tremendous country that lay
beyond the mouth of the Missouri.

The explorers crossed one portion of a vast land which was like to
nothing they had ever seen--the region later to become the great
cattle-range of America. It reached, although they could know nothing of
that, from the Spanish possessions on the south across a thousand miles
of short grass lands to the present Canadian boundary line which certain
obdurate American souls still say ought to have been at 54 degrees 40
minutes, and not where it is! From the Rio Grande to "Fifty-four forty,"
indeed, would have made nice measurements for the Saxon cattle-range.

Little, however, was the value of this land understood by the explorers;
and, for more than half a century afterwards, it commonly was supposed
to be useless for the occupation of white men and suitable only as a
hunting-ground for savage tribes. Most of us can remember the school
maps of our own youth, showing a vast region marked, vaguely, "The Great
American Desert," which was considered hopeless for any human industry,
but much of which has since proved as rich as any land anywhere on the
globe.

Perhaps it was the treeless nature of the vast Plains which carried the
first idea of their infertility. When the first settlers of Illinois and
Indiana came up from south of the Ohio River they had their choice of
timber and prairie lands. Thinking the prairies worthless--since land
which could not raise a tree certainly could not raise crops--these
first occupants of the Middle West spent a generation or more, axe in
hand, along the heavily timbered river-bottoms. The prairies were long
in settling. No one then could have predicted that farm lands in that
region would be worth three hundred dollars an acre or better, and that
these prairies of the Mississippi Valley would, in a few generations,
be studded with great towns and would form a part of the granary of the
world.

But, if our early explorers, passing beyond the valley of the Missouri,
found valueless the region of the Plains and