re vanishing. The buffalo have not yet gone,
but are soon to pass.

Until the closing days of the Civil War the northern range was a wide,
open domain, the greatest ever offered for the use of a people. None
claimed it then in fee; none wanted it in fee. The grasses and the sweet
waters offered accessible and profitable chemistry for all men who
had cows to range. The land laws still were vague and inexact in
application, and each man could construe them much as he liked. The
excellent homestead law of 1862, one of the few really good land laws
that have been put on our national statute books, worked well enough
so long as we had good farming lands for homesteading--lands of which a
quarter section would support a home and a family. This same homestead
law was the only one available for use on the cattle-range. In practice
it was violated thousands of times--in fact, of necessity violated
by any cattle man who wished to acquire sufficient range to run a
considerable herd. Our great timber kings, our great cattle kings, made
their fortunes out of their open contempt for the homestead law, which
was designed to give all the people an even chance for a home and a
farm. It made, and lost, America.

Swiftly enough, here and there along all the great waterways of the
northern range, ranchers and their men filed claims on the water fronts.
The dry land thus lay tributary to them. For the most part the open
lands were held practically under squatter right; the first cowman in
any valley usually had his rights respected, at least for a time. These
were the days of the open range. Fences had not come, nor had farms been
staked out.

From the South now appeared that tremendous and elemental force--most
revolutionary of all the great changes we have noted in the swiftly
changing West--the bringing in of thousands of horned kine along the
northbound trails. The trails were hurrying from the Rio Grande to the
upper plains of Texas and northward, along the north and south line of
the Frontier--that land which now we have been seeking less to define
and to mark precisely than fundamentally to understand.

The Indian wars had much to do with the cow trade. The Indians were
crowded upon the reservations, and they had to be fed, and fed on beef.
Corrupt Indian agents made fortunes, and the Beef Ring at Washington,
one of the most despicable lobbies which ever fattened there, now wrote
its brief and unworthy history. In a strange way c