en
of the West. In time the lights of the dance-halls and the saloons and
the gambling parlors went out one by one all along the frontier. By 1885
Dodge City, a famed capital of the cow trade, which will live as long
as the history of that industry is known, resigned its eminence and
declared that from where the sun then stood it would be a cow camp no
more! The men of Dodge knew that another day had dawned. But this was
after the homesteaders had arrived and put up their wire fences, cutting
off from the town the holding grounds of the northbound herds.

This innovation of barb-wire fences in the seventies had caused a
tremendous alteration of conditions over all the country. It had enabled
men to fence in their own water-fronts, their own homesteads. Casually,
and at first without any objection filed by any one, they had included
in their fences many hundreds of thousands of acres of range land to
which they had no title whatever. These men--like the large-handed cow
barons of the Indian Nations, who had things much as they willed in a
little unnoted realm all their own--had money and political influence.
And there seemed still range enough for all. If a man wished to throw a
drift fence here or there, what mattered it?

Up to this time not much attention had been paid to the Little Fellow,
the man of small capital who registered a brand of his own, and who
with a Maverick * here and there and the natural increase, and perhaps
a trifle of unnatural increase here and there--had proved able to
accumulate with more or less rapidity a herd of his own. Now the cattle
associations passed rules that no foreman should be allowed to have
or register a brand of his own. Not that any foreman could be
suspected--not at all!--but the foreman who insisted on his old right to
own a running iron and a registered brand was politely asked to find his
employment somewhere else.

* In the early days a rancher by the name of Maverick, a Texas
man, had made himself rich simply by riding out on the open range and
branding loose and unmarked occupants of the free lands. Hence the term
"Maverick" was applied to any unbranded animal running loose on
the range. No one cared to interfere with these early activities in
collecting unclaimed cattle. Many a foundation for a great fortune was
laid in precisely that way. It was not until the more canny days in the
North that Mavericks were regarded with jealous eyes.

The large-handed and once