years of his operations. In one California town at one time a
bonanza farmer came in and covered three city blocks with farm machinery
which he had turned over to the bank owning the mortgages on his lands
and plant. He turned in also all his mules and horses, and retired worse
than broke from an industry in which he had once made his hundreds of
thousands. Something of this same story was to follow in the Dakotas.
Presently we heard no more of the bonanza wheat farms; and a little
later they were not. The one-crop country is never one of sound
investing values; and a land boom is something of which to
beware--always and always to beware.

The prairie had passed; the range had passed; the illegal fences had
passed; and presently the cattle themselves were to pass--that is to
say, the great herds. As recently as five years ago (1912) it was my
fortune to be in the town of Belle Fourche, near the Black Hills--a
region long accustomed to vivid history, whether of Indians, mines, or
cows--at the time when the last of the great herds of the old industry
thereabouts were breaking up; and to see, coming down to the cattle
chutes to be shipped to the Eastern stockyards, the last hundreds of
the last great Belle Fourche herd, which was once numbered in thousands.
They came down out of the blue-edged horizon, threading their way from
upper benches down across the dusty valley. The dust of their travel
rose as it had twenty years earlier on the same old trail. But these
were not the same cattle. There was not a longhorn among them; there has
not been a longhorn on the range for many years. They were sleek, fat,
well-fed animals, heavy and stocky, even of type, all either whitefaces
or shorthorns. With them were some old-time cowmen, men grown gray in
range work. Alongside the herds, after the ancient fashion of trailing
cattle, rode cowboys who handled their charges with the same old skill.
But even the cowboys had changed. These were without exception men from
the East who had learned their trade here in the West. Here indeed
was one of the last acts of the great drama of the Plains. To many an
observer there it was a tragic thing. I saw many a cowman there the
gravity on whose face had nothing to do with commercial loss. It was
the Old West he mourned. I mourned with him. Naturally the growth of
the great stockyards of the Middle West had an effect upon all the
cattle-producing country of the West, whether those cattle were bred