c of Texas, may
be regarded as the first enduring American result of contact with the
Spanish industry. The men who won Texas came mostly from Kentucky and
Tennessee or southern Ohio, and the first colonizer of Texas was a
Virginian, Stephen Fuller Austin. They came along the old Natchez Trace
from Nashville to the Mississippi River--that highway which has so much
history of its own. Down this old winding trail into the greatest valley
of all the world, and beyond that valley out into the Spanish country,
moved steadily the adventurers whose fathers had but recently crossed
the Appalachians. One of the strongest thrusts of the American
civilization thus entered the cattle-range at its lower end, between the
Rio Grande and the Red River.

In all the several activities, mining, freighting, scouting, soldiering,
riding pony express, or even sheer adventuring for what might come,
there was ever a trading back and forth between home-staying men and
adventuring men. Thus there was an interchange of knowledge and of
customs between East and West, between our old country and our
new. There was an interchange, too, at the south, where our Saxon
civilization came in touch with that of Mexico.

We have now to note some fundamental facts and principles of the cattle
industry which our American cattlemen took over ready-made from the
hands of Mexico.

The Mexicans in Texas had an abundance of small, hardy horses of African
and Spanish breed, which Spain had brought into the New World--the same
horses that the Moors had brought into Spain--a breed naturally hardy
and able to subsist upon dry food. Without such horses there could
have been no cattle industry. These horses, running wild in herds, had
crossed to the upper Plains. La Verendrye, and later Lewis and Clark,
had found the Indians using horses in the north. The Indians, as we have
seen, had learned to manage the horse. Formerly they had used dogs to
drag the travois, but now they used the "elk-dog," as they first called
the horse.

In the original cow country, that is, in Mexico and Texas, countless
herds of cattle were held in a loose sort of ownership over wide and
unknown plains. Like all wild animals in that warm country, they bred
in extraordinary numbers. The southern range, indeed, has always been
called the breeding range. The cattle had little value. He who wanted
beef killed beef. He who wanted leather killed cattle for their hides.
But beyond these scant and i