recautions, began
to mingle as settlers became more numerous; hence came the idea of the
round-up. The country was warm and lazy. If a hundred or a thousand cows
were not collected, very well. If a calf were separated from its mother,
very well. The old ranchers never quarreled among themselves. They never
would have made in the South anything like a cattle association; it was
left for the Yankees to do that at a time when cows had come to have
far greater values. There were few arguments in the first rodeos of the
lower range. One rancher would vie with his neighbor in generosity
in the matter of unbranded calves. Haggling would have been held
contemptible. On the lower range in the old times no one cared much
about a cow. Why should one do so? There was no market for cows--no one
who wished to buy them. If one tendered a Mexican cinquo pesos for a
yearling or a two-year-old, the owner might perhaps offer the animal as
a gift, or he might smile and say "Con mucho gusto" as he was handed a
few pieces of silver. There were plenty of cows everywhere in the world!

Let us, therefore, give the old Spaniard full credit alike in
picturesque romance and in the organized industry of the cow. The
westbound thrust which came upon the upper part of the range in the days
of more shrewd and exacting business methods was simply the best-known
and most published phase of frontier life in the cow country; hence we
have usually accepted it as typical. It would not be accurate to say
that the cattle industry was basically much influenced or governed by
northern or eastern men. In practically all of its great phenomena the
frontier of the old cow-range was southern by birth and growth.

There lay, then, so long unused, that vast and splendid land so soon to
write romantic history of its own, so soon to come into the admiration
or the wonder of a great portion of the earth--a land of fascinating
interest to the youth of every country, and a region whose story holds
a charm for young and old alike even today. It was a region royal in
its dimensions. Far on the west it was hedged by the gray-sided and
white-topped mountains, the Rockies. Where the buffalo once lived, the
cattle were to live, high up in the foothills of this great mountain
range which ran from the Rio Grande to Canada. On the east, where lay
the Prairies rather than the Plains, it was a country waving with high
native grasses, with many brilliant flowers hiding among them, th