e
sweet-William, the wild rose, and often great masses of the yellow
sunflower.

From the Rio Grande to the Athabaska, for the greater part, the
frontier sky was blue and cloudless during most of the year. The
rainfall was not great. The atmosphere was dry. It was a cheerful
country, one of optimism and not of gloom. In the extreme south, along
the Rio Grande, the climate was moister, warmer, more enervating; but
on the high steppes of the middle range in Colorado, Wyoming, Montana,
western Nebraska, there lay the finest out-of-doors country, man's
country the finest of the earth.

But for the time, busy with more accustomed things, mining and
freighting and fighting and hunting and trading and trapping, we
Americans who had arrived upon the range cared little for cows. The
upper thrust of the great herds from the south into the north had not
begun. It was after the Civil War that the first great drives of cattle
from the south toward the north began, and after men had learned in
the State of Texas that cattle moved from the Rio Grande to the upper
portions of the State and fed on the mesquite grass would attain greater
stature than in the hot coast country. Then swiftly, somewhat luridly,
there leaped into our comprehension and our interest that strange
country long loosely held under our flag, the region of the Plains, the
region which we now call the Old West.

In great bands, in long lines, slowly, towheaded, sore-footed, the vast
gatherings of the prolific lower range moved north, each cow with its
title indelibly marked upon its hide. These cattle were now going to
take the place of those on which the Indians had depended for their
living these many years. A new day in American history had dawned.

Chapter III. The Cattle Trails

The customary method of studying history by means of a series of events
and dates is not the method which we have chosen to employ in this study
of the Old West. Speaking generally, our minds are unable to assimilate
a condensed mass of events and dates; and that is precisely what would
be required of us if we should attempt here to follow the ways of
conventional history. Dates are at best no more than milestones on the
pathway of time; and in the present instance it is not the milestones
but the road itself with which we are concerned. Where does the road
begin? Why comes it hither? Whither does it lead? These are the real
questions.

Under all the exuberance of the life of