the range there lay a steady
business of tremendous size and enormous values. The "uproarious
iniquity" of the West, its picturesqueness, its vividness--these were
but froth on the stream. The stream itself was a steady and somber
flood. Beyond this picturesqueness of environment very few have cared to
go, and therefore sometimes have had little realization of the vastness
of the cowboy's kingdom, the "magnitude of the interests in his care, or
the fortitude, resolution, and instant readiness essential to his daily
life." The American cowboy is the most modern representative of a human
industry that is second to very few in antiquity.

Julius Caesar struck the note of real history: Quorum pars magna
fui--"Of which I was a great part." If we are to seek the actual truth,
we ought most to value contemporary records, representations made by men
who were themselves a part of the scenes which they describe. In that
way we shall arrive not merely upon lurid events, not alone upon the
stereotyped characters of the "Wild West," but upon causes which are
much more interesting and immensely more valuable than any merely
titillating stories from the weirdly illustrated Apocrypha of the
West. We must go below such things if we would gain a just and lasting
estimate of the times. We ought to look on the old range neither as a
playground of idle men nor as a scene of hysterical and contorted human
activities. We ought to look upon it from the point of view of its uses
to mankind. The explorers found it a wilderness, the home of the red man
and the buffalo. What were the underlying causes of its settlement and
development?

There is in history no agency so wondrous in events, no working
instrumentality so great as transportation. The great seeking of all
human life is to find its level. Perhaps the first men traveled
by hollowed logs down stream. Then possibly the idea of a sail was
conceived. Early in the story of the United States men made commercial
journeys from the head of the Ohio to the mouth of the Mississippi
by flatboats, and came back by keelboats. The pole, the cordelle, the
paddle, and the sail, in turn helped them to navigate the great streams
which led out into the West. And presently there was to come that
tremendous upheaval wrought by the advent of the iron trails which,
scorning alike waterways and mountain ranges, flung themselves almost
directly westward across the continent.

The iron trails, crossing the nort