hern range soon after the Civil War,
brought a market to the cattle country. Inevitably the men of the
lower range would seek to reach the railroads with what they had to
sell--their greatest natural product, cattle on the hoof. This was the
primary cause of the great northbound drives already mentioned, the
greatest pastoral phenomena in the story of the world.

The southern herds at that time had no market at their doors. They had
to go to the market, and they had to go on foot. That meant that they
must be driven northward by cattle handlers who had passed their days
in the wild life of the lower range. These cowmen of course took their
character and their customs northward with them, and so they were
discovered by those enthusiastic observers, newly arrived by rail, whom
the cowmen were wont to call "pilgrims."

Now the trail of the great cattle drives--the Long Trail-was a thing of
tremendous importance of itself and it is still full of interest. As it
may not easily be possible for the author to better a description of it
that was written some twenty years ago, that description is here again
set down. *

* "The Story of the Cowboy," by E. Hough. Appleton. 1897.
Reprinted by permission.

The braiding of a hundred minor pathways, the Long Trail lay like a vast
rope connecting the cattle country of the South with that of the North.
Lying loose or coiling, it ran for more than two thousand miles along
the eastern edge of the Rocky Mountains, sometimes close in at their
feet, again hundreds of miles away across the hard tablelands or the
well-flowered prairies. It traversed in a fair line the vast land of
Texas, curled over the Indian Nations, over Kansas, Colorado, Nebraska,
Wyoming, and Montana, and bent in wide overlapping circles as far west
as Utah and Nevada; as far east as Missouri, Iowa, even Illinois; and as
far north as the British possessions. Even today you may trace plainly
its former course, from its faint beginnings in the lazy land of
Mexico, the Ararat of the cattle-range. It is distinct across Texas, and
multifold still in the Indian lands. Its many intermingling paths still
scar the iron surface of the Neutral Strip, and the plows have not
buried all the old furrows in the plains of Kansas. Parts of the path
still remain visible in the mountain lands of the far North. You may
see the ribbons banding the hillsides today along the valley of the
Stillwater, and along the Yellowstone and towa