ustry.

Chips and flakes of the great Southwestern herd began to be seen in the
Northern States. As early as 1857 Texas cattle were driven to Illinois.
In 1861 Louisiana was, without success, tried as an outlet. In 1867
a venturous drover took a herd across the Indian Nations, bound for
California, and only abandoned the project because the Plains Indians
were then very bad in the country to the north. In 1869 several herds
were driven from Texas to Nevada. These were side trails of the main
cattle road. It seemed clear that a great population in the North needed
the cheap beef of Texas, and the main question appeared to be one of
transportation. No proper means for this offered. The Civil War stopped
almost all plans to market the range cattle, and the close of that war
found the vast grazing lands of Texas covered fairly with millions of
cattle which had no actual or determinate value. They were sorted and
branded and herded after a fashion, but neither they nor their increase
could be converted into anything but more cattle. The cry for a market
became imperative.

Meantime the Anglo-Saxon civilization was rolling swiftly toward the
upper West. The Indians were being driven from the Plains. A solid army
was pressing behind the vanguard of soldier, scout, and plainsman. The
railroads were pushing out into a new and untracked empire. They carried
the market with them. The market halted, much nearer, though still some
hundred of miles to the north of the great herd. The Long Trail tapped
no more at the door of Illinois, Missouri, Arkansas, but leaped north
again definitely, this time springing across the Red River and up to the
railroads, along sharp and well-defined channels deepened in the year of
1866 alone by the hoofs of more than a quarter of a million cattle.

In 1871, only five years later, over six hundred thousand cattle crossed
the Red River for the Northern markets. Abilene, Newton, Wichita,
Ellsworth, Great Bend, Dodge, flared out into a swift and sometime evil
blossoming. Thus the men of the North first came to hear of the Long
Trail and the men who made it, although really it had begun long ago and
had been foreordained to grow.

By this time, 1867 and 1868, the northern portions of the region
immediately to the east of the Rocky Mountains had been sufficiently
cleared of their wild inhabitants to admit a gradual though precarious
settlement. It had been learned yet again that the buffalo grass and
th