and practically unknown. The only thing certain about it was that it
swarmed with hostile Indians. What were the conditions as to water and
grass, two prime essentials to moving herds, no one knew. To be sure,
the old overland mail road to El Paso, Chihuahua, and Los Angeles led
out west from the head of the Concho to the Pecos; and once on the
Pecos, which they knew had its source indefinitely in the north, a
practicable route to market should be possible.

But the trouble was to reach the Pecos across the ninety intervening
miles of waterless plateau called the _Llano Estacado_, or Staked
Plain. This plain was christened by the early Spanish explorers who,
looking out across its vast stretches, could note no landmark, and left
behind them driven stakes to guide their return. An elevated tableland
averaging about one hundred miles wide and extending four hundred miles
north and south, it presents, approaching anywhere from the east or the
west, an endless line of sharply escarped bluffs from one hundred to
two hundred feet high that with their buttresses and re-entrant angles
look at a distance like the walls of an enormous fortified town. And
indeed it possesses riches well worth fortifying.

While without a single surface spring or stream from Devil's River in
the south to Yellow House Canon in the north, this great mesa is
nevertheless the source of the entire stream system of central and
south Texas. Absorbing thirstily every drop of moisture that falls
upon its surface, from its deep bosom pours a vitalizing flood that
makes fertile and has enriched an empire,--a flood without which Texas,
now producing one-third of the cotton grown in the United States, would
be an arid waste. Bountiful to the south and east, it is niggardly
elsewhere, and only two small springs, Grierson and Mescalero, escape
from its western escarpment.

A driven herd normally travels only twelve to seventeen miles a day,
and even less than this in the early Spring when herds usually are
started. It therefore seemed a desperate undertaking to enter upon the
ninety-mile "dry drive," from the head of the Concho to the Horsehead
Crossing of the Pecos, wherein two-thirds of one's cattle were likely
to perish for want of water.

Joe Loving was the first man to venture it, and he succeeded. He
traversed the Plain, fought his way up the Pecos, reached a good
market, and returned home in the Autumn, bringing a load of gold and
stories of