northward from Texas
between the years 1866 and 1885 was approximately as follows:

1866 260,000 1877 201,000
1867 35,000 1878 265,649
1868 75,000 1879 257,927
1869 350,000 1880 394,784
1870 350,000 1881 250,000
1871 600,000 1882 250,000
1872 350,000 1883 265,000
1873 404,000 1884 416,000
1874 166,000 1885 350,000
1875 151,618 ---------
1876 321,998 Total 5,713,976

The range business on a large and profitable scale was long since
practically done and ended. In Texas there remain very few open ranges
capable of turning off fair grass beef. With the good lands farmed and
the poor lands exhausted, the ranges have become narrower every year;
and every year the cost of getting fat grass steers has been eating
deeper and deeper into the rangeman's pocket. Of course, there are
still isolated ranges where the rangemen still hang on, but they are
not many, and most of them must soon fall easy prey to the ploughshare.

When the rangeman was forced to lease land in Texas, or buy water
fronts in the Territories and build fences, his fate was soon sealed.
With these conditions, he soon found that the sooner he reduced his
numbers, improved his breed, and went on tame feed, the better. A corn
shock is now a more profitable close herder than any cowpuncher who
ever wore spurs. This is a sad thing for an old rangeman to
contemplate, but it is nevertheless the simple truth. Soon the merry
crack of the six Footer will no more be heard in the land, its wild and
woolly manipulator being driven across the last divide, with faint show
of resistance, by an unassuming granger and his all-conquering hoe.

The rangeman, like many another in the past, has served his purpose and
survived his usefulness. His work is practically done, and few realize
what a noble work it has been, or what its cost in hardship and danger.

I refer, of course, not alone to the development of a great industry,
which in its time has added millions to the material wealth of the
country, but to its collateral results and influence. But for the
venturesome rangeman and his rifle, millions of acres, from the Gulf in
the South to Bow River in the far Canadian Northwest, now constituting
the peaceful, prosperous home