rthern states. 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. In
1871 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. The
Long Trail, which long ago had found the black corn lands of
Illinois and Missouri, now crowded to the West, until it had
reached Utah and Nevada, and penetrated every open park and _mesa_
and valley of Colorado, and found all the high plains of Wyoming.
Cheyenne and Laramie became common words now, and drovers spoke
wisely of the dangers of the Platte as a year before they had
mentioned those of the Red river or the Arkansas. Nor did the Trail
pause in its irresistible push to the north until it had found the
last of the five great trans-continental lines, far in the British
provinces. The Long Trail of the cattle range was done. By magic
the cattle industry had spread over the entire West."

[Footnote B: "The Story of the Cowboy," by E. Hough. D. Appleton & Co.,
New York.]

By magic, also, the cattle industry called to itself a population unique
and peculiar. Here were great values to be handled and guarded. The
cowboy appeared, summoned out of the shadows by the demand of evolution.
With him appeared also the cattle thief, making his living on free beef,
as he had once on the free buffalo of the plains. The immense domain of
the West was filled with property held under no better or more obvious
mark than the imprint of a hot iron on the hide. There were no fences.
The owner might be a thousand miles away. The temptation to theft was
continual and urgent. It seemed easy and natural to take a living from
these great herds which no one seemed to own or to care for. The
"rustler" of the range made his appearance, bold, hardy, unprincipled;
and the story of his undoing by the law is precisely that of the finish
of the robbers of the mines by the Vigilantes.

Now, too, came the days of transition, which have utterly changed all
the West. The railroad sprang across this great middle country of the
plains. The intent was to connect the two sides of this