, the creaking cook
carts of the cattle trail, and the van of the less nomadic man. It was
the beginning of the great cattle drive from the Southern to the
Northern ranges, a strange, wild movement in American life which
carried in its train a set of conditions as vivid and peculiar as they
were transient. At Ellisville there was no ordered way of living. The
frontier was yet but one vast camp. It was, as Battersleigh had said,
the beginning of things.

Many of the white-topped wagons began to come from the East, not
following the railroad, but travelling the trail of the older
adventurers who had for a generation gone this way, and whose pathway
the railroad took for its own. Some of these wagons passed still
onward, uncontent. Others swerved and scattered over the country to
the south and southwest, from which the Indian tribes had now been
driven, and which appeared more tempting to the farming man than lands
farther to the west and higher up that gradual and wonderful incline
which reaches from the Missouri River to the Rockies. One by one, here
and there, these new men selected their lands and made their first rude
attempts at building for themselves the homes which they coveted and
had come far to win.

Ellisville lay at an eddy in the Plains, and gathered toll of the
strange driftwood which was then afloat. Though the chutes at the
railway were busy, yet other herds of cattle passed Ellisville and
wandered on north, crowding at the heels of the passing Indians, who
now began to see their own cattle to be doomed. The main herd of the
buffalo was now reported to be three or four days' drive from
Ellisville, and the men who killed for the railroad camps uttered loud
complaints. The skin-hunting still went on. Great wagons, loaded with
parties of rough men, passed on out, bound for the inner haunts, where
they might still find their prey. The wagons came creaking back loaded
with bales of the shaggy brown robes, which gave the skin-hunters money
with which to join the cowmen at the drinking places. Some of the
skin-hunters, some of the railroad men, some of the cowmen, some of the
home-seekers, remained in the eddy at Ellisville, this womanless
beginning of a permanent society. Not sinless was this society at its
incipiency. In any social atmosphere good and evil are necessary
concomitants. Sinless men would form a community at best but
perishable. Tolerance, submission, patriotism so called, broth