Each year beholds more western acres broken by the plough; each year
witnesses a diminution of the cattle ranges and cattle herding. This
need ring no bell of alarm concerning a future barren of a beef
supply. More cattle are the product of the farm-regions than of the
ranges. That ground, once range and now farm, raises more cattle now
than then. Texas is a great cattle State. Ohio, Indiana, Illinois,
Iowa, and Missouri are first States of agriculture. The area of
Texas is about even with the collected area of the other five. Yet
one finds double the number of cattle in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois,
Iowa, and Missouri than in Texas, to say nothing of tenfold the sheep
and hogs. No; one may be calm; one is not to fall a prey to any
hunger of beef.

While the farms in their westward pushing do not diminish the cattle,
they reduce the cattleman and pinch off much that is romantic and
picturesque. Between the farm and the wire fence, the cowboy, as
once he flourished, has been modified, subdued, and made partially to
disappear. In the good old days of the Jones and Plummer trail there
were no wire fences, and the sullen farmer had not yet arrived. Your
cowboy at that time was a person of thrill and consequence. He wore
a broad-brimmed Stetson hat, and all about it a rattlesnake skin by
way of band, retaining head and rattles. This was to be potent
against headaches--a malady, by the way, which swept down no cowboy
save in hours emergent of a spree. In such case the snake cure
didn't cure. The hat was retained in defiance of winds, by a
leathern cord caught about the back of the head, not under the chin.
This cord was beautiful with a garniture of three or four perforated
poker chips, red, yellow, and blue.

There are sundry angles of costume where the dandyism of a cowboy of