In consequence there came an entire readjustment of values. This
country, but yesterday barren and worthless, now was covered with
gold, deeper than the gold of California or any of the old
placers. New securities and new values appeared. Banks did not
care much for the land as security--it was practically worthless
without the cattle--but they would lend money on cattle at rates
which did not then seem usurious. A new system of finance came
into use. Side by side with the expansion of credits went the
expansion of the cattle business. Literally in hundreds of
thousands the cows came north from the exhaustless ranges of the
lower country.

It was a wild, strange day. But withal it was the kindliest and
most generous time, alike the most contented and the boldest
time, in all the history of our frontiers. There never was a
better life than that of the cowman who had a good range on the
Plains and cattle enough to stock his range. There never will be
found a better man's country in all the world than that which ran
from the Missouri up to the low foothills of the Rockies.

The lower cities took their tribute of the northbound cattle for
quite a time. Wichita, Coffeyville, and other towns of lower
Kansas in turn made bids for prominence as cattle marts. Agents
of the Chicago stockyards would come down along the trails into
the Indian Nations to meet the northbound herds and to try to
divert them to this or that market as a shipping-point. The
Kiowas and Comanches, not yet wholly confined to their
reservations, sometimes took tribute, whether in theft or in open
extortion, of the herds laboring upward through the long slow