most of whom depended in part upon the buffalo for their living,
though the Otoes, the Pawnees, the Mandans, and certain others
now and then raised a little corn or a few squashes to help out
their bill of fare. Still farther south dwelt the Kiowas, the
Comanches, and others. The Arapahoes, the Cheyennes, the Crows,
and the Utes, all hunters, were soon to come into the ken of the
white man. Of such of these tribes as they met, the youthful
captains made accounting, gravely and with extraordinary
accuracy, but without discovering in this region much future for
Americans. They were explorers and not industrial investigators.

It was nearly half a century after the journey of Lewis and Clark
that the Forty-Niners were crossing the Plains, whither,
meanwhile, the Mormons had trekked in search of a country where
they might live as they liked. Still the wealth of the Plains
remained untouched. California was in the eyes of the world. The
great cow-range was overleaped. But, in the early fifties, when
the placer fields of California began to be less numerous and
less rich, the half-savage population of the mines roared on
northward, even across our northern line. Soon it was to roll
back. Next it worked east and southeast and northeast over the
great dry plains of Washington and Oregon, so that, as readily
may be seen, the cow-range proper was not settled as most of the
West was, by a directly westbound thrust of an eastern
population; but, on the contrary, it was approached from several
different angles--from the north, from the east, from the west
and northwest, and finally from the south.

The early, turbulent population of miners and adventurers was
crude, lawless, and aggressive. It cared nothing whatever for the