In all the several activities, mining, freighting, scouting,
soldiering, riding pony express, or even sheer adventuring for
what might come, there was ever a trading back and forth between
home-staying men and adventuring men. Thus there was an
interchange of knowledge and of customs between East and West,
between our old country and our new. There was an interchange,
too, at the south, where our Saxon civilization came in touch
with that of Mexico.

We have now to note some fundamental facts and principles of the
cattle industry which our American cattlemen took over ready-made
from the hands of Mexico.

The Mexicans in Texas had an abundance of small, hardy horses of
African and Spanish breed, which Spain had brought into the New
World--the same horses that the Moors had brought into Spain--a
breed naturally hardy and able to subsist upon dry food. Without
such horses there could have been no cattle industry. These
horses, running wild in herds, had crossed to the upper Plains.
La Verendrye, and later Lewis and Clark, had found the Indians
using horses in the north. The Indians, as we have seen, had
learned to manage the horse. Formerly they had used dogs to drag
the travois, but now they used the "elk-dog," as they first
called the horse.

In the original cow country, that is, in Mexico and Texas,
countless herds of cattle were held in a loose sort of ownership
over wide and unknown plains. Like all wild animals in that warm
country, they bred in extraordinary numbers. The southern range,
indeed, has always been called the breeding range. The cattle had