>From the Rio Grande to the Athabaska, for the greater part, the
frontier sky was blue and cloudless during most of the year. The
rainfall was not great. The atmosphere was dry. It was a cheerful
country, one of optimism and not of gloom. In the extreme south,
along the Rio Grande, the climate was moister, warmer, more
enervating; but on the high steppes of the middle range in
Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, western Nebraska, there lay the
finest out-of-doors country, man's country the finest of the
earth.

But for the time, busy with more accustomed things, mining and
freighting and fighting and hunting and trading and trapping, we
Americans who had arrived upon the range cared little for cows.
The upper thrust of the great herds from the south into the north
had not begun. It was after the Civil War that the first great
drives of cattle from the south toward the north began, and after
men had learned in the State of Texas that cattle moved from the
Rio Grande to the upper portions of the State and fed on the
mesquite grass would attain greater stature than in the hot coast
country. Then swiftly, somewhat luridly, there leaped into our
comprehension and our interest that strange country long loosely
held under our flag, the region of the Plains, the region which
we now call the Old West.

In great bands, in long lines, slowly, towheaded, sore-footed,
the vast gatherings of the prolific lower range moved north, each
cow with its title indelibly marked upon its hide. These cattle
were now going to take the place of those on which the Indians
had depended for their living these many years. A new day in