a vast rope connecting the cattle country of the South with that
of the North. Lying loose or coiling, it ran for more than two
thousand miles along the eastern edge of the Rocky Mountains,
sometimes close in at their feet, again hundreds of miles away
across the hard tablelands or the well-flowered prairies. It
traversed in a fair line the vast land of Texas, curled over the
Indian Nations, over Kansas, Colorado, Nebraska, Wyoming, and
Montana, and bent in wide overlapping circles as far west as Utah
and Nevada; as far east as Missouri, Iowa, even Illinois; and as
far north as the British possessions. Even today you may trace
plainly its former course, from its faint beginnings in the lazy
land of Mexico, the Ararat of the cattle-range. It is distinct
across Texas, and multifold still in the Indian lands. Its many
intermingling paths still scar the iron surface of the Neutral
Strip, and the plows have not buried all the old furrows in the
plains of Kansas. Parts of the path still remain visible in the
mountain lands of the far North. You may see the ribbons banding
the hillsides today along the valley of the Stillwater, and along
the Yellowstone and toward the source of the Missouri. The hoof
marks are beyond the Musselshell, over the Bad Lands and the
coulees and the flat prairies; and far up into the land of the
long cold you may see, even today if you like, the shadow of that
unparalleled pathway, the Long Trail of the cattle-range. History
has no other like it.

The Long Trail was surveyed and constructed in a century and a
day. Over the Red River of the South, a stream even today perhaps
known but vaguely in the minds of many inhabitants of the
country, there appeared, almost without warning, vast processions
of strange horned kine--processions of enormous wealth, owned by