more ancient cattle-range of the lower Pacific Slope will never
come into acceptance as the Old West. Always, when we use these
words, we think of buffalo plains and of Indians, and of their
passing before the footmen and riders who carried the phantom
flag of Drake and the Virgin Queen from the Appalachians to the
Rockies--before the men who eventually made good that glorious
and vaunting vision of the Virginia cavaliers, whose party turned
back from the Rockfish Gap after laying claim in the name of King
George on all the country lying west of them, as far as the South
Sea!

The American cow country may with very good logic arrogate to
itself the title of the real and typical frontier of all the
world. We call the spirit of the frontier Elizabethan, and so it
was; but even as the Elizabethan Age was marked by its contact
with the Spanish civilization in Europe, on the high seas, and in
both the Americas, so the last frontier of the American West also
was affected, and largely, deeply, by Spanish influence and
Spanish customs. The very phraseology of range work bears proof
of this. Scores of Spanish words are written indelibly in the
language of the Plains. The frontier of the cow-range never was
Saxon alone.

It is a curious fact also, seldom if ever noted, that this Old
West of the Plains was very largely Southern and not Northern on
its Saxon side. No States so much as Kentucky and Tennessee and,
later, Missouri--daughters of Old Virginia in her
glory--contributed to the forces of the frontiersmen. Texas,
farther to the south, put her stamp indelibly upon the entire
cattle industry of the West. Visionary, impractical, restless,