The explorers crossed one portion of a vast land which was like
to nothing they had ever seen--the region later to become the
great cattle-range of America. It reached, although they could
know nothing of that, from the Spanish possessions on the south
across a thousand miles of short grass lands to the present
Canadian boundary line which certain obdurate American souls
still say ought to have been at 54 degrees 40 minutes, and not
where it is! From the Rio Grande to "Fifty-four forty," indeed,
would have made nice measurements for the Saxon cattle-range.

Little, however, was the value of this land understood by the
explorers; and, for more than half a century afterwards, it
commonly was supposed to be useless for the occupation of white
men and suitable only as a hunting-ground for savage tribes. Most
of us can remember the school maps of our own youth, showing a
vast region marked, vaguely, "The Great American Desert," which
was considered hopeless for any human industry, but much of which
has since proved as rich as any land anywhere on the globe.

Perhaps it was the treeless nature of the vast Plains which
carried the first idea of their infertility. When the first
settlers of Illinois and Indiana came up from south of the Ohio
River they had their choice of timber and prairie lands. Thinking
the prairies worthless--since land which could not raise a tree
certainly could not raise crops--these first occupants of the
Middle West spent a generation or more, axe in hand, along the
heavily timbered river-bottoms. The prairies were long in
settling. No one then could have predicted that farm lands in
that region would be worth three hundred dollars an acre or
better, and that these prairies of the Mississippi Valley would,