The great unfenced ranches, in the days of "free grass," necessarily
represented a temporary stage in our history. The large migratory flocks
of sheep, each guarded by the hired shepherds of absentee owners, were
the first enemies of the cattlemen; and owing to the way they ate out
the grass and destroyed all other vegetation, these roving sheep
bands represented little of permanent good to the country. But the
homesteaders, the permanent settlers, the men who took up each his own
farm on which he lived and brought up his family, these represented from
the National standpoint the most desirable of all possible users of,
and dwellers on, the soil. Their advent meant the breaking up of the big
ranches; and the change was a National gain, although to some of us an
individual loss.

I first reached the Little Missouri on a Northern Pacific train about
three in the morning of a cool September day in 1883. Aside from the
station, the only building was a ramshackle structure called the Pyramid
Park Hotel. I dragged my duffle-bag thither, and hammered at the door
until the frowsy proprietor appeared, muttering oaths. He ushered me
upstairs, where I was given one of the fourteen beds in the room which
by itself constituted the entire upper floor. Next day I walked over
to the abandoned army post, and, after some hours among the gray log
shacks, a ranchman who had driven into the station agreed to take me
out to his ranch, the Chimney Butte ranch, where he was living with his
brother and their partner.

The ranch was a log structure with a dirt roof, a corral for the horses
near by, and a chicken-house jabbed against the rear of the ranch house.
Inside there was only one room, with a table, three or four chairs, a
cooking-stove, and three bunks. The owners were Sylvane and Joe Ferris
and William J. Merrifield. Later all three of them held my commissions