Wyoming is now the greatest or second greatest of the cattle States. There is free grass in Wyoming and no herd law, and much of the land is so high, dry, and broken in its nature that the farmer will never trouble the cowman, who will continue to be as he is now — the controlling citizen of the commonwealth, the enormous cattle industry overruling all others. It is forbidden by State law to fence in any of the public lands of Wyoming, though certain descriptions of lands may be bought or leased of the State and then fenced. Of course the homesteader may fence his little holding if he likes. The small farmer has made his appearance in Wyoming, and will be more and more of a figure there from year to year. Millions of acres of the lands of the State are really fertile as any in the world when only they have water brought upon them, and for some time both large and small irrigating interests have been at work seeking to increase the wealth of the State in agricultural regards. The future of the cowmen in Wyoming lies in the exceedingly uncompromising nature of much the greater portion of the land, which is too broken or too high for farming. In the Dakotas and in Wyoming the natural water is for the most part abundant enough to obviate all question of waterfront rights.
Montana has also free grass for all men, and one man has as good a right as another to let his cattle run free over the unoccupied Government lands. Here the cowman has the best of the farmer, who must fence his crops if he would sustain action against a cowman for damage done by his cattle. Great bodies of land lie wild here which can never be farmed, though all the little flats and valleys over which the water can be led are now pretty well taken up by the man who irrigates and farms. (Properly speaking, the rancher is himself a farmer, though the meaning of the word has been changed by popular usage. The rancher himself is more generous or perhaps more accurate in his own use of the term. He speaks of a "hay ranch," a "fruit ranch," a "hen ranch," etc.) In Montana the question of water front is of little consequence, for there is natural water enough to balance the natural grass.
In the free-grass country, such as that of Wyoming or Montana, there may be seen again proof of the cattle man's custom of respecting the rights of others. Although the country is as much one man's as another's, the man who has possession of a certain portion of the range has his rights roughly regarded, even though he be smaller in importance than his neighbour. The latter will be affected by a depasturage as much as the former, though sometimes a body of cattle is driven in and must take its chances. The new man on the range respects the lines commonly accepted by the local men as the limits of the respective ranges, and hunts about for the best place left open for himself. Of course, the future will see more and more curtailment of the free-grass privilege, especially in such parts of the country as are well watered, and all things point to the day when the rancher must control his land in such way that he can legally fence it and shut out all others.
A great enemy to the cattle trade has for years been growing up upon the same country with it and under the same conditions. At this writing this danger has assumed such proportions as to threaten the permanence of profitableness of cow ranching even upon that portion of the open range which may still be called free grass. This menace is no less than the sheep industry, itself a great one, albeit cordially detested by your genuine cowman, who has a deep-seated contempt for any one who will look at a sheep. The great flocks of sheep differ in a singular and important respect from the herds of the cowman. They can not live unless they move. Confined on close pasture, they contract disease and die by thousands. Allowed to "walk," or range and feed forward over a great extent of country during the season, they increase and thrive. A flock of sheep starting, say, in Colorado or the Green River country, may range over five hundred miles in a year, entirely leaving their original range. Of course, these sheep can only be driven over a "free-grass" country, and on such a country they have as good right as the cattle have, though often their owners fail to enforce that right upon the range. One of these great flocks of sheep coming over the native range of a local band of cattle will eat off the grass so closely that the cattle will leave the range or starve to death upon it. This year sheep are coming in from the West in such numbers over some of the Wyoming free-grass country that many cattle men have shipped their cattle out of the country, giving up their interests and seeking other range. Yet others have sold out entirely and relinquished the business. The farmer, the irrigator, the sheep herder have been fatal to the old order of things which obtained in the days when all the range was free grass, or even the days when the key of the water unlocked the wealth of the range. More and more the cowman himself will become a farmer, as indeed many are now. More and more the cowboy will become a farm labourer. Even to-day, in a round-up on the Wyoming plains, you may see as many overalls and jumpers as chaps and shirt sleeves. Thus, it seems, and not in garb of silk or steel or gold, are to be clad the builders of the cities of Cibola.
CHAPTER VIII
THE DRIVE
Early in the history of the cowboy, as that history is popularly known, there came from the crowded ranges of the South the urgent cry for a market and the demand for additional territory out of the empire of free grass. It was in the stars that the cattle must go North. To get them North was a problem in transportation to which there could not then be summoned the aid of the railroads. The cattle must walk these hundreds of miles. Hence arose one of the most picturesque phases of the cowboy's occupation. He became a wanderer, an explorer, as well as a guide and a protector. The days of '67 in the cattle drive were as the days of '49 in the history of gold, inaugurative of an era full of rude and vivid life. Those were epoch-making times, and swift and startling were the changes which they brought. All the West was then in turmoil. The inhabitants of the Eastern and Middle States were just beginning to learn definitely of the great unsettled region into which the railroads were moving. To meet the railroads there came rolling up from the South the great herds of longhorns over the trail. With them came the cowboys, a news gens, reported a gens horri-bilis. In a trice the trail became one of the institutions of the West, and the cowboy became a character. Prior to the days of the drive he had existed, but he had not been differentiated. His calling had not been specialized, he had not become a type. The trail was the college of the cowboy. In all the lusty life of the West in the old days there was no wilder and no rougher school. Out of it came a man whose rugged and insistent individuality has for a triple decade excited alike popular admiration and popular misunderstanding.
To-day the cattle drive is one of the occasional necessities of the trade all over the cow country, but it exists only in modified form. The cowman drives to his shipping point the beef he has "gathered" in his fall round-up, or perhaps he drives some grown cattle from one range to another a hundred miles or so distant. At times one cowman purchases young stock cattle from another, and these may be driven to the new range. In one way or another a drive nowadays may perhaps occupy at most a month or so. Perhaps, again, a cowman of some upper country — say Wyoming — has also a ranch down in the lower country, such as the Nations, where he raises his own stock cattle, which he wishes to put on his upper range. He is situated perhaps well up in Wyoming, and a hundred miles or so from the nearest railroad point. He ships his cattle by rail from the Nations to this railroad station, and then drives across country as in the old days. No such operations as these, however, compare in extent or interest with the old drives of the early days, when things were booming in the cow towns.
Let us suppose it to be in those early days when the herds of the South were just beginning to break from their confines and push on in their strange and irresistible migration to the North. Some rancher has learned that he can command at the railroad to the north of him a price far in advance of any obtainable in his own country. Perhaps he has a contract for so many head to he delivered at some Northern point, or perhaps he drives on general speculation and in