CHAPTER XIII

THE CATTLE DRIVE

CATTLE DRIVE—SINGING TO CATTLE—STAMPEDE—BURIALS OF DEAD MEN—DEFINITIONS—WATERING LIVE STOCK—MORE DEFINITIONS—RAIL SHIPMENTS—SHOOTING GAME FROM TRAINS—MORALITY OF WEST—FURTHER DEFINITIONS—TEXAS TRAIL AND OREGON DRIVE—SWIMMING CATTLE—QUICKSAND—MILLING—CROSSING A RAILWAY—QUARANTINE—FINANCIAL RESULTS.

IF, upon the completion of a round-up, the saleable stock thereby yielded to a rancher were cattle, the next task for this rancher would be to start promptly toward the “shipping point,” the animals that were to be sold. But, if the stock were horses, the terms of sale might require that the beasts be well broken, an obligation which, on the Range, was summed up in the single word “gentled,” and which would take the animals, in their first movement, not to the railway but to the corrals near their owner’s home ranch-house.

Assume that the stock was cattle. Accordingly, when all confusion about the rodeo corral or holding spot had abated, the brutes were herded into a ragged column and were headed toward the distant railway.

The men accompanying the beasts were in number such as, for a large herd, allowed—not counting the foreman (usually termed “trail boss”), his assistant (sometimes called the “segundo”) and the cook—one puncher to each two hundred and fifty cattle. A large herd was controlled more easily than was a small one.

No puncher rode directly in front of the column, the theory being that, the less the herd realized that it was under constraint, the more disposed it would be to behave itself properly. Nevertheless, on each side of the column, parallel with it, and at some distance from it rode a line of cowboys with long intervals between the men. The foremost one of the punchers in each of these lines was slightly more advanced than the van of the herd and was called a “point man” or “lead rider.” Each of the men in line behind him was termed a “swing man” or “flank rider.” At the rear of the column came the tail riders, the remuda and the men in charge of it, and finally the chuck-wagon.

The function of the swing men was not only to block their own cattle from sidewise wandering, but also to fend off all such foreign cattle as tried to merge themselves in the driven herd.

For the first week, the herd was “shoved” to the reasonable limit of its speed, that the beasts might tire into submissiveness, and thereafter willingly keep to the course which their owners had planned. During that week there was made mileage, but not all of it in one direction. When eventually resigned to a single aim, the animals would make a daily sinuous progress of ten to fifteen miles according to the smoothness of the traversed country. But only the kindliest of routes permitted a day’s march to exceed ten miles.

It was tiresome grimy business for the attendant punchers, who travelled ever in a cloud of dust, and heard little but the constant chorus from the crackling of hoofs and of ankle joints, from the bellows, lows, and bleats of the trudging animals.

The caravan started forth each morning at “sun-up,” crawled on till late afternoon, and then, as a preliminary to halting for the night and as a preventive of entanglement with other travelling herds, was “thrown” or “thrown off” a half mile or more from the side of the trail, if at that point it were narrow and in general use. For the halting place, the so-called bed ground, the punchers, in order best to satisfy the cattle’s inborn preferences, tried to find land that offered fresh grass to eat, old dry grass to lie upon, and, if the weather were warm, an elevation sufficient to catch the breeze.

The animals, throughout their day-long march, nipped at the grass that they passed; but at the evening halt they set themselves to a solid meal. This eaten, the cattle embarked, as did Range horses, upon the same regimen as that which wild animals pursued. Two hours after dark the cattle one by one sank down to sleep, to rise again at midnight and to browse until that depressing time of night, two o’clock, when all vitality ebbs and the Death Angel frequently calls dying men. Another hour or so of sleep, another browsing, another nap, and then the dawn summoned the cattle to their feet. But, with the full moon’s light, the beasts would eat practically all night long.

All through the darkness men of the “night herd,” working in shifts of from two to four hours, rode about the animals; and as the men rode they constantly serenaded the beasts by crooning to them songs or chants, which, when so used, were entitled “hymns.” This serenading was done partly to hold the cattle under the compelling spell of the human voice, and partly to disabuse from the mind of any fearsome member of the herd suspicion that either a puncher’s silhouette against the sky-line or else the noise of his moving pony might represent a snooping dragon. The rider, when “singing to the cattle,” as his vocal efforts were styled, disgorged all the words he knew set to all the tunes he could remember or invent, but omitted any sound or inflection which might startle. Sacred airs were usual, for from their simple melodies they were easy of remembrance, and also they then still held the national popularity which since has passed to the tunes of the music-halls; but the words set to these churchly airs well might have surprised the clergy. The proper words, accounts of horse-races, unflattering opinions of the cattle, strings of profanity, the voluminous text on the labels of coffee or condensed milk-cans, mere humming sounds, alike and with seemingly deep religious fervor, were poured on many a night into the appreciative ears of an audience with cloven hoofs. Herded horses might wish for an occasional reassuring word, but they lacked debased operatic taste.

NIGHT HERDING

Thus tired men, cat-napping but always crooning, were out in the black, their ponies steadily, slowly patrolling, though half asleep; but man and horse were ready to wake like a shot and to act the instant that a steer started to “roll his tail,” or, in less technical English, to gallop with his tail humped up at its shore end, an infallible sign of confident expectation to disregard both distance and time.

There was for the men, throughout a cattle drive, no recreation except swearing, and the eating of the very dusty meals which the attendant chuck-wagon provided. But as for work, there was always the exacting labor of daily routine punctuated from time to time by such extra galloping tasks as, without warning, the temperamental natures of the cattle interjected. And also from time to time a “trail-cutter” might “cut the trail,” which is to say might require the punchers to halt the marching herd, to reduce it to such form as would facilitate inspection, to permit an inspection, to cut from the herd and deliver to the trail-cutter such animals, if any, as he was entitled to demand. This cutting upon the drive was termed “trimming the herd.”

Each ranch owner whose Range was being traversed by the driven cattle had the right to cut the trail, and might do so in person or through any duly accredited employee. Such a trail-cutter might demand from the drovers only the animals belonging to the cutter’s ranch. Each official stock inspector and Range detective might also cut the trail, and might demand all animals which, though actually within the herd, did not legally belong therein.

Day after day the marching cattle sauntered down the trail. Presently, they encountered a second bunch of stock collected at another of their owners’ corrals, and were “bunched up” or “banded up” with these brutes. So it went till all that the owners were to ship was in a single herd, and that ambled on by day and halted by night until the “our town,” the “our shipping point” of the guarding punchers, and its pens beside the railroad track were reached and absorbed the expedition.

All through the journey the animals had proceeded quietly and rested decently until one moment when there came a snort, a bellow. What caused the snort and bellow nobody knew or could stop to ascertain. Merely “tails” had “rolled,” and a stampede was on. From a common centre cattle were darting toward every point of the compass. It was “all hands to the pumps!” and into saddle and on the run for every man. Riders armed with saddle blankets, with doffed coats, hastily plucked sage-brush plants, anything that could be waved, holding pistols, the only attainable objects that would make a commanding noise, galloped out beyond the fleeing animals, headed and flanked them, “cutting in” all incipient, bovine meteors. Finally, the frayed edges of the mass constricted, and the whole was reduced to a ragged, narrow, rushing column, one set of galloping cowboys guiding its van, another, as flank riders, guarding its sides and endeavoring so far as possible to soothe the animals. The forefront of this column was, under the pilotage of the attacking horsemen, swerved into the shape of a shepherd’s crook, and a moment later the herd was pouring itself into the form of a capital letter “U.”

When its two ends came opposite each other, they were welded together by a yelling, waving, shooting set of madmen on the backs of flying, snorting horses.

This started “milling,” a merry-go-round which kept up until the participating cattle quit from exhaustion. Of course, milling did not take place in a circle, an ellipse, an oval, or in any other geometrical form. It occurred in an irregular chunk of grunting, bellowing cattle, overspread and surrounded by an unbreathable cloud of biting dust, with cursing cowboys acting as satellites.

To the miserable humans in charge of the milling, its disadvantage was the discomfort which it caused; its advantage was that the cattle involved in it were, at its conclusion, at the place from which they had started, instead of miles away.

The milling stopped, the animals commenced peacefully to graze, and the men were where they began, but were very tired and very mad. In their next ensuing hymns, they definitely told the animals what was thought of them.

After every stampede there was made a careful counting and inspection of the rebunched cattle, since not only did all absentees have to be hunted for, but also there had to be cut out and chased away any foreign beasts that might have been absorbed into the herd during the sweeping progress of the stampede.

If riders were enmeshed in the stampede or the milling, as they often were, they hastened along with the fracas; and, as opportunity offered, worked their way through openings and shot out to safety. It was a dangerous game of checkers played on the run.

A stampede at night and in a country beset with “cut banks,” i.e., precipitous hillsides, beset also with deep canyons, with vertically sided arroyos, with gopher and badger holes, killed many a steer, broke many a pony’s leg, left many a rider lifeless on the ground.

After every night stampede there was a counting of human noses. This was done with anxiety which always was as tender in spirit as it was flippant in form. The riders, returning one by one during the next day’s morning hours, came into camp, and an atmosphere of banter—banter which, in joking phrases and with several participants, ran on one occasion somewhat as follows: “Hulloa, Shorty, where’d you come from? Thought you was dead.... Where’s Baldy? Guess he’s gone off to git married.... No, he ain’t. Here he comes.... Everybody’s in but Jack and Skinny. They must a ridden all the way to Omaha.... There’s Jack now, comin’ up over the top of that rise.”

The banter suddenly ceased, for, as soon as Jack had come completely over the top of the hill and into clear view, he had begun to ride rapidly in a small circle. This was one of the equestrian Indians’ two signals of important news or of request for strangers to advance for parley, and was often used by whites as a messenger of like import or of serious tidings. At the first circle, some one remarked “Mebbe Jack’s playing with a rattler. No, he ain’t. There he goes again. He’s shore signalling,” while some one else added “Jack wouldn’t do that for no cows. It must be Skinny.” The camp had risen to its feet and started for the tethered ponies.

Suddenly there floated down the breeze three faint sounds evenly spaced. The wind had shifted, and its new course straight from Jack to the camp giving promise that sounds would carry thither, he had used his gun. The camp gasped, “My God, it’s Skinny,” and then the foreman said, with machine-gun rapidity but icily quiet tone, “Pete, quick, get them two clean shirts that’s drying on the wagon tongue. We may need ’em for bandages.” Nobody mentioned anything about a shovel, but a collision at the wagon’s tailboard and the sound of rasping metal showed that three men instinctively had sought for the sometimes sad utensil, and that it was in hand.

In rapid strides of exaggerated length the punchers approached their horses. One beast shied away, but stopped the instant there rang out with tinny sound, “Damn you, Bronc, quit that,” and thereafter the brute crouched and trembled and made no opposition to taking its bit and saddle. Bits were driven into horses’ mouths like wedges into split logs. No effort was made to gather in cinches and offside latigos, to lay them atop the saddles, and to place the latter gently on the ponies’ backs. The saddles, each grasped by horn and cantle, were waved in air to straighten out the latigos, and were slapped onto cringing backs with a sound like that of a slatting sail on a windy day.

At times like this when men were fierce and in a killing mood, their horses seemed to sense the situation. The most chronic buckers would forego their pitching avocation, and, squatting low in tremor, would receive their load and never make a single jump.

The camp moved out to waiting Jack, and with it went the two clean shirts, each clutched against a rider’s chest.

There were jerky, vertical single nods of heads, Jack supplementing his own nod by one later, slow, horizontal turning of his head to right and then to left. A gentle sigh rose from the arriving punchers, two hands impotently opened and let two shirts flutter to the ground. Jack’s inquiring look was answered by Ike’s slight raising of the handle of the shovel, which thus far he had endeavored to conceal. Then came the first spoken words. Jack commenced the conversation, and in part it ran: “He’s up at the end of the big draw, right by the split rock. Went over that high cut bank, him and a mess of cattle. He’s lyin’ under ’em. He never knowed what hit him.... No, I warn’t with him. Just now seen his sign as I was coming acrost. I seen it was headed for the cut bank, so I chasséd over there.” The foreman added: “Well, boys, let’s get at it.”

Then the little funeral cortège, having silently smoked a cigarette or two, fell into jiggling trot and headed for the big draw.

The funerals of the men who died in this way, of many Western men, were deeply affecting from their crude, sincere simplicity. About the open grave, which was at merely “somewhere on the plain,” would gather a serious-faced little group. The body, wrapped in a saddle-blanket, would be lowered gently into its resting-place, and then would come a pause. Each attendant strongly wished that some appropriate statement might be made either to God or about the dead; but each man felt himself unequal to the task, and stood nervously wiping his forehead. Perhaps the strain wrung from some one person a sudden ejaculation. If so, the requirement for utterance had been satisfied, and all the mourners felt a buoyant sense of relief. If nobody spoke, some wandering eye fastened on the shovel. Whether by the ending of the spoken words or by the recognition of the spade, the signal for the filling of the grave had come.

When the filled-in earth had been pounded to smoothness and had been overlaid with rocks, as a barrier to marauding animals, it was time to leave. That parting would not be accomplished or even begun until there had terminated the strained, awkward silence under which most American men cloak their deeper feelings. The silence usually was ended by an expression spontaneously emitted from overwrought nerves, and often profane in form though not in intent. Speech broke the tension, horses were remounted, and the world was faced again.

At the foot of one of the noblest peaks in the Rocky Mountains lies a grave. Its occupant died in a stampede. All that was said at the interment came out hesitatingly and as follows: “It’s too bad, too bad. Tom, dig a little deeper there. Hell, boys, he was a man,” and presently, when the burial had been completed, “Bill, we boys leave you to God and the mountain. Good-by, Bill. Damn it, Jim, look out for your bronc.”

Out of the darkness during a wild, night stampede might vibrate the blood-curdling death scream of a mangled horse. It was no more merry in tone than is the shriek of a woman in the face of murder. Nature seems to have invented various horrid sounds for the final leave-takings of the several species of her animal subjects.

From the insensate milling of frightened bisons came that picturesque Range word “buffaloed,” as a slangy synonym for mentally confused.

The term “stampede” too was picture-making, coming as it did from the Spanish word “estampida,” meaning a crash or loud noise.

On various nights our punchers, bound townward with their cattle, had seen the distant camp-fires of other “cow outfits,” which were travelling just as our men were; but neither our punchers nor those of these foreign “cow camps” had had time for social visits.

The punchers of one of these outfits caused, one day, our punchers much trouble and some anxiety through failure to “hold” the former’s herd until our men’s animals had finished drinking at a waterhole. The alien cattle, pushing forward, had overrun and so fully melded with those of our men that it had taken the active efforts of all the riders on the scene to cut the commingled beasts into their proper herds.

Competent punchers upon their galloping ponies required but little time for separating two or more herds that thus had tangled themselves, however confusedly.

But our men’s anxiety had had real foundation. They had feared lest their weaker animals—these weakly beasts naturally had been the last to drink—might be crushed by the thirst-maddened brutes advancing from the strangers’ bunch. Not uncommonly at drinking-places in dry countries driven cattle were crowded to their death or mortally trampled under foot by other cattle pushing in from the rear.

Cattle, when loose upon the Range, and on their own initiative seeking drink, performed somewhat curiously. They would suddenly stop eating, would raise their heads, start on a trot, steadily increase their speed, and finally would upon a gallop arrive at the waterhole. They quietly would drink; but, when satiated, would leave as precipitately as they had come.

Both the cattle and the horses in driven herds required, because of the sustained effort and the awful dust, more frequent drink than when the beasts were shifting for themselves. In addition, the farther they were bred away from the original “wild” blood, the more often they demanded water. Wild horses and wild cattle during a drought would wander about for days without drinking, and would keep alive even though thirst might both swell and blacken their tongues.

Range horses and Range cattle, when loose upon the Range, demanded, for keeping in good condition, access to water at least once in every forty-eight hours; but if called upon to do so, could withstand thirst for a number of successive days. Many of the beasts, for reasons known only to themselves, selected for their habitual grazing-grounds tracts far from any waterhole, and so had regularly to travel miles to and from their drinking spot.

The recently mentioned lights of “cow camps,” direct attention to an inconsistency in American English whereby “cow camp” labelled a merely temporary stopping-place, although “mining camp,” denoted a lasting settlement of some size. But should a “cow camp” attain a substantial, human population and decide to root itself in permanently, it automatically became a “cow town.”

As our men’s cattle were so numerous as to fill many railway-cars, the owners of the beasts would send, as caretakers or as not uncommonly called “horse pushers” or “bull nurses,” two or three cowboys with the shipment to its ultimate destination, the abattoirs of Chicago, Omaha, or Kansas City, theoretically to tend the stock en route, practically to ride all the way in the caboose, and to compare the game of poker as developed on transportation systems with that evolved upon the Range.

But, had the cattle been few in number, the brutes would have been intrusted on the journey to some other outfit’s punchers bound eastward with their beeves.

Perhaps, upon the journey, the engineer would sight game near the track, and would stop a few minutes that the occupants of the caboose might stock the larder.

Until the decade of the nineties, in the days when newly laid tracks and hastily built bridges not infrequently went to pot, and made the time-table a nullity, passenger-trains were not uncommonly halted for this same purpose. More than one now living person can recall that, even upon the Overland Limited, there has been a sudden stop, and that presently thereafter the conductor has announced in each car: “Gents, the dining-car is short on meat. The engineer has just ‘raised’ a band of antelope. If there is any ranchmen or hunting-parties present that has Winchesters, will they oblige?” With due warning of such impending famine, a prudent conductor occasionally would break the news that the dining-car was “ate out,” and then add: “Will ranchmen and hunting-parties with rifles please oblige by moving forward to the baggage-car? We’re just about entering the antelope country.” This anabasis expedited stalking, and produced through machine-gun effect a more telling fire.

On one occasion, a Northern Pacific train, which had for several days been stalled by a washout, began eventually its hungry journey along a bank of the Yellowstone River. Above the river, flocks of geese for several miles flew parallel with the railway-track. By the conductor’s invitation, the baggage-car had been temporarily converted into a moving shooting-lodge. Every time a shot goose dropped in shallow water, the train stopped.

Not infrequently ranchmen “obliged” by alighting from a train, and killing such cattle as had wandered into a railway cut and been injured by the train.

Punchers, when bound for the Eastern abattoirs, scorned to pack their spare belongings into gunny “war sacks,” and provided themselves at the “general store” with “boughten” bags of carpet or of imitation leather, bags such as urban folk then employed. These new receptacles the punchers often termed “go-easters.”

In the youth of the cattle industry, long railway trips were infrequent for the ranchmen, because at that time delivery often was made at the local railroad shipping-point. There the animals were received as so many “head,” or, if on the basis of weight, then in terms of estimated pounds, and when once so delivered, passed out of the field of the ranchmen’s liability and into the purgatory of foodless, waterless miles of bumping railway journey.

Then came the decent laws which required, upon the cars, fodder, periodical halts for drink and rest, and consequent necessity for human attendants; and came also the habit of requiring delivery to be made at the abattoirs, with weights determined by their scales.

Let us follow the punchers to Chicago or wherever. Hours, not days, after reaching the destination, there almost always arose ample basis for that moot subject of school-day debates: “Which can the better care for himself, the city boy in the country or the country boy in the city?” Montana, Idaho, Oregon, Wyoming, Colorado, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and old Dakota have seen their sons taken unawares, black-jacked and felled in the slums of the slaughter-house cities of the Middle West.

However, for this the Far West never attempted to retaliate upon strangers within its borders. Whoever hunted there for trouble could find it, but trouble usually was reserved for the exclusive use of such as sought it. The Range may have been untutored in Old World drawing-room conventions, but it was humanly decent and humanly generous. It roughly hazed newcomers only when by superciliousness they impliedly asked for the treatment, though the askers received at least all they had requested. Such newcomers as, instead of having positive quality and being affirmatively disagreeable, were of negative worth and merely not agreeable were not overtly assailed. Simply they were ignored and were left to wither away from ostracism.

A stone went under the saddle-blanket of such only as did not meet the West eye to eye. The tenderfoot who could not ride, had the courage to announce it, and was a man, was given at the ranches horses ashamed to buck. A man, who was of the same manly ilk, who for moral reasons did not wish to drink alcohol, but did not make unctuous advertisement of personal piety, could walk into any saloon in any settlement in the Cattle Country, and, save in the rarest of cases, be as happily treated over his glass of water as he would have been had he asked for “red eye.”

However, there was one thing which that tenderfoot could not safely attempt. This was peremptorily handing his coat to a Westerner to carry. Throughout the Range such an offer was construed as an affirmative attack upon personal dignity, and beyond that upon the very democracy of the West.

The phrase “humanly decent,” when used above, bore no relation to the question as to whether or not the men of the Range were any more devoted to the urban “red-light districts” than were their Eastern brothers. They were not so, if the testimony of many old-timers be credible.

Admittedly, at the end of lengthy cattle drives, notably that of the Texas Trail, the attendant riders, as a rebound from protracted, gruelling duties, were prone to engage in orgies. Dodge City, Abilene, Newton, and their sister cow towns standing at the end of the long trail were, for the dusty, tired, jubilant, arriving puncher, relatively the same as for years was Paris to the ocean-crossing American—license rather than a place.

Morality with many a man was local. He might refuse to foul his own nest; yet, when travelling far away from it, his restrictive decency was apt to decrease in ratio with the square of the distance. As Smoke Murphy said at Julesburg: “Many a virtuous polar bear raises hell on the equator.”

But long drives were, for any given man, unless he belonged to the small coterie that specialized upon Texas Trail work, only an occasional function. For the most part of his time he stayed comparatively near home, and home as such, however simple, were it only a one-man dug-out, ever had compelling moral effect.

West was, as regards its eastern boundary, a relative term. For the purposes of this writing, the West is taken as the country “west of the Missouri River,” i. e., westward of approximately the meridian of Omaha, Nebraska; but that country also had its intersectional comparisons. With a peg driven into the ground at any point in the United States westward of the Mississippi River, one found, as one still finds, all persons living on the sunset side of that peg regarding all transpeg people as Easterners. Colorado has ever been “back East” to Arizona.

The interchangeable phrases “west of the Missouri River,” “west of the Missouri,” and “west of the river” (with simon-pure old-timers the Missouri was merely “the river”) had a very definite meaning in the Cattle Country. The ferries from present Council Bluffs, Iowa, to the site of present Omaha, and from first Independence or Westport, and later “St. Joe,” to the Kansan shore, were the means by which many of the westward-bound Forty-Niners and their followers crossed the Missouri River. It was there that these gold-seekers left their “States,” and entered their “West.” It was these gold-seekers who made that phrase “west of the Missouri.” The point which they thus fixed as the one to mark where the West began stayed put, but presently there extended from it a north and south line that reached to Canada and to the Gulf of Mexico. All the area westward of that imaginary line was said to be “west of the Missouri River,” even though Dakota for much of its territory was in fact eastward of the actual stream.

In addition to the almost constant driving of myriad northbound cattle along the Texas Trail, there were sometimes, within the North itself, prolonged movements “upon the hoof.” These latter hegiras sprang out of exaggerated, though temporary, differences between the conditions in various localities. A drought-made differential between Oregon and, say, Wyoming, or between Wyoming and, say, Dakota, occasionally made it advisable to drive live stock many hundreds of miles in order to reach an unscorched refuge. Thus, for instance, animals have been herded out of eastern Oregon and into Wyoming or Montana, while again Wyoming’s ranchmen have forced their thirsty herds out of the latter’s home lands and across the map to western Kansas. When planning these intrasectional transfers, care was taken that, so far as possible, the animals involved should not finally be landed unduly far from the line of their normal course to market.

The bovine victims of a long, long trail were, when leaving Texas, known there as “coasters,” but after they had reached the Northwest they were called in the latter section “pilgrims.” No special name attached to the suffering animals that ploughed through dust to escape from a blighted Northern Range.

The brutes’ plodding journey upon all these drives was in details like the already described trek from the round-up to the railway—like it, save in three regards. To make fair comparison, one must multiply by ten, if not by twenty, all the distances, all the fatigue, all the vexation accorded to the shorter expedition. It took five months to make a drive from the Rio Grande straight northward to the Canadian border. Then one, while recalling the Texas Trail, should at times increase the herd’s size to four thousand, even to ten thousand, animals; should not forget those strenuous periods, each of at least two days, when below the Colorado River, again between the Stinking Water and the South Platte, and again below the Tongue River, the punchers, on leaving one river, deliberately prevented their animals from satisfyingly drinking there, in order that mad lust for water might hold these animals to a steady march through the semidesert that lay before the next encountered stream; and finally not only one should bear in mind the distressing possibility of having to drive, across a sun-blistered country, cattle temporarily blinded by thirst and frenzied in their blindness, but also one must remember the strain of “swimming” the charges across a swollen river.

Though the “swim” was not encountered on many of the shorter drives, it was met on some of them, as it was upon all of the longdistance hikes. It was no event for weaklings.

Hundreds of driven cattle were walking in a column nearly a mile in length, and of irregular formation like scattered leaves blown slowly across a lawn. Their van reached the stream’s bank. Singly, in pairs, or in somewhat larger groups, the forward animals broke from their formation, lumbered down the bank, trotted across the sand-bar at its foot, and finally side to side stood to mid-knee in the water, muzzles immersed.

Cowboy strategists selected from the line of drinking beasts one or two steers that promised courage and qualities of leadership, rode quietly into position behind them, and as they raised their heads, urged them farther into the stream, thus into “swimming water”; and, by heading all attempts to deviate from the course prescribed, achieved the satisfaction of seeing brown bodies churn wakes which pointed directly at the opposite shore. A few adventurous brutes, of their own volition, followed these leaders; and, once all these pioneers showed their dripping, glistening bodies on the farther shore, the herd automatically and in tenuous line passed down the hither bank, into the water and across it.

The line once established, there was little risk that the marching column would rebound from the stream and scatter over the prairie. So, for the quiet, seductive methods necessary to institute the crossing, there safely could now be substituted more overt and violent means to speed the rate and to force participation by slothful or timid beasts.

“Starting the swim” was an anxious task, for if the selected leaders were to outwit the men and succeed in “doubling back,” either before leaving the hither shore or after fairly entering the water, it would mean an immediate stampede, wherein the steadily arriving cattle, on reaching the water’s edge, would swerve from it and pursue the brutes which, though a moment before ahead of them, already would have similarly turned and now would be galloping inland; or else it would mean at the riverside an interweaving jam of nervous animals steadily mushrooming from the forward pressure of the still-arriving column, and ready at any instant to “split,” i. e., to form like a capital letter “Y,” and to launch a stampede from the tip of each of the prongs.

As soon as the continuity of the line was assured, a cowboy or two plunged their horses into the water, made their way to the opposite shore, and set about clearing it of its clogging cattle and marshalling them in marching order upon the plain beyond. The rest of the punchers so timed their own crossings as to make them in proper relation to the varying sizes of the two sections of the stream-divided herd.

Some of the men, preferring sureness to comfort, made while in the water no change in their riding position, and “swimming wet,” landed with clothing dripping to half-way between knee and hip. Others, more finical, bent their knees and raised their feet to a kneeling pose with spurs touching the cantle. A rider of the latter type ran the risk of being unbalanced by an unexpected eddy or a bumping steer, and thereby of rolling his top heavily burdened horse directly upon its side; or else, upon like collision and through instinctive and unfortunate pull upon the reins, of rearing his horse, to have it madly splash its front legs and then flop sideways. A successful grab of a stirrup or, better still, of a tail’s end would give this hapless rider an efficient tow to safety.

The men’s familiarity with this “crossing,” as the West termed a ford, as well as the act of traversing it, relieved them from any anxiety about possible quicksands. Had not every square inch of the shores been known to the punchers, they would have “scouted” both banks before the herd’s arrival. The treacherous sands of many a Western stream have swallowed many a horse or steer, and many a solitary cowboy has been eaten alive by the very land he loved. The only remedy for quicksand was a lariat and a tugging pony.

Fortunately, during the crossing, there had occurred no untoward event to drive into panic the swimming portion of the herd and impel it to suicide through self-devised milling in midstream. No low-lying sun had shone directly into the animals’ eyes. No Indians had attacked the operation, no bear or wolf had appeared upon the farther shore; no stick unexpectedly had cracked; no fantastically shaped log had floated down the channel; nothing had happened to check the nautical pioneers, to break the brown thread which they drew behind them, and to send the living contents of the river, first into a crazed, revolving mêlée, and next into brown carcasses which would bob in the current until disgusted waters spewed out the carrion upon a sandbar.

Had milling started in the stream, mounted punchers and the ponies under them would have done their best to struggle through the whirling mess, to break its motion, to resolve its participants into a sane, straight line, and to connect that line’s front end with the desired shore. A pony might be crushed, might have his trappings entangled in the horns of a sinking steer, but the plucky little horse preferred excitement to ennui. A rider might meet with similar catastrophe. Yet, because of the self-sufficiency of punchers, usually the worst that befell a man in breaking a mill was to be capsized from his mount and to go ashore upon a steer’s back or by holding the end of its tail.

Horses, save in the very rarest of instances, had too much sense to mill in water or even on land. When they, however, did embark on it, their action was technically called not “milling,” but instead “rounding-up,” just as it was in the case of their interweavings upon land when being forced by cowboys to shift from a scattered formation into a compact band. To the cattle was given a monopoly of the term “mill.”

If by chance a railway skirted the river, either upon its farther bank or at but little inland distance from it, there very possibly was an occurrence such as one never sees in these present days of fenced farms.

The moment the first steer entered the water, the entire herd was, by inviolate custom, vested with the right of way over every train, and this right continued until the fording was completed. The locomotive’s whistle was of no interest to the cowboys. They knew that the engineer, with eyes out for swimming herds, under strictest orders not to damage future freight or to antagonize its owners and their kind, would come to a complete stop so far away from the scene of ferrying as not to lend his train to the starting of a stampede. Thus railways frequently were blocked, and for hours at a time, because in days now past, “cattle was king.”

The profanity which poured from the opened windows of the cars and from the engine’s cab melted into the lowing of such cattle as had made the passage and into the bellowing of those yet to essay it. The cowboys, indifferent to the noise and their fellow man’s impatience, stuck to their own swimming job.

A northbound, Texan herd, once clear of the Panhandle, had an excellent chance of being held temporarily at any spot upon its route by a quarantine against “Texas fever,” “Spanish fever,” or “splenic fever,” according as the local veterinarian chose to entitle that endemic disease. Then the punchers in charge of the beasts had an enforced halt of not less than sixty days, and so for at least sixty days impatient men practised swearing.

The fevered Texan cattle, so soon as they reached a Northern latitude, quickly ridded themselves of their ailment; but if not held in quarantine, the beasts would seed mile after mile of trail with pestilential germs that would lie in wait for uninoculated animals.

Some States permanently maintained for their entire areas a quarantine of definite period. In other States, the quarantine was intermittent and sometimes was limited to a particular zone.

Commercial profit proved for the great majority of ranchers a term of purely academic meaning. Taxless grazing-lands made possible large profits, if—. High selling prices potentialized great earnings, if—. The “if” was the drought or the snow-storm. The profits of the fat years went into high living or into additions to the live stock. If into high living, they disappeared immediately. If into additions to the live stock, their days were longer but usually were numbered. In the latter case, ordinarily sooner or later the profits and capital lay side by side, parched bodies on the sand or bloated carcasses appearing from the snow according as the ranch was in the South or in the North.

But no man who ever lived upon the Range regretted later that he had had that residential privilege.