The Passing of the Frontier | Page 6

or see again, floating high in the cloudless skies, the sails of the
Great Armada, was the privilege of Americans for a double decade
within the memory of men yet living, in that country, so unfailingly
beloved, which we call the Old West of America.

Chapter II.

The Range
When, in 1803, those two immortal youths, Meriwether Lewis and
William Clark, were about to go forth on their great journey across the
continent, they were admonished by Thomas Jefferson that they would
in all likelihood encounter in their travels, living and stalking about, the
mammoth or the mastodon, whose bones had been found in the great
salt-licks of Kentucky. We smile now at such a supposition; yet it was
not unreasonable then. No man knew that tremendous country that lay
beyond the mouth of the Missouri.
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, in a few generations, be
studded with great towns and would form a part of the granary of the

world.
But, if our early explorers, passing beyond the valley of the Missouri,
found valueless the region of the Plains and the foothills, not so the
wild creatures or the savage men who had lived there longer than
science records. The buffalo then ranged from the Rio Grande to the
Athabaska, from the Missouri to the Rockies, and beyond. No one
seems to have concluded in those days that there was after all slight
difference between the buffalo and the domestic ox. The native cattle,
however, in untold thousands and millions, had even then proved
beyond peradventure the sustaining and strengthening nature of the
grasses of the Plains.
Now, each creature, even of human species, must adjust itself to its
environment. Having done so, commonly it is disposed to love that
environment. The Eskimo and the Zulu each thinks that he has the best
land in the world: So with the American Indian, who, supported by the
vast herds of buffalo, ranged all over that tremendous country which
was later to be given over to the white man with his domestic cattle. No
freer life ever was lived by any savages than by the Horse Indians of
the Plains in the buffalo days; and never has the world known a
physically higher type of savage.
On the buffalo-range--that is to say, on the cattle-range which was to
be--Lewis and Clark met several bands of the Sioux--the Mandans and
the Assiniboines, the Blackfeet, the Shoshones. Farther south were the
Pawnees, the Kaws, the Otoes, the Osages, most of whom depended in
part upon the buffalo for their living, though the Otoes, the Pawnees,
the Mandans, and certain others now and then raised a little corn or a
few squashes to help out their bill of fare. Still farther south dwelt the
Kiowas, the Comanches, and others. The Arapahoes, the Cheyennes,
the Crows, and the Utes, all hunters, were soon to come into the ken of
the white man. Of such of these tribes as they met, the youthful
captains made accounting, gravely and with extraordinary accuracy, but
without discovering