The Passing of the Frontier | Page 8

southern and northern riflemen--ruthless and savage, yet strangely
statesmanlike--though they might betimes drive away the owners of the
herds, troubled little about the herds themselves. There was a certain
fascination to these rude strangers in the slow and easeful civilization
of Old Spain which they encountered in the land below them. Little by
little, and then largely and yet more largely, the warriors of San Jacinto
reached out and began to claim lands for themselves--leagues and
uncounted leagues of land, which had, however, no market value. Well
within the memory of the present generation large tracts of good land
were bought in Texas for six cents an acre; some was bought for half
that price in a time not much earlier. Today much of that land is

producing wealth; but land then was worthless--and so were cows.
This civilization of the Southwest, of the new Republic of Texas, may
be regarded as the first enduring American result of contact with the
Spanish industry. The men who won Texas came mostly from
Kentucky and Tennessee or southern Ohio, and the first colonizer of
Texas was a Virginian, Stephen Fuller Austin. They came along the old
Natchez Trace from Nashville to the Mississippi River--that highway
which has so much history of its own. Down this old winding trail into
the greatest valley of all the world, and beyond that valley out into the
Spanish country, moved steadily the adventurers whose fathers had but
recently crossed the Appalachians. One of the strongest thrusts of the
American civilization thus entered the cattle-range at its lower end,
between the Rio Grande and the Red River.
In all the several activities, mining, freighting, scouting, soldiering,
riding pony express, or even sheer adventuring for what might come,
there was ever a trading back and forth between home-staying men and
adventuring men. Thus there was an interchange of knowledge and of
customs between East and West, between our old country and our new.
There was an interchange, too, at the south, where our Saxon
civilization came in touch with that of Mexico.
We have now to note some fundamental facts and principles of the
cattle industry which our American cattlemen took over ready-made
from the hands of Mexico.
The Mexicans in Texas had an abundance of small, hardy horses of
African and Spanish breed, which Spain had brought into the New
World--the same horses that the Moors had brought into Spain--a breed
naturally hardy and able to subsist upon dry food. Without such horses
there could have been no cattle industry. These horses, running wild in
herds, had crossed to the upper Plains. La Verendrye, and later Lewis
and Clark, had found the Indians using horses in the north. The Indians,
as we have seen, had learned to manage the horse. Formerly they had
used dogs to drag the travois, but now they used the "elk-dog," as they
first called the horse.
In the original cow country, that is, in Mexico and Texas, countless
herds of cattle were held in a loose sort of ownership over wide and
unknown plains. Like all wild animals in that warm country, they bred
in extraordinary numbers. The southern range, indeed, has always been

called the breeding range. The cattle had little value. He who wanted
beef killed beef. He who wanted leather killed cattle for their hides. But
beyond these scant and infrequent uses cattle had no definite value.
The Mexican, however, knew how to handle cows. He could ride a
horse, and he could rope cattle and brand them. Most of the cattle of a
wide range would go to certain water-holes more or less regularly,
where they might be roughly collected or estimated. This coming of the
cattle to the watering-places made it unnecessary for owners of cattle to
acquire ranch land. It was enough to secure the water-front where the
cows must go to drink. That gave the owner all the title he needed. His
right to the increase he could prove by another phenomenon of nature,
just as inevitable and invariable as that of thirst. The maternal instinct
of a cow and the dependence of the calf upon its mother gave the old
rancher of immemorial times sufficient proof of ownership in the
increase of his herd. The calf would run with its own mother and with
no other cow through its first season. So that if an old Mexican
ranchero saw a certain number of cows at his watering-places, and with
them calves, he knew that all before him were his property--or, at least,
he claimed them as such and used them.
Still, this was loose-footed property. It might stray away after all, or it
might be driven away. Hence, in some forgotten time, our shrewd
Spaniard invented a system of proof of ownership which has always
lain