The Passing of the Frontier | Page 9

Emerson Hough
at the very bottom of the organized cow industry; he invented the
method of branding. This meant his sign, his name, his trade-mark, his
proof of ownership. The animal could not shake it off. It would not
burn off in the sun or wash off in the rain. It went with the animal and
could not be eradicated from the animal's hide. Wherever the bearer
was seen, the brand upon its hide provided certain identification of the
owner.
Now, all these basic ideas of the cow industry were old on the lower
range in Texas when our white men first drifted thither. The cattle
industry, although in its infancy, and although supposed to have no
great future, was developed long before Texas became a republic. It
never, indeed, changed very much from that time until the end of its
own career.
One great principle was accepted religiously even in those early and
crude days. A man's cow was HIS cow. A man's brand was HIS brand.

There must be no interference with his ownership. Hence certain other
phases of the industry followed inevitably. These cattle, these calves,
each branded by the iron of the owner, in spite of all precautions, began
to mingle as settlers became more numerous; hence came the idea of
the round-up. The country was warm and lazy. If a hundred or a
thousand cows were not collected, very well. If a calf were separated
from its mother, very well. The old ranchers never quarreled among
themselves. They never would have made in the South anything like a
cattle association; it was left for the Yankees to do that at a time when
cows had come to have far greater values. There were few arguments in
the first rodeos of the lower range. One rancher would vie with his
neighbor in generosity in the matter of unbranded calves. Haggling
would have been held contemptible. On the lower range in the old
times no one cared much about a cow. Why should one do so? There
was no market for cows--no one who wished to buy them. If one
tendered a Mexican cinquo pesos for a yearling or a two-year-old, the
owner might perhaps offer the animal as a gift, or he might smile and
say "Con mucho gusto" as he was handed a few pieces of silver. There
were plenty of cows everywhere in the world!
Let us, therefore, give the old Spaniard full credit alike in picturesque
romance and in the organized industry of the cow. The westbound
thrust which came upon the upper part of the range in the days of more
shrewd and exacting business methods was simply the best-known and
most published phase of frontier life in the cow country; hence we have
usually accepted it as typical. It would not be accurate to say that the
cattle industry was basically much influenced or governed by northern
or eastern men. In practically all of its great phenomena the frontier of
the old cow-range was southern by birth and growth.
There lay, then, so long unused, that vast and splendid land so soon to
write romantic history of its own, so soon to come into the admiration
or the wonder of a great portion of the earth--a land of fascinating
interest to the youth of every country, and a region whose story holds a
charm for young and old alike even today. It was a region royal in its
dimensions. Far on the west it was hedged by the gray-sided and
white-topped mountains, the Rockies. Where the buffalo once lived, the
cattle were to live, high up in the foothills of this great mountain range
which ran from the Rio Grande to Canada. On the east, where lay the

Prairies rather than the Plains, it was a country waving with high native
grasses, with many brilliant flowers hiding among them, the
sweet-William, the wild rose, and often great masses of the yellow
sunflower.
>From the Rio Grande to the Athabaska, for the greater part, the
frontier sky was blue and cloudless during most of the year. The
rainfall was not great. The atmosphere was dry. It was a cheerful
country, one of optimism and not of gloom. In the extreme south, along
the Rio Grande, the climate was moister, warmer, more enervating; but
on the high steppes of the middle range in Colorado, Wyoming,
Montana, western Nebraska, there lay the finest out-of-doors country,
man's country the finest of the earth.
But for the time, busy with more accustomed things, mining and
freighting and fighting and hunting and trading and trapping, we
Americans who had arrived upon the range cared little for cows. The
upper thrust of the great herds from the south into the north had not
begun. It was after the Civil War that the
Continue reading on your phone by scaning this QR Code

 / 49
Tip: The current page has been bookmarked automatically. If you wish to continue reading later, just open the Dertz Homepage, and click on the 'continue reading' link at the bottom of the page.