The Settling of the Sage | Page 2

cows
from Dodge City to the Platte, from the Platte to the rolling sage-clad
hills round old Fort Laramie and from Laramie to the present range.
Many times he had heard the tale, and though most of the scenes had
been enacted before his birth, they were impressed so firmly upon his
mind by repetition that it seemed as if he himself had been a part of
them.
His mind pictured two boys of somewhere round eighteen years of age
setting forth from the little home town of Kansas City, nestling at the
confluence of the Missouri and the Kaw. A year later Cal Warren was
whacking bulls on the Santa Fe Trail while the other, William Harris,
was holding the reins over four plunging horses as he tooled a
lumbering Concord stage over the trail from Omaha to the little camp
called Denver.
It was five years before their trails crossed again. Cal Warren was the
first of the two to wed, and he had established a post along the trail, a

rambling structure of 'dobe, poles and sod, and there conducted the
business of "Two for One," a calling impossible and unknown in any
other than that day and place.
The long bull trains were in sight from horizon to horizon every hour of
the day. The grind of the gravel wore down the hoofs of the unshod
oxen, and when footsore they could not go on. One sound bull for two
with tender feet was Warren's rule of trade. These crippled ones were
soon made sound in the puddle pen, a sod corral flooded with sufficient
water to puddle the yellow clay into a six-inch layer of stiff, healing
mud, then thrown out on the open range to fatten and grow strong. But
transitions were swift and sweeping. Steel rails were crowding close
behind the prairie schooners and the ox-bows. Bull trains grew fewer
every year and eventually Cal Warren made his last trade of two for
one.
Bill Harris had come back to view the railroad of which he had heard
so much and he remained to witness and to be a part of the wild days of
Abilene, Hays and Dodge, as each attained the apex of its glory as the
railroad's end and the consequent destination of the Texas trail herds.
The sight of these droves of thousands implanted a desire to run cows
himself and when he was wed in Dodge he broached this project to his
boyhood pal.
It was the sincere wish of each to gain the other as a partner in all
future enterprise, but this was not to be. Warren had seen the bottom
drop out of the bull trade and he would not relinquish the suspicion that
any business dealing in four-footed stock was hazardous in the extreme
and he insisted that the solution of all their financial problems rested
upon owning land, not cows. Harris could not be induced to farm the
soil while steers were selling round eight dollars a head.
Warren squatted on a quarter of land. Harris bought a few head of
she-stock and grazed his cows north and west across the Kansas line
into the edge of the great unknown that was styled Nebraska and
Northwest District. At first his range was limitless, but in a few short
years he could stand on the roof of his sod hut and see the white points
of light which were squatters' wagons dotting the range to the far

horizon in any direction he chose to look. The first of these to invade
his range had been Cal Warren, moving on before the swarm of settlers
flocking into the locality of his first choice in such alarming numbers
that he feared an unhealthy congestion of humanity in the near future.
The debate of farming versus cows was resumed between the two, but
each held doggedly to his own particular views and the longed-for
partnership was again postponed.
Harris moved once more--and then again--and it was something over
two decades after his departure from Dodge with the Three Bar cows
that he made one final shift, faring on in search of that land where
nesters were unknown. He made a dry march that cost him a fourth of
his cows, skirted the Colorado Desert and made his stand under the first
rim of the hills. Those others who came to share this range were men
whose views were identical with his own, whose watchword was: "Our
cows shall run free on a thousand hills." They sought for a spot where
the range was untouched by the plow and the water holes unfenced.
They had moved, then moved again, driven on before the invasion of
the settlers. These men banded together and swore that here conditions
should be reversed, that