All these new white men who had crowded into the unknown country of the Plains, the Rockies, the Sierras, and the Cascades, had to be fed.They could not employ and remain content with the means by which the red man there had always fed himself.Hence a new industry sprang up in the United States, which of itself made certain history in that land.The business of freighting supplies to the West, whether by bull-train or by pack-train, was an industry sui generic, very highly specialized, and pursued by men of great business ability as well as by men of great hardihood and daring.
Each of these freight trains which went West carried hanging on its flank more and more of the white men.As the trains returned, more and more was learned in the States of the new country which lay between the Missouri and the Rockies, which ran no man knew how far north, and no man could guess how far south.Now appears in history Fort Benton, on the Missouri, the great northern supply post--just as at an earlier date there had appeared Fort Hall, one of the old fur-trading posts beyond the Rockies, Bent's Fort on the Arkansas, and many other outposts of the new Saxon civilization in the West.
Later came the pony express and the stage coach which made history and romance for a generation.Feverishly, boisterously, a strong, rugged, womanless population crowded westward and formed the wavering, now advancing, now receding line of the great frontier of American story.
But for long there was no sign of permanent settlement on the Plains, and no one thought of this region as the frontier.The men there who were prospecting and exploiting were classified as no more than adventurers.No one seems to have taken a lesson from the Indian and the buffalo.The reports of Fremont long since had called attention to the nourishing quality of those grasses of the high country, but the day of the cowboy had not yet dawned.There is a somewhat feeble story which runs to the effect that in 1866 one of the great wagon-trains, caught by the early snows of winter, was obliged to abandon its oxen on the range.It was supposed that, of course, the oxen must perish during the winter.But next spring the owners were surprised to find that the oxen, so far from perishing, had flourished very much--indeed, were fat and in good condition.So runs the story which is often repeated.It may be true, but to accredit to this incident the beginnings of the cattle industry in the Indian country would surely be going too far.The truth is that the cow industry was not a Saxon discovery.It was a Latin enterprise, flourishing in Mexico long before the first of these miners and adventurers came on the range.
Something was known of the Spanish lands to the south through the explorations of Pike, but more through the commerce of the prairies--the old wagon trade from the Missouri River to the Spanish cities of Sante Fe and Chihuahua.Now the cow business, south of the Rio Grande, was already well differentiated and developed at the time the first adventurers from the United States went into Texas and began to crowd their Latin neighbors for more room.There it was that our Saxon frontiersmen first discovered the cattle industry.But these 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.
