CHAPTER II

THE RANCH IN THE SOUTH

Table of Contents

Description of the Western cattle industry, whether in regard to its features, its characters, or its environments, must be largely a matter of generalization. The cattle country itself covers a third of the entire territory of the United States. We have sought roughly to divide it into the two sections of the North and South, but it would trouble one to say where even a broad and indefinite line should be drawn which should act as a fair boundary between the two. Should we place that boundary, loosely speaking, somewhere at the central or southern line of the State of Kansas, we shall have established a demarcation at best arbitrary and in many ways inconclusive and inaccurate. Even if we presume that this indefinite line be sufficiently accurate, we shall have left, for our Southern ranch region, a domain many times larger than the entire territory of Great Britain, with a few of her choice provinces thrown into the bargain.

Over so large a region there must prevail some divergence of people and things; and in turn we must remember that all these people and things, more especially as they pertain to the story of the cattle man, have in late years been subject to much change. It would be very natural for any one who had but a partial acquaintance, or one limited to a few sections of so large a region, to consider as incorrect any specialized description which did not tally with his own observation in his own locality. Still more inaccurate might such an observer consider a description which covered accurately twenty years ago a section which he first sees to-day, in the last quarter of the century. For instance, a citizen of the type our friend the cowpuncher is wont to term a"pilgrim," might go to-day to some railroad point in the vast State of Texas, expecting to find there in full swing the rude ways of the past. He might expect to see the ranchman an uncouth personage, clad in the border garb once pictured in lurid literature or still more lurid drama, his speech full of strange oaths, his home a dugout or a shanty. Much surprised might this stranger be to discover his ranchman a comfortable individual, of well-cut business dress, guiltless of obvious weaponry, and plain and simple in speech. Still more surprised he might be to learn that this ranchman does not live upon his ranch at all, but in the town or city, perhaps many miles therefrom. The ranchman may have an office in the bank, and may be chief stockholder in that institution and other leading concerns of his town. He may be a member of the Legislature, or sheriff of his county, or candidate for higher office. His family may have a son in college, a daughter in the art school of a distant city. The ranch itself, if discovered, may be simply a vast and partly tilled farm, with white-painted buildings, with busy tenantry, and much modern machinery in intelligent use. This would be accurate description of a ranch in the South to-day. But it would be accurate only in particular, not in general, and it would never satisfy the inquirer who knows something of what ranch life once was and is to-day in ft wide and wild portion of the Western region.

If we sought to be more general in the outlook for a ranch fit to be called typically Southern, we should certainly have much latitude afforded us. Suppose it to be in the Indian Nations, taking it at that time before the Indians had grown wise in their day and generation, and before the United States Government had evicted many of those opulent tenants, the cattle men of the nations. Let us picture our ranch as lying along some timbered stream, such as the Cimarron, which flows just above the"black-jack" country of the Cheyennes and Arapahoes. Here the land lies in long swelling rolls and ridges, with hills of short oak scrub, and wide intervals of prairie. Into the main stream of the river flow many smaller tributaries, and among these are some little creeks heading back among the hills in fresh, unfailing springs, whose waters flow always sweet and abundant throughou