Hunting Trips of a Ranchman
Chapter One
Ranching in the Bad Lands
The great middle plains of the United States, parts of which
are still scantily peopled by men of Mexican parentage, while other
parts have been but recently won from the warlike tribes of Horse
Indians, now form a broad pastoral belt, stretching in a north and south
line from British America to the Rio Grande. Throughout this great belt
of grazing land almost the only industry is stock-raising, which is here
engaged in on a really gigantic scale; and it is already nearly covered
with the ranches of the stockmen, except on those isolated tracts (often
themselves of great extent) from which the red men look hopelessly and
sullenly out upon their old hunting-grounds, now roamed over by the
countless herds of long-horned cattle. The northern portion of this belt
is that which has been most lately thrown open to the whites; and it is
with this part only that we have to do.
The northern cattle plains occupy the basin of the Upper Missouri; that
is, they occupy all of the land drained by the tributarie ... read full excerpt from Hunting Trips of a Ranchman ebook
