In consequence there came an entire readjustment of values.This country, but yesterday barren and worthless, now was covered with gold, deeper than the gold of California or any of the old placers.New securities and new values appeared.Banks did not care much for the land as security--it was practically worthless without the cattle--but they would lend money on cattle at rates which did not then seem usurious.A new system of finance came into use.Side by side with the expansion of credits went the expansion of the cattle business.Literally in hundreds of thousands the cows came north from the exhaustless ranges of the lower country.
It was a wild, strange day.But withal it was the kindliest and most generous time, alike the most contented and the boldest time, in all the history of our frontiers.There never was a better life than that of the cowman who had a good range on the Plains and cattle enough to stock his range.There never will be found a better man's country in all the world than that which ran from the Missouri up to the low foothills of the Rockies.
The lower cities took their tribute of the northbound cattle for quite a time.Wichita, Coffeyville, and other towns of lower Kansas in turn made bids for prominence as cattle marts.Agents of the Chicago stockyards would come down along the trails into the Indian Nations to meet the northbound herds and to try to divert them to this or that market as a shipping-point.The Kiowas and Comanches, not yet wholly confined to their reservations, sometimes took tribute, whether in theft or in open extortion, of the herds laboring upward through the long slow season.Trail-cutters and herd-combers, licensed or unlicensed hangers-on to the northbound throngs of cattle, appeared along the lower trails--with some reason, occasionally; for in a great northbound herd there might be many cows included under brands other than those of the road brands registered for the drovers of that particular herd.Cattle thieving became an industry of certain value, rivaling in some localities the operations of the bandits of the placer camps.There was great wealth suddenly to be seen.The weak and the lawless, as well as the strong and the unscrupulous, set out to reap after their own fashion where they had not sown.If a grave here or there appeared along the trail or at the edge of the straggling town, it mattered little.If the gamblers and the desperadoes of the cow towns such as Newton, Ellsworth, Abilene, Dodge, furnished a man for breakfast day after day, it mattered little, for plenty of men, remained, as good or better.The life was large and careless, and bloodshed was but an incident.
During the early and unregulated days of the cattle industry, the frontier insisted on its own creed, its own standards.But all the time, coming out from the East, were scores and hundreds of men of exacter notions of trade and business.The enormous waste of the cattle range could not long endure.The toll taken by the thievery of the men who came to be called range-rustlers made an element of loss which could not long be sustained by thinking men.As the Vigilantes regulated things in the mining camps, so now in slightly different fashion the new property owners on the upper range established their own ideas, their own sense of proportion as to law and order.The cattle associations, the banding together of many owners of vast herds, for mutual protection and mutual gain were a natural and logical development.Outside of these there was for a time a highly efficient corps of cattle-range Vigilantes, who shot and hanged some scores of rustlers.
It was a frenzied life while it lasted--this lurid outburst, the last flare of the frontier.Such towns as Dodge and Ogallalla offered extraordinary phenomena of unrestraint.But fortunately into the worst of these capitals of license came the best men of the new regime, and the new officers of the law, the agents of the Vigilantes, the advance-guard of civilization now crowding on the heels of the wild men of the West.In time the lights of the dance-halls and the saloons and the gambling parlors went out one by one all along the frontier.By 1885 Dodge City, a famed capital of the cow trade, which will live as long as the history of that industry is known, resigned its eminence and declared that from where the sun then stood it would be a cow camp no more! The men of Dodge knew that another day had dawned.But this was after the homesteaders had arrived and put up their wire fences, cutting off from the town the holding grounds of the northbound herds.
