The Long Trail was surveyed and constructed in a century and a day.Over the Red River of the South, a stream even today perhaps known but vaguely in the minds of many inhabitants of the country, there appeared, almost without warning, vast processions of strange horned kine--processions of enormous wealth, owned by kings who paid no tribute, and guarded by men who never knew a master.Whither these were bound, what had conjured them forth, whence they came, were questions in the minds of the majority of the population of the North and East to whom the phenomenon appeared as the product of a day.The answer to these questions lay deep in the laws of civilization, and extended far back into that civilization's history.The Long Trail was finished in a day.It was begun more than a century before that day, and came forward along the very appointed ways of time....Thus, far down in the vague Southwest, at some distant time, in some distant portion of old, mysterious Mexico, there fell into line the hoof prints which made the first faint beginnings of the Long Trail, merely the path of a half nomadic movement along the line of the least resistance.
The Long Trail began to deepen and extend.It received then, as it did later, a baptism of human blood such as no other pathway of the continent has known.The nomadic and the warlike days passed, and there ensued a more quiet and pastoral time.It was the beginning of a feudalism of the range, a barony rude enough, but a glorious one, albeit it began, like all feudalism, in large-handed theft and generous murdering.The flocks of these strong men, carelessly interlapping, increased and multiplied amazingly.They were hardly looked upon as wealth.The people could not eat a tithe of the beef; they could not use a hundredth of the leather.Over hundreds and hundreds of miles of ownerless grass lands, by the rapid waters of the mountains, by the slow streams of the plains or the long and dark lagoons of the low coast country the herds of tens grew into droves of hundreds and thousands and hundreds of thousands.This was really the dawning of the American cattle industry.
Chips and flakes of the great Southwestern herd began to be seen in the Northern States.As early as 1857 Texas cattle were driven to Illinois.In 1861 Louisiana was, without success, tried as an outlet.In 1867 a venturous drover took a herd across the Indian Nations, bound for California, and only abandoned the project because the Plains Indians were then very bad in the country to the north.In 1869 several herds were driven from Texas to Nevada.These were side trails of the main cattle road.It seemed clear that a great population in the North needed the cheap beef of Texas, and the main question appeared to be one of transportation.No proper means for this offered.The Civil War stopped almost all plans to market the range cattle, and the close of that war found the vast grazing lands of Texas covered fairly with millions of cattle which had no actual or determinate value.They were sorted and branded and herded after a fashion, but neither they nor their increase could be converted into anything but more cattle.The cry for a market became imperative.
