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194
—the American live stock industry as it exists today west of the Mississippi. It is indeed a far stretch from the domesticated, gentle thoroughbred to the wild, untamable "longhorn." But is it not well that at times we take a
retrospective view, and contrast the present with the past? By so doing we may the better determine the extent to which this all important industry h a s progressed with our geographical development, and also incidentally keep alive the memories and the traditions of a bygone age.
By a degree of good fortune it fell to me to be reared from infancy to manhood in Southwest Texas in the midst of that favored section when it was one vast breeding ground for cattle and horses, and from which was afterward to be driven those herds that, moving across the prairies of Texas and through the Indian Territory, from 1869 to 1886, poured into the wild and unsettled area from Kansas to the British Dominions. In the days and in the section of which I treat the railroad, the telegraph and the telephone were unknown. "A greater part of the land still belonged to the State and was prized in the main for the grasses which grew upon it ; fencing wire had not been invented, and in consequence the entire country, except where dotted with ranches, was unfenced and uncontrolled —a common pasture in which thousands of horses and cattle roamed at will.