Where the buffalo once lived, the cattle were to live,
high up in the foothills of this great mountain range which ran
from the Rio Grande to Canada. On the east, where lay the
Prairies rather than the Plains, it was a country waving with
high native grasses, with many brilliant flowers hiding among
them, the sweet-William, the wild rose, and often great masses of
the yellow sunflower.
>From the Rio Grande to the Athabaska, for the greater part, the
frontier sky was blue and cloudless during most of the year. The
rainfall was not great. The atmosphere was dry. It was a cheerful
country, one of optimism and not of gloom. In the extreme south,
along the Rio Grande, the climate was moister, warmer, more
enervating; but on the high steppes of the middle range in
Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, western Nebraska, there lay the
finest out-of-doors country, man's country the finest of the
earth.
But for the time, busy with more accustomed things, mining and
freighting and fighting and hunting and trading and trapping, we
Americans who had arrived upon the range cared little for cows.
The upper thrust of the great herds from the south into the north
had not begun.
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