This innovation of barb-wire fences in the seventies had caused a
tremendous alteration of conditions over all the country. It had
enabled men to fence in their own water-fronts, their own
homesteads. Casually, and at first without any objection filed by
any one, they had included in their fences many hundreds of
thousands of acres of range land to which they had no title
whatever. These men--like the large-handed cow barons of the
Indian Nations, who had things much as they willed in a little
unnoted realm all their own--had money and political influence.
And there seemed still range enough for all. If a man wished to
throw a drift fence here or there, what mattered it?
Up to this time not much attention had been paid to the Little
Fellow, the man of small capital who registered a brand of his
own, and who with a Maverick* here and there and the natural
increase, and perhaps a trifle of unnatural increase here and
there--had proved able to accumulate with more or less rapidity a
herd of his own. Now the cattle associations passed rules that no
foreman should be allowed to have or register a brand of his own.
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