Something of this same story was to follow in the Dakotas.
Presently we heard no more of the bonanza wheat farms; and a
little later they were not. The one-crop country is never one of
sound investing values; and a land boom is something of which to
beware--always and always to beware.
The prairie had passed; the range had passed; the illegal fences
had passed; and presently the cattle themselves were to
pass--that is to say, the great herds. As recently as five years
ago (1912) it was my fortune to be in the town of Belle Fourche,
near the Black Hills--a region long accustomed to vivid history,
whether of Indians, mines, or cows--at the time when the last of
the great herds of the old industry thereabouts were breaking up;
and to see, coming down to the cattle chutes to be shipped to the
Eastern stockyards, the last hundreds of the last great Belle
Fourche herd, which was once numbered in thousands. They came
down out of the blue-edged horizon, threading their way from
upper benches down across the dusty valley. The dust of their
travel rose as it had twenty years earlier on the same old trail.
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