THIRTY-SIX
ONE delay after another, one disaster with another, the Del Sol
adventurers now were far into their second month on the trail. The
summer was approaching, although they had as yet made scarce more than
three-fourths of their entire distance to the railroad. Day after day
they advanced over a wholly unsettled country that lay for nearly its
entire length between the more settled civilized tribes on the east and
the buffalo range toward the west. Clinging in their wavering line
fairly close to the ninety-eighth meridian, without a guide, watch,
calendar or compass, they now had reached a region beautiful as a
wilderness, but soon to be the seat of a later and undreamed
civilization.
They had been in wilderness practically all the way. At that time Austin
was little more than a straggling country town. The herd cast dust into
the one street of Fort Worth, then boasting not over one hundred
inhabitants; and that was the last of the upper Texas towns. But what a
line of cities was to follow their path on ninety-eight!
In the Indian Nations they had crossed the Washita, where now stands the
thriving town of Chickasha, Oklahoma. El Reno, of Oklahoma, was
grassland then, near the ford of the North Fork of the Canadian.
Kingfisher was not dreamed of on the trail from the North Fork to the
Cimarron; and beyond that the city of Enid was to wait until long after
cattle days were gone and the cattle trail had moved itself much farther
to the west. Above them they aimed for Caldwell, just across the Kansas
line then but a ragged frontier town. Thence the wagon tongue pointed
toward Wichita, when Wichita was hardly more than a furrow in the
ground, “a mile long and an inch wide.” A railroad was still unforeseen
in any of these vicinities in 1867; but railroads soon were to follow,
almost in the footsteps of the earliest herd to Abilene. So much, to
make understandable the exultation of these men as they discovered for
themselves a country, or a succession of countries, absolutely virgin so
far as the white man was concerned; a pastoral empire that never has had
a parallel.
Whether by accident or design, the location of their northbound path was
a lucky or a shrewd one. Scarcely anywhere else would there have been so
few Indians to disturb them, nor could their experience easily be
repeated. The depredations of the tribesmen, their begging of the
drovers, their demands of tribute of all the northbound herds were still
in the future, since as yet the Indians had not learned of the northern
passing of the white men which was to come in a great wave in the
ensuing years; and since not many tribes knew this herd was passing. The
Del Sol men were pioneers.
How rich, how wildly alluring, this unsullied world which now was all
their own to enjoy! Their wild cattle now advanced quite usually in
sight of an almost continuous spectacle of wild buffalo, wild horses,
wild deer. At times the herd had to be held while a body of buffalo was
parted by rifle fire to let them through. There seemed no end to the
animal life of the region into which they came. It was all so different
from Texas now that they felt themselves strangers in a foreign land.
Their next river was the Cimarron, one more stream heading down from the
high, dry buffalo plains of the Panhandle to the sandy reaches and the
flat loam lands to the eastward. Making down out of the strip of scrubby
timber which they encountered below their crossing, the herdsmen made
short work of the Cimarron, which was at so low a stage that the carts
were driven through and the cattle did not have to swim at all.
Their start had been approximately at the thirtieth degree of latitude.
They had now reached, just above the Cimarron crossing, the parallel of
thirty-six, which later represented, as well as any arbitrary
delineation, the vague dividing line between the southern and the
northern ranges.
Above them now by one degree of latitude lay the south line of Kansas;
between, the narrow unsettled and unorganized east-and-west tract so
long known as the Cherokee Strip or the Cherokee Outlet. The existence
of this strip of land was proof that the greatest range of the buffalo
lay yet farther to the west, in the short-grass land; for forty years
before this time the Cherokees had fought the Osages to secure an outlet
over their land to the buffalo range beyond. But of all these things
also the Del Sol men were ignorant or careless. They did not know where
they were.
Roll along, little dogies, roll along! You broke one of the greatest
paths in all the world! You carried the South into the North! It was you
who ended the war!
“Roll along, little dogies, roll along!”
The lazy song of half-somnolent riders, ragged, lean, brown, rose on the
afternoon air of one more sunny day after sunny day. By this time the
herd had but one more considerable stream, the Salt Fork of the
Arkansas, between it and the main stream of the Arkansas. The men now
all were studying geography as best they might, for gradually they all
had concluded that Texas was far behind them, and that they were in a
world they knew not.
“She’s shore a perty country, Miss Taisie,” said Jim Nabours when they
paused for their noonday rest, the first stop north of the Cimarron. “It
looks to me like folks could almost live here, some day, though I don’t
see no cows nowheres.”
He could not dream that within a few short years there would be cattle
under fence in all that country; that long before that time abundant
strays would run wild as wild horses; that even then stretched
illimitedly the great upper range, wholly undiscovered, soon to be
clamoring for cows, to carry on a business which was then an unsuspected
thing.
“Come along here, Miss Taisie,” he continued, inviting her to take a
seat beside him on the grass and spreading down a crumpled sheet of
brown paper. It held what cannot be bought to-day for any money—a more
or less precise map of the first old cow trail from Texas north,
although only his rude amateur hand had drawn it. The clumsy finger of
the trail boss pointed out to his employer their locality as near as he
himself could guess it.
“Dan McMasters and me talked this over afore he quit us,” he explained.
“I’ve drawed it the best I could, and it’s sort of helpful too. Near as
I can figure it, we’re just about to cross thirty-six north. My pap told
me that thirty-six-thirty was where slavery ended and the damn Yankees
begun.”
“Yes; the Missouri Compromise,” nodded Taisie.
“Anyways my pap told me that thirty-six, along in there, was about where
cotton wouldn’t grow so well nohow, and where the ticks probably would
fall offen the cows in the wintertime. The line must come right about
here.”
“What line?” demanded Len Hersey, who was listening in and who now bent
over the rude map curiously. “I kep’ a clost look all the time we’ve
been on the trail, an’ so fur from seein’ any thirty-six lines atween
here and where we all started, I ain’t seen nary line a-tall.”
“They ain’t marked on the ground, man,” replied his leader gently; “it’s
only on the paper. But what can I expect of a boy raised on squirrel and
corn pone, like you was? Yes, sir; thirty-six is just in and around
right here.”
He made on this soiled paper a little cross, using a gnawed stub of a
pencil which in its time had tallied perhaps a hundred thousand cows.
“There ain’t no moss on the trees no more,” mused Len. “The grass ain’t
the same here. My law! did you ever see so many greenhead flies in your
borned days as we’ve had all the way from the Red River north? And as
for mosquitoes, Miss Lockhart,” he added, “a feller don’t darst get his
arms out of his blankets at night.”
He looked ruefully at his elbows, entirely visible through the sleeves
of his only shirt.
“Like enough a man could make some corn up here,” mused Jim Nabours,
sagely, looking around him over the rolling prairie. “He couldn’t raise
no cows; it’d be too cold. No, nor of course he couldn’t raise no
cotton. Well it’s a right purty country; but can’t never be settled,
even if the Osages was gone.”
“I wonder how big a place is Aberlene, anyhow,” queried the ragged
cowhand. “Me, I never seen a railroad. Down at Fort Worth several men
been saying there’d be a railroad there some time. That’s all
foolishness.”
“Shore it is,” said Nabours. “Well, we got no railroad here neither.
Let’s move along.”
They were now, although they were not aware of it, to pass up the course
of Turkey Creek towards the Salt Fork for two days’ march above the
Cimarron. When they came to the heads of that stream and of Mulberry
Creek, which ran thence southeast—also a stream unknown to any map at
that time—they reached a pleasant rolling plain where it seemed as
though the entire country was alive with moving game. It was a spectacle
which awakened even their blasé souls, used to wild game all their
lives.
Northward appeared a vast herd of buffalo, usually a most welcome sight
to the plains traveler, but one always dreaded by the drover, who
sometimes had to start a road through them at cost of much ammunition.
Antelope, wild horses, all the great game of the unfrequented plains
were visible also. But all this game was on the move and not feeding
peacefully, as naturally it should be. Why was this?
Nabours came back as soon as he sensed the nature of what lay ahead.
“Throw ’em off, boys!” he called hurriedly. “Hold ’em in here and don’t
go a foot further, or we’ll lose every hoof we’ve got. That country’s
full of buffalo and everything else, and something has set them going.”
Leaving his best men to keep the cattle under control, he took with him
two or three men and rode rapidly on ahead. They pulled up at a little
eminence.
“Great Snakes!” said one of the men. “Just look there!”
The entire country was dotted with scattered black masses of moving
buffalo. The numbers seemed endless, uncountable. Something had pushed
them east of the more abundant short-grass range far to the westward.
“We’ll have to break that up or we’ll never get through,” said Nabours.
“Yet I was thinking this country up here wouldn’t feed cows! Just look
at the game!”
They could see also band after band of wild horses, magnificent animals
with high heads and heavy manes and tails; creatures that never failed
to awaken keen enthusiasm among even the most experienced plainsman.
Now, also, they were in an elk country, and herds of these creatures
trotted off, following the same general drift to the east and south.
There was such an immeasurably vast blending of wild life as not any one
of these men ever expected to see again.
“Look! Look, men!” called Nabours, who was studying the sight eagerly.
“If that ain’t cows I’m a liar!”
He was entirely right. Caught in the general drift, there were two or
three score of domestic cattle, of no man might tell what origin; no
doubt outcasts or strays of some Osage Indian settlement to the east.
The sight of these especially caused the blood of the range men to leap.
“Don’t tell me this ain’t a good country!” exclaimed Nabours. “Them’s
cows!”
“They’ve got right funny horns,” said Lem Hersey critically; and
forsooth these cattle, descendants of some Eastern stock, even then
lacked the wide horns of the old Texan breed.
“I ain’t particular about their horns,” remarked Nabours. “They got hide
enough to hold the Fishhook brand, and they look like strays to me. Any
of ’em comes around here too clost I ain’t going to let his horns stand
in the way. We need some more strays.
“But ef once our herd gets in there they’ll be strays too. We’ve got to
hold ’em back, boys, and wait till this thing gets by. This is a general
movement of the range stuff, plumb out of the country, and if our cows
begin to drift with this it’ll be worse than anything we’ve run into
yet.”
“Hark!” A man threw up his hand. “What’s that? Shooting on ahead?”
They sat their horses, uncertain. The sound of rifle fire in their
experience was usually a signal of danger.
“Wait! Wait, men!” Nabours in turn raised a hand.
The sound of rifle fire was unmistakable. The heavy reports were borne
by the prairie winds across what might be a mile of open space. The
detonations were spaced almost mathematically alike.
“That’s not Injuns!” exclaimed Jim Nabours. “That’s a white man! He’s
got a stand on a bunch of buffalo: I’ll bet a horse that’s what it is.”