And it stands practically at that amount today. At the end of the year the property statement is as follows:

57,850 Cattle at.... 2,000 Bulls at....

600 Horses at..

Land 450,876 at.

$16.80 per head

35.00 per head 20.00 per head

1.25 per acre

Mr.

The above and other small items make up a total of $1,600,000.00, of which $1,000,000.00 was in shares and the balance borrowed on Debenture or otherwise. You generally found the Home Board of this company on the safe side. It was their policy never to count their chickens before they were hatched. The meeting in Dundee, when the accounts of 1898 were placed before the shareholders, of whom only twenty-eight attended, was a sort of a love feast. Yearlings sold in Denver had netted $20.00. I remember the sale as if it was yesterday. Mr. Mackenzie was there in person. Dewey, from Manhattan, Kansas, was the purchaser. We had a rather amusing time making the deal, as the two principals were hard-headed, rather obstinate customers. A lot of the poorest cows, either with calves or in calf, were sent to pastures in Kansas, meeting in the fall a ready market and incidentally getting quit of poor breeding stuff. The northern cattle netted $43.21 per head. Bulls were purchased and some young bulls of their own breeding sold. The credit of the company was so good that Debentures were placed at 31⁄2 per cent. More lands were purchased, some sold and the ranch was consolidated. In 1902 the Alamositas ranch was purchased-213,961 acres at $2.00 per acre. Pastures were taken and the northern business expanded. As the open range in the Dakotas and Montana became circumscribed by settlers, pastures were rented in an Indian reservation and a lease was made in Canada, all of those transactions as a whole having been successful. It would be mere repetition to follow up in further detail the history of this company. The statements following tell the story:

On the 1st of January, 1912, after twenty-one years' service as manager of the company, Mr. Mackenzie resigned to take another position mentioned above. He left it in the full tide of prosperity. It had over 70,000 cattle on four ranches-Matador and Alamositas in Texas, South Dakota and Canadian pastures in the north—and the sales the previous year had been 10,367 head at an average of $50.72 per head. Its cattle had reached the highest honors in the show ring. Today it has the same number of cattle, carried at $14.87 per head, and it has 879,000 acres of land standing at a cost of $2.05 per acre. What a heritage for the Scotch owners when they come to realize upon their property! Those results have come a great deal in the financial way from the rise in the values of live stock and land, but otherwise it was team work. The Board, the Secretary, the Manager pulling together, welding, not overlapping, and behind all this was a fine organization. Henry H. Johnstone, best of accountants and afterward manager of the Espeula Land & Cattle Co., now living in Edinburgh, Scotland, in dignified ease; Arthur Legertwood, range manager, and a host of superintendents who added lustre to the business. Last, not least, either physically or mentally, John McBain, who succeeded to the management a strong, virile Scotchman who is making his mark in western circles. The mantle of Mackenzie fell on his shoulders.

Note: The above article was written in 1917. Since then McBain has crossed the Great Divide and Mackenzie having returned from his Brazilian job is once more at the head of the Matador. Under present conditions he is having a hard job but these details are left for another day when I may add on to the above and other stories of the Range.-J. C.

CHAPTER XXXVII

ORE or less has been said about breeding cattle on the range in former chapters. It will be interest

MR

ing to take up this phase of the business and amplify it. Except to the Redman, the trapper and the adventurer, the plains of the west and the valleys of the Rockies were unknown to the average man till the California gold excitement of 1849. Again in 1859 there was a further trek westward which halted near Pike's Peak. Then came the Civil War, which flattened out many an industry. Down in Texas the old Spanish Longhorn prevailed. Westward, more especially in Washington and Oregon Territories, the foundation of their herds of cattle had come from the East, nearly all Shorthorns crosses-big, bony, rough stock, maturing slowly and not at all attractive to buyers. The great strides in the line of improvement began in the seventies. Any number of ranchmen contributed to this end, but the leading lights were Mr. Charles Goodnight in the Panhandle of Texas, Mr. A. H. Swan in Wyoming, and Mr. Conrad Kohrs in Montana. Goodnight and Kohrs were natural born cattlemen. Swan was merely a speculator, knowing very little about the business, but he forecasted what was coming with prophetic insight. In those early days you had to draw on the Shorthorn, as the Hereford and Aberdeen Angus had made no impression on the minds of our western cattlemen. Kentucky was the great source of supply. It was and still is an ideal country to raise cattle in. The beautiful blue grass pastures, resting on a limestone foundation, the glorious shade of its trees, the mildness of its climate, all lent themselves to this enticing pursuit. The Kentucky breeder was not progressive. Herds of cattle, bred on better lines, were founded in other states, and now there is not a corner on the continent where you can't find a purebred herd of some breed of cattle. The Shorthorn did admirable work in

the early stages of this forward movement. This is to his credit. But in the West, on its arid plains, in valleys where the rainfall is scant, you need a vigorous, healthy animal to stand the hardships incident to a frontier country. When I look back and think of the class of bulls-paper skinned, delicate looking, long pedigreed aristocrats on paper-it seems as if we had abnormal courage to purchase them. It was our only source of large supply, and if only a small percentage of the bulls bought survived for a year or two, we were so far ahead on the path of improvement. Brought up close to the walls of Ladykirk, near to the land of Bates and Booth, and latterly in charge of Bow Park, where we had 250 Shorthorns, a big herd in those days, my early sympathies were with this breed of cattle. Today they are outstanding as a general purpose animal. The best proof of this is their popularity and the prices they are making in the sale ring. Forty years ago the leaders responsible for this breed of cattle did not meet the requirements of the western breeder. We had the pure Bates and no surrender period, the color craze; worse, we had a lot of unhealthy stock impregnated with tuberculosis. All those fads and weaknesses might pass on the farm where an animal got proper care and attention, but out on the range, on the banks of the Rio Grande, by the shores of the North Platte or the swiftrunning Yellowstone, something stronger, more virile was needed. Out in California, on the plains of the San Joaquin, Henry Miller was testing and using freely the Devon. They mated well with his big Oregon cows. But a second cross did not succeed so well. In the East the Hereford was making some inroads, and the Aberdeen Angus were also in evidence. In November, 1880, at the old Exposition building on the lake front at Chicago, the Hereford breeders made an awful shout. Nothing in my experience of show rings ever touched the scenes enacted in that old building, or the jockeying at night in the Grand Pacific Hotel to get an advantage in the selection of judges. The Hereford men had as a leader T. L. Miller of Beecher, Ill. He was a fighter with a great

fountain of pent-up energy, unscrupulous and in the end unsuccessful, but for the time being he gave the Hereford cattle a great push forward. The Herefords, as I recollect them in my younger days at Smithfield, were a rough lot of cattle, angular with coarse bones, tough hides, great horns and a want of mellowness about them, but they were born grazers with grand constitutions and full of vitality. From a butcher's point of view their ends were bad but their middles good. The Hereford of today is not the Hereford of 1870. The American importers took care to buy an improved animal. They left "the work ox" of this breed behind. They fined down his horns, they took the roughness away from his shoulders, and they formed his hindquarters in the mold of McCombie. In fact, they changed the breed as to formation. They retained his activity and restless ambition in the herd, his capacity of improving on short feed and his ability to travel long distances to water. At the outset of their career in this country they lost in bone and gained in tallow, which was not well distributed. The criticism of the dressed beef buyer today is that he is patchy and lays on fat unequally. Then the Aberdeen Angus made a bid. Nothing touches the black on the block, but on the range he was slow, indolent and unable to hold his own. In pasture he does well, but when you come to cross him on other breeds he somehow or other has not the impressive power of the Shorthorn or Hereford. But it was the question of his activity that settled the question so far as the range was concerned. Many attempts were made to develop his latent powers, but they were failures. As a patriotic Scotchman and in search for light in the ways of cattle improvement, I tried several lots of the above on the range and the results were absolutely nil. And yet on the rich pastures of our central states he is peerless there and in the feed lot.

The contests in the old Exposition building among the beef breeds, with all the rough-and-tumble work in and around the ring, were merely forerunners of the vast changes that were to take place in our cattle production. These