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 n and around the ring, were merely forerunners of the vast changes that were to take place in our cattle production. These

shows, held under the management of the Illinois State Board of Agriculture, were in a way crude and unsatisfactory. The Board was a moribund sort of institution, perpetuating itself, semi-political, weak in its management, but prolific in results. The building was badly constructed, outwardly and inwardly unseemly, but around the judging arena met many great men, men who have made history in more lines than one. There you met James J. Hill, empire builder in the Northwest; John J. Gillett, the greatest commercial cattleman of his time; Aleck Swan, then at the height of his paper prosperity; James W. Judy of auction ring fame, a fine specimen of a southern gentleman; T. W. Harvey, a progressive Chicago lumberman; the elder Sanders, then editing the Live Stock Journal and founder of our greatest live stock paper, the Breeder's Gazette; T. L. Miller, keen, crafty and fearless; John Hope, champion of the Shorthorn, a show yard manipulator without an equal; John B. Sherman, the founder of our modern system of stockyards, and a great congregation of breeders and feeders from all over the country. Canada also contributed many able men. In these struggles the Shorthorn had all the best of it, but around the ring the rangeman was doing a lot of missionary work. He told the story of how the Hereford, after a hard winter on the plains, came up in the spring thin but still virile, and by the middle of May or first of June he was following up his harem with his usual energy. The Shorthorn inbred, with a constitution often depleted by tuberculosis, was either not there or took a long time to recover his normal condition. The white-faced calves were thick on the range. The work of Bates had been dwarfed by the votaries of pedigree. It was not the blame of the breed; it was the methods in which it was handled—a long period of incest, with no fresh blood, had weakened and deteriorated the descendants of Belvidere. In early days Goodnight, Cresswell and others had used the Shorthorn on the Texas cow. Cresswell often told me he would do it over again, even if the Hereford had been at hand, but those men all seized onto the whiteface when they saw his

adaptability to range conditions. The crossing of the Hereford on the Texas Shorthorn was a wonderful success. You saw its marvelous work in the JA's and the F's. Today you see it in the Matadors and many other beautiful herds of smaller size. So far as the Shorthorn was concerned the worship of pedigree blew up. It was a good thing for the breed. Away up in Aberdeenshire, the modern Shorthorn was being developed on beef-producing lines. The milk was secondary. Early maturity, with strong constitutions, were the ends aimed at, and so today what we might call the modern Shorthorn, the product of Cruickshanks and Duthie, is infinitely stronger in the central states, the pasture and the feed lot than he ever was, but he makes slow progress in the West. The old prejudice hangs over him. And yet if you wish to see what he can do, take the instance of Mr. Al Neale at Montrose, Colo., and try to produce anything better than what he can show you either at home or in the show arena.

For thirty-five years the Hereford has had a walkover on the range, in Texas pastures, in countless valleys and windswept plains of the West. And this in the face of some very ragged work in developing his supremacy. A vast number of inferior bulls found their way West. Light boned, badly shaped, they should have been made into steers, but the demand was urgent and many a herd felt the impress of this misfortune. It was a tender subject to talk about, more especially among some of our Texas friends. It was almost as bad as talking gold in Denver in 1896. You stood the chance of being punched or thrown out of a club, as nearly befell the writer. Men like Mortimer on the breeders' and Mackenzie on the rangemen's side sized up the situation and met the issue, but even at this late day, more especially in the Panhandle of Texas, there is a want of bone and scale in many of our herds. It is always hard to obliterate the mistakes of the past. A great effort is being made in these days of high prices to add weight and yet not sacrifice quality to our western cattle. Today the dressed beef buyer must have quality. In this age of baby beef it is absolutely necessary

to have a strong bone and a good frame to carry forward a calf from its infancy to the twenty month period, when by all the arts of scientific feeding you present your cattle for sale. The pressure of the present age calls for changes, and instinctively we have to meet them. The open range will soon be a thing of the past. We will have pasture herds, large ones in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California, but in other states they will be small, only a few herds of over 1,000 head. The call will be insistent for good blood; color will make little difference. Shorthorn, Hereford and Aberdeen Angus will be on a par. All of these breeds from a beef-making point of view are at their greatest capacity. In the pasture they are probably equally prolific; possibly the Hereford has the advantage. It comes, therefore, to a contest and a friendly one as to which will prevail. Our central states must look to the West for breeding cattle. It is the source of their supply. The days of cheap cattle being past, the raiser must be careful to get the most out of his work, and with the bull the half of the herd he must be careful in his choice. My judgment is that the Shorthorn has an even chance under these new conditions. They have size, stamina, and, if the herds are kept clear of tuberculosis, are honestly handled in this respect, they may win back in the West the position they once held in old days.

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CHAPTER XXXVIII

HE question of our public lands is one intimately connected with the range. The policy of the Federal Government has been from time immemorial to settle up the country. They were reckless in this matter. To this day, however, our political guides have not discovered that a law which applies to the rich lands of such states as Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas and other similarly situated territories is not adaptable to our semi-arid regions and mountain districts. They are not similar cases at all, but you could not drive this fact into the heads of our Washington sages if you used a steam hammer and then added some force. The reason is found in the fact that the granger, so far as votes is concerned, is in the saddle. Politically we may have used our vast extent of grazing lands to advantage, but economically we have made an awful mess of them. The average citizen, native born or alien, thinks he has an inherent right to a bit of Uncle Sam's domain. He got originally 160, then 320 and now 640 acres either for a small payment or a promise to spend so much money on his holding. The object was to settle up the country, build up a great reserve of healthy, vigorous people who are drafting themselves to the cities, to the world of motion pictures, to the glare of countless saloons, where only the few make good and the others toil along in semi-poverty, whereas in the land they left they would have had at least food in plenty if they had less amusement. There is no objection to people hungry for land pushing out to the frontier. It is the methods which are at fault. The homeseeker has the whole West-mountain, valley, divide-to choose from. What we should have had is a steady, forward march, and to have done this our arid or semi-arid lands should have been classified and opened up for settlement as required, just as they have done in Australia and New Zealand. The rangeman should have been able to lease