On All Sides Mountains Rise To An Altitude Of
From 11,000 To 15,000 Feet, Their Skirts Shaggy With Pitch-Pine
Forests, And Scarred By Deep Canyons, Wooded And Boulder Strewn,
Opening Upon The Mountain Pasture Previously Mentioned.
Two
thousand head of half-wild Texan cattle are scattered in herds
throughout the canyons, living on more or
Less suspicious terms
with grizzly and brown bears, mountain lions, elk, mountain
sheep, spotted deer, wolves, lynxes, wild cats, beavers, minks,
skunks, chipmunks, eagles, rattlesnakes, and all the other
two-legged, four-legged, vertebrate, and invertebrate inhabitants
of this lonely and romantic region. On the whole, they show a
tendency rather to the habits of wild than of domestic cattle.
They march to water in Indian file, with the bulls leading, and
when threatened, take strategic advantage of ridgy ground,
slinking warily along in the hollows, the bulls acting as
sentinels, and bringing up the rear in case of an attack from
dogs. Cows have to be regularly broken in for milking, being as
wild as buffaloes in their unbroken state; but, owing to the
comparative dryness of the grasses, and the system of allowing
the calf to have the milk during the daytime, a dairy of 200 cows
does not produce as much butter as a Devonshire dairy of fifty.
Some "necessary" cruelty is involved in the stockman's business,
however humane he may be. The system is one of terrorism, and
from the time that the calf is bullied into the branding pen, and
the hot iron burns into his shrinking flesh, to the day when the
fatted ox is driven down from his boundless pastures to be
slaughtered in Chicago, "the fear and dread of man" are upon him.
The herds are apt to penetrate the savage canyons which come down
from the Snowy Range, when they incur a risk of being snowed up
and starved, and it is necessary now and then to hunt them out
and drive them down to the "park." On this occasion, the whole
were driven down for a muster, and for the purpose of branding
the calves.
After a 6:30 breakfast this morning, we started, the party being
composed of my host, a hunter from the Snowy Range, two stockmen
from the Plains, one of whom rode a violent buck-jumper, and was
said by his comrade to be the "best rider in North Americay,"
and myself.
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