Democratic Sentinel, Volume 10, Number 11, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 16 April 1886 — A National Cattle Trail. [ARTICLE]

A National Cattle Trail.

I have said that the annual drive from Texas will probably be from 750.000 to 1,000,000 cattle. A large proportion of these will be stock cattie—cows, heifers, and young steers. Where are these cattle to be held until fit for market? At the Cattle Growers’ Convention, held in St. Louis, November, 1884, the Texas cattle-growers were unanimous in advocating the creation of a national cattle trail, si?t miles wide, and extending from Texas to our northern boundary. The Northern graziers opposed the proposed trail on the ground that the Texas cattle were infected with a disease known in the business as the Spanish fever. They asserted—and truthfully, —that the driving of through Texan cattle along the trail would infect their herds. The Spanish fever does not injure Texas cattle; but all native cattle —that is, all Northern stock, no matter what their blood—catch the disease by grazing on the ground over which through Texas cattle have passed, and they generally die. Here were two parties disputing about a fact that both knew to be a fact, both cunningly endeavoring to conceal their real hopes and fears. There are Territorial and State laws in force in the West that forbid the driving of through Texas cattle on to tnany ranges. A national law enacted for the purpose of providing a cattle trail would override these local laws, which many lawyers pronounce unconstitutional, and open the Northern grazing ground to the Texas cattle. The Southern stock-growers want the trail created so that they can drive young steers that are strong enough to endure the severe winters of the Northwest through to the bunch and buffalo pastures of Wyoming and Montana in one season, and so avert overstocking their home range, which is secure from invasion of Northern herds, as no naThey desire to secure absolute possession of the range; and if they succeed, they will as surely stop agricultural settlers from entering the arid belt to acquire low-lying farms along the streams as if they owned the land in fee-simple. —Frank Wilkeson, in Harper's Magazine for April. It is claimed that E. W. Dexter, of the town of Liberty, near New London, is the soldier mentioned in Grant’s memoirs who surrounded and captured a half-dozen Mexicans on a roof at Chapultepec, at the storming and capture of that place during the Mexican war. Grant did not know the name of the soldier, but Mr. Dexter, while applying for a pension in 1880, told Mr. Patchen the incident. The wound on which he based his application was received on the roof, after the capture, while waving the flag he had taken.