Democratic Sentinel, Volume 16, Number 35, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 16 September 1892 — On a Cattle Ranch. [ARTICLE]

On a Cattle Ranch.

The wise man from the East, on first visiting a ranch comprising six or seven hundred thousand acres, cannot understand how the cattle wandering at large over the range are ever collected together. He sees a dozen or more steers here, a bunco of horses there, and a single steer or two a mile off, and even as he looks at them they disappear in the brush, and, as far as his chance of finding them again would be, they might as well stand forty miles away at the other end of the ranch. But this is a very simple problem to the ranchman. The superintendent of the ranch perhaps receives an order calling for one thousand head of cattle. The breed of cattle the firm wants is grazing in a corner of the range fenced in by barbed wire, and marked pale-blue for convenience on a beautiful map blocked out in colors, like a patch-work quilt, which hangs in the superintendent’s office. When the orddr is received he sjnds a Mexican on a pony to veil the men near that particular pale-blue pasture to round up a thousand head of cattle, aud at the same time directs his superintendent to send in a few days as many cowboys to that pasture as are needed to “hold” a thousand head of cattle on the way to the railroad station. The hoys on the pasture, which we will suppose is ten miles square, will take ten of their number and five extra ponies apiece, which one man leads, and from one to another of which they shift their saddles as men do in polo, and go directly to the water tanks in the ten square miles of land. A cow will not often wander more than two and a half miles from water, and so with the water tank or a dammed canyon full of rain water as a rendezvous, the finding of the cattle is comparatively easy, and ten men can round up a thousand head in a day or two. When they have them all together, the cowboys who are to drive them to the station have arrived and taken them off. At the station the agent of the firm and the superintendent of the ranch ride through the herd together, and if they disagree as to the fitness of any one or more of the cattle, an outsider is called in, and his decision is final. The cattle are then driven onto the cars, and the superintendent's responsibility is at an end.