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The Range.
When, in 1803, those two immortal youths, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, were about to go forth on their great journey across the continent, they were admonished by Thomas Jefferson that they would in all likelihood encounter in their travels, living and stalking about, the mammoth or the mastodon, whose bones had been found in the great salt-licks of Kentucky.

We smile now at such a supposition; yet it was not unreasonable then.

No man knew that tremendous country that lay beyond the mouth of the Missouri.
The explorers crossed one portion of a vast land which was like to nothing they had ever seen--the region later to become the great cattle-range of America.

It reached, although they could know nothing of that, from the Spanish possessions on the south across a thousand miles of short grass lands to the present Canadian boundary line which certain obdurate American souls still say ought to have been at 54 degrees 40 minutes, and not where it is! From the Rio Grande to "Fifty-four forty," indeed, would have made nice measurements for the Saxon cattle-range.
Little, however, was the value of this land understood by the explorers; and, for more than half a century afterwards, it commonly was supposed to be useless for the occupation of white men and suitable only as a hunting-ground for savage tribes.