It was a Latin enterprise, flourishing in Mexico long before the first of these miners and adventurers came on the range.
Something was known of the Spanish lands to the south through the explorations of Pike, but more through the commerce of the prairies--the old wagon trade from the Missouri River to the Spanish cities of Sante Fe and Chihuahua.

Now the cow business, south of the Rio Grande, was already well differentiated and developed at the time the first adventurers from the United States went into Texas and began to crowd their Latin neighbors for more room.

There it was that our Saxon frontiersmen first discovered the cattle industry.

But these southern and northern riflemen--ruthless and savage, yet strangely statesmanlike--though they might betimes drive away the owners of the herds, troubled little about the herds themselves.

There was a certain fascination to these rude strangers in the slow and easeful civilization of Old Spain which they encountered in the land below them.