History has no other like it.
The Long Trail was surveyed and constructed in a century and a day.
Over the Red River of the South, a stream even today perhaps known but vaguely in the minds of many inhabitants of the country, there appeared, almost without warning, vast processions of strange horned kine--processions of enormous wealth, owned by kings who paid no tribute, and guarded by men who never knew a master.

Whither these were bound, what had conjured them forth, whence they came, were questions in the minds of the majority of the population of the North and East to whom the phenomenon appeared as the product of a day.

The answer to these questions lay deep in the laws of civilization, and extended far back into that civilization's history.

The Long Trail was finished in a day.

It was begun more than a century before that day, and came forward along the very appointed ways of time....