In time the lights of the dance-halls and the saloons and the gambling parlors went out one by one all along the frontier.

By 1885 Dodge City, a famed capital of the cow trade, which will live as long as the history of that industry is known, resigned its eminence and declared that from where the sun then stood it would be a cow camp no more! The men of Dodge knew that another day had dawned.

But this was after the homesteaders had arrived and put up their wire fences, cutting off from the town the holding grounds of the northbound herds.
This innovation of barb-wire fences in the seventies had caused a tremendous alteration of conditions over all the country.

It had enabled men to fence in their own water-fronts, their own homesteads.

Casually, and at first without any objection filed by any one, they had included in their fences many hundreds of thousands of acres of range land to which they had no title whatever.