The place of the tents was taken by vast white-topped wagons, the creaking cook carts of the cattle trail, and the van of the less nomadic man.

It was the beginning of the great cattle drive from the Southern to the Northern ranges, a strange, wild movement in American life which carried in its train a set of conditions as vivid and peculiar as they were transient.

At Ellisville there was no ordered way of living.

The frontier was yet but one vast camp.

It was, as Battersleigh had said, the beginning of things.
Many of the white-topped wagons began to come from the East, not following the railroad, but travelling the trail of the older adventurers who had for a generation gone this way, and whose pathway the railroad took for its own.