For both, this was the West, the free, unbounded, illimitable, exhaustless West--Homeric, Titanic, scornful to metes and bounds, having no scale of little things.
Here and there small, low houses, built of the soil and clinging grimly to the soil, made indistinct dots upon the wide gray plains.

Small corrals raised their ragged arms.

Each man claimed his herd of kine.
Slowly, swinging up from the far Southwest, whose settlement, slower and still more crude, had gone on scores of years ago when the Spaniards and the horse Indians of the lower plains were finally beaten back from the _rancherias_, there came on the great herds of the gaunt, broad-horned cattle, footsore and slow and weary with their march of more than a thousand miles.

These vast herds deployed in turn about the town of Ellisville, the Mecca for which they had made this unprecedented pilgrimage.

They trampled down every incipient field, and spread abroad over all the grazing lands, until every township held its thousands, crowded by the new thousands continually coming on.
Long train loads of these cattle, wild and fierce, fresh from the chutes into which they were driven after their march across the untracked empire of the range, rolled eastward day after day.