CHAPTER VII.
ON MY OWN RANCH Locating--Plans--Prairie Fires and Guards--Bulls--Trading--Successful Methods--Loco-weed--Sale of Ranch.
A year before selling out the Company's cattle I had started a small ranch for myself.

Seeing that it was quite hopeless to run cattle profitably on the open-range system, and having longing eyes on a certain part of the plains which was covered with very fine grass and already fenced on one side by the Texas line--knowing also quite well that fencing of public land in New Mexico was strictly against the law (land in the territories is the property of the Federal Government, which will neither lease it nor sell it, but holds it for home-steading)--I yet went to work, bought a lot of wire and posts, gave a contract to a fence-builder and boldly ran a line over thirty miles long enclosing something like 100,000 acres.

The location was part of the country where our stock horses used to run with the mustangs, and so I knew every foot of it pretty well.

There was practically no limit to the acreage I might have enclosed; and I had then the choice of all sorts of country--country with lots of natural shelter for cattle, and even country where water in abundance could be got close to the surface.
In my selected territory I knew quite well that it was very deep to water and that it would cost a lot of money in the shape of deep wells and powerful windmills to get it out; yet it was for this very reason that I so selected it.

Would not the country in a few years swarm with settlers ("nesters" as we called small farmers), and would they not of course first select the land where water was shallow?
They could not afford to put in expensive wells and windmills.