The one-crop country is never one of sound investing values; and a land boom is something of which to beware--always and always to beware.
The prairie had passed; the range had passed; the illegal fences had passed; and presently the cattle themselves were to pass--that is to say, the great herds.

As recently as five years ago (1912) it was my fortune to be in the town of Belle Fourche, near the Black Hills--a region long accustomed to vivid history, whether of Indians, mines, or cows--at the time when the last of the great herds of the old industry thereabouts were breaking up; and to see, coming down to the cattle chutes to be shipped to the Eastern stockyards, the last hundreds of the last great Belle Fourche herd, which was once numbered in thousands.
They came down out of the blue-edged horizon, threading their way from upper benches down across the dusty valley.

The dust of their travel rose as it had twenty years earlier on the same old trail.

But these were not the same cattle.

There was not a longhorn among them; there has not been a longhorn on the range for many years.