A Three-Foot Stool

This volume was published in 1909 and is about ranch life in Texas.

Excerpts from the book:

Cattle-ranching is not an invention of the
white man. It is in its origin Mexican, and is an
ingenious solution of a very difficult problem
profitable cattle-farming. Or it is perhaps giving
too much credit to an incapable race to call it
a solution, which implies the deliberate application
of a thinking mind. It is the result of a few simple
conditions, a continent of waving grassy plains,
a race with a strong aversion to anything as
arduous as agriculture, and absence of capital.
To turn cattle loose to breed in this unenclosed
country, and to handle the animals, that had
almost relapsed into their original wildness, on
horseback, was a simple proceeding. A business
that was partly farming and partly hunting was
suited to the genius of the Mexican, partly white
and partly Indian.
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The horse Indians of the plains, and the still more
cruel and savage Indians of the Rockies, did not
surrender their hunting-grounds without a struggle;
and in that long guerilla, the whites, always more
determined and intrepid than their opponents, grew
as wary and as cunning, and as ruthless. Till the
end of the '8o's the range was always worked
under the imminent danger of an Apache raid,
sudden, swift, and cruel. Few parts of the Rockies
have not turf graves and burnt huts and ravaged
homesteads, and tales of fiendish torture ; while the
complete disappearance of the Red Indian from a
country which within this generation was his un-
disputed territory proves the thoroughness of the
revenge. Even more deadly were the fights with
cattle-thieves.