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Updated: June 3, 2025
The advice was not taken and the train set forth in two sections, twenty wagons belonging to the Jayhawkers and their bachelor companions and seven owned by men who traveled with their wives and little ones. The scouts had picked an easy route through rolling hills where bunch-grass stood in thick clusters among the tall gray sage; the oxen cropped the rich feed as they went along.
The surface of the ground was composed of angular volcanic rocks about the size of your two fists, between which the bunch-grass sprouted. An Eastern rider would ride his horse very gingerly and at a walk, and then thank his lucky stars if he escaped stumbles. The cowboys turned their mounts through at a dead run.
They mounted and rode up the hill, looking for breaks in the fences and counting the colts, some of whom, luxuriously lazy in the heat of the sun, stood with lowered heads, drowsing. Others, scattered about the hillsides and in the arroyos, grazed nippingly at the sparse bunch-grass, moving quickly from clump to clump.
They never make haste, however, and seem to have no dread of storms, many of the strongest only going down leisurely to bare, wind-swept ridges, to feed on bushes and dry bunch-grass, and then returning up into the snow. Once I was snow-bound on Mount Shasta for three days, a little below the timber line.
The snows of the mountains furnished the streams with water and the bunch-grass with sufficient dampness to sustain it until July when it became cured and was the food that sustained all animal life on the plains, summer and winter. I have seen herds of buffalo, hundreds of thousands in number, living off bunch-grass that they obtained by pawing through two feet of snow, on the level.
The bunch-grass, grown at such an elevation, possesses extraordinary nutritive properties, even in midwinter. About the middle of January a new growth is developed underneath the snow, forcing off the old dry blade that ripened and shed its seed the previous summer.
"I'm goin' with you and Peter," she finished. Something came to relieve the tenseness of the moment for Jolly Roger. Peter, nosing in a thick patch of bunch-grass, put out a huge snowshoe rabbit, and the two crashed in a startling avalanche through the young jackpines, Peter's still puppyish voice yelling in a high staccato as he pursued.
Under the lash of a rope, the animal had lumbered across the pasture for several hundred yards, where he paused languidly to crunch some bunch-grass. There was an air of lassitude and weakness about the creature which made Buck, as he approached, eye it with anxious intentness. A dozen feet or so away he jerked his horse to a standstill and caught his breath with an odd whistling sound.
Twenty thousand acres under fence, with plenty of water, would take care of eight hundred or a thousand head of cattle. And as a provision against a lean winter, Waring had put a mowing-machine in at the eastern end of the range, where the bunch-grass was heavy enough to cut. It would be necessary to winter-feed. Four hundred white-faced Herefords grazed in the autumn sunshine.
There were comrades battling for life in the Colorado Rockies, and aid could not come too soon. Under the cloudless heavens, under the starlit skies, blessing the grateful dew that cools the upland air and moistens the bunch-grass that has been bleaching all day in the fierce rays of the summer sun, a little column of infantry is swinging steadily southward.
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