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It is only with the greatest effort that they can keep their places in the summer: there is just a scanty thread of water strung along a great, rambling bed of sand, to restrain Dame Nature from revoking their licenses to run and turning them into cattle-ranches.
This was another potent agency in producing the result we enjoy to-day, in having in so short a time replaced the wild buffaloes by more numerous herds of tame cattle, and by substituting for the useless Indians the intelligent owners of productive farms and cattle-ranches.
They were mostly shade trees, the commonest being the Lombardy poplar, which of all trees is the easiest one to grow in that land. And these trees at the estancias or cattle-ranches were, at the time I am writing about, almost invariably aged and in many instances in an advanced state of decay.
This contained a wooden bedstead and some simple furniture, for luxuries are not popular on cattle-ranches. Surely no bed ever felt more luxurious, however, than the blankets upon which the wearied youths flung themselves, sinking almost immediately into deep, dreamless sleep.
It ran sheep and cattle-ranches as well as stores and manufactories. Most of the newspapers in the State were dominated by it. Of a population of two hundred and fifty thousand, it controlled more than half directly by the simple means of filling dinner-pails.
But let us tear ourselves away from Sydney, and go on to Brisbane, passing on the way through Kurringai Chase, one of the great National Parks of New South Wales; along the fertile Hawkesbury and Hunter valleys, which grow Indian corn and lucerne, and oranges and melons, and men who are mostly over six feet high; up the New England Mountains, through a country which owes its name to the fact that the high elevation gives it a climate somewhat like that of England; then into Queensland along the rich Darling Down studded with wheat-farms, dairy-farms, and cattle-ranches; and finally to Brisbane, a prospering semi-tropical town which is the capital of the Northern State of Queensland.
It was a country that attracted prospectors, cattlemen, lumbermen. The summer season was not long enough to grow grain, and the nights too frosty for corn; otherwise Middle Park would have increased rapidly in population. In the years that succeeded the departure of the Utes Bill Belllounds developed several cattle-ranches and acquired others.
The man born with the gift to draw finds as irresistible a fascination in pencil or brush as the man with the power of narrative discovers in ink and paper. Whether he serves before the mast as an A.B., or cattle-ranches out west, sooner or later he is certain to drift into his proper sphere of activity. It may take long to get there, but eventually he is bound to arrive.
At my winter camp, some thirty-five miles below headquarters, there was a good three-roomed frame house, a corral, etc., and the Little Colorado River flowed past near by. It was to these lower parts of the range that most of our cattle drifted in winter time. Two or three other large cattle-ranches marched with us there. A small Mormon settlement was not far off.
Most of these men were from the prairies and cattle-ranches in the West; some were "cowboys," some were Indians. The others in the regiment were young men from the East business men, college men, sons of rich men; all were brave, hardy fellows, fond of out-door life, fond of excitement, not afraid of work.
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