In my
own previous locations, the water-front and valley lands were all that
I had coveted, the tracts not even adjoining, the one on the Salt Fork
lying like a boot, while the lower one zigzagged like a stairway in
following the watercourse. The prices agreed on were twenty cents an
acre for arid land, forty for medium, and sixty for choice tracts,
every other section to be set aside for school purposes in compliance
with the law. My foreman would designate the land wanted, and the firm
agreed to put an outfit of surveyors into the field at once.
My two ranches were proving a valuable source of profit. After
starting five herds of seventeen thousand cattle on the trail
that spring, and shipping on consignment fifteen hundred bulls to
distilleries that fall, we branded nineteen thousand five hundred
calves on the two ranges. In spite of the heavy drain, the brand
was actually growing in numbers, and as long as it remained an open
country I had ample room for my cattle even on the Clear Fork. Each
stock was in splendid shape, as the culling of the aging and barren of
both sexes to Indian agencies and distilleries had preserved the brand
vigorous and productive. The first few years of its establishment I
am satisfied that the Double Mountain ranch increased at the rate of
ninety calves to the hundred cows, and once the Clear Fork range was
rid of its drones, a similar ratio was easily maintained on that
range.
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