One of the most fascinating subjects in all American history is the story of the great cow country. Its heyday was the twenty-year period from 1868 to 1888. It extended from below the Rio Grande on the south to well up in Saskatchewan in western Canada on the north. East and west it reached from the Rocky Mountains to about the Missouri- Arkansas border. It occupied a region nearly 2,000 miles long and from 200 to 700 miles wide--almost a million square miles in one vast open range. For countless years this region had been the home of millions of wild buffaloes, but in a very short time after 1868 it was transformed into a gigantic cattle kingdom. After two decades of spectacular existence, it just as suddenly passed away, and the cattle industry entered a new and in many ways an entirely different era. Texas cattle and Texas cattlemen played leading roles in this great drama of the West. The warm southern plains of Texas were the breeding place-the "incubator"-f or thousands of longhorn cattle, the broad prairies to the north were their feeding grounds, and the newly established railroad towns in Kansas and other states were the shipping points.