cattle business as the barb-wire fence did not exist.  The work of cattle herding and feeding to-day certainly differs in a most remarkable manner from that of thirty and even twenty years ago, and the man has naturally changed with his work.  Now, the cowboy is, to all intents and purposes, a farm hand.  He feeds the stock, drives it to water when necessary, and goes to the nearest market town to dispose of surplus products, with all the system and method of a thoroughly domesticated man.  Formerly he had charge of hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of branded cattle, which ranged at will over boundless prairies, and the day’s work was frequently varied by a set-to with some unfriendly Indians or some exceptionally daring cattle thieves.

The very nature of his work used to make the cowboy somewhat desperate in his habits, and apt to be suspicious of newcomers.  He was never such a terrible individual as has been frequently stated in print.  His work confined him to a few frontier States and Territories, and hence he was a very convenient person to ridicule and decry.  The man who met the average cowboy face to face, generally learned to respect him, and speedily appreciated the fact that it paid to be at least civil.  Writers who never went within 500 miles of the nearest cattle ranch or cowboy’s home, treated him with less courtesy and described him in all sorts of terms.

Dime literature, with its yellow covers and sensational pictures of stage robberies and the like, has always libeled the American cowboy to a most outrageous extent.  As a result of the misapprehensions thus created, what is known as cowboy or prairie fever is quite a common disease among youths who are trying to raise a mustache for a first time.  The feats of recklessness, the absolute disregard of conventionality and the general defiance attributed to the man who herds cattle on the prairie, seem to create a longing on the part of sensationally inclined youths, and many of these have cut their teeth and learned their lesson in a very different manner from what was expected.

Let us imagine for a moment the experiences of the young man from the East, who has convinced himself, by careful reasoning and reading, that nature intended him to shine in the West.  It is probable that he came to this most important conclusion many years before, and it is not unlikely that his first cowboy enthusiasm was fed by attacks upon the cat, with the nearest approach he could obtain to a rawhide whip.  From this primitive experience, sensational literature, and five and ten-cent illustrated descriptions of the adventures of “Bill, the Plunger,” and “Jack, the Indian Slayer,” completed the education, until the boy, or young man, as the case may be, determines that the hour has arrived for him to cast away childish things and become a genuine bad man of the West.