In the days of open range, everybody had great freedom. A cowboy could change countries every spring if he wanted to and they were always drifting from one range to another—not only to different ranges but to different states. For instance, maybe he would be in New Mexico one year and on the Canadian border the next.

Every cowboy had a private horse of his own, pack horse and his own bed, which consisted of a tarpaulin and some blankets. And according to the custom of them days he could stop at any cow camp or ranch and was not under obligations to anyone, and if he wanted to stay a week and rest his horses that was O.K. too. If there was no one home, he always found grub and helped himself, so he was quite independent—and it did not take much money to travel. Nature provided him with new scenery every day, such as unclaimed land, rivers and creeks, and in my day plenty of wild game of all kinds. I don’t believe the tourist of today with his automobile has anything compared to what we had.

I am going to make a statement here that almost sounds fishy, but I can prove it. I worked for a cow outfit that run twenty-five thousand cattle and three or four hundred saddle horses to handle the cattle with, and they didn’t own one foot of deeded land. The land was unsurveyed and belonged to the government. They usually built a big log house, some corrals and a kind of stable, and called it their ranch, and no one disputed their title—even a sheepman must not get too close with his woolies. They paid no taxes on this land and as it would be impossible for the assessor to count the cattle in an area of two or three hundred miles, I would say a good honest cattle man might give in one-third of his number. An outfit the size I speak of, would hire about twenty-five cowboys during the summer months and keep four or five during the winter. That was the only expense they had, outside of buying saddle horses to mount their cowboys—which was ten or twelve to the man.

I have been asked quite often what a “Rep” was by people that was hatched at a later day. Well, for illustration, Tom Jones has a ranch at San Francisco—Bill Smith has a ranch at Los Angeles. Both run several thousand cattle. There are no fences between those two places, so, naturally, in the course of a year quite a number of both men’s cattle would drift out of their range where they worked their main range and it wouldn’t pay to send a whole outfit so far for what cattle had drifted—so they picked out a very reliable cowboy that knew their brands. He cut out his string of horses, packed his bed and started for one of those ranges to represent the outfit he was working for. There might be six or seven reps with each different outfit.

Now, when one of those outfits started to work their range, they started what they called a “Day Herd”—that was for the purpose............