Others were Antelopeville, Cheyenne, Ogallala, Sidney, and Camp Clarke. Alliance, the present headquarters of the Stockmen's association, was not then on the map. The Box Butte table lay in all its virgin glory under the western sun.

The Texas trail was three hundred miles wide, if you take in all its deflections and ramifications. From east of Ogallala to the Laramie plains ran the parallel lines of trvael, sometimes crossing one another, according to the

idea of the men having a herd in charge, as to pasturage and water.

Occasionally somewhere between the starting point and the destination, a large herd would entirely disappear, and with it the men in charge. The general belief was that these were gigantic thefts, but there came a story filtering into the south country, of a mysterious arroyo or canyon, somewhere about the vicinity of the southeast corner of Colorado, where these herds of cattle were stampeded by a phatom steer, run over a bluff, and all killed. I think I shall tell this story as it came to me more than a score of years ago.

The route of the original Texas Trail was not direct, it swung eastward across Oklahoma, or Indian Territory, to Coffeyville ; then swung westward up the Arkansas river valley a hundred or more miles, and while such a route had water advantages over a route more direct, I had often wondered if that was the reason for its being in such an indirect way.

The story came to me in the later eighties, that in about 1860, a herd had been sent north by the direct route, but that it never reached the Arkansas river. Searching parties failed to disclose what became of them although they found evidences of a stampede near the southwest corner of Kansas.