The last outfit to return from the summer’s drive was detained on the Clear Fork to assist in the fall branding.  Another one of fifteen men all told was chosen from the relieved lads in making up a surveying party, and taking fifty saddle horses and a well-stocked commissary with us, we started due west.  I knew the country for some distance beyond Fort Griffin, and from late maps in possession of the surveyors, we knew that by holding our course, we were due to strike a fork of the mother Brazos before reaching the Staked Plain.  Holding our course contrary to the needle, we crossed the Double Mountain Fork, and after a week out from the ranch the brakes which form the border between the lowlands and the Llano Estacado were sighted.  Within view of the foothills which form the approach of the famous plain, the Salt and Double Mountain forks of the Brazos are not over twelve miles apart.  We traveled up the divide between these two rivers, and when within thirty miles of the low-browed borderland a halt was called and we went into camp.  From the view before us one could almost imagine the feelings of the discoverer of this continent when he first sighted land; for I remember the thrill which possessed our little party as we looked off into either valley or forward to the menacing Staked Plain in our front.  There was something primal in the scene,—­something that brought back the words, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”  Men who knew neither creed nor profession of faith felt themselves drawn very near to some great creative power.  The surrounding view held us spellbound by its beauty and strength.  It was like a rush of fern-scents, the breath of pine forests, the music of the stars, the first lovelight in a mother’s eye; and now its pristine beauty was to be marred, as covetous eyes and a lust of possession moved an earth-born man to lay hands on all things created for his use.

Camp was established on the Double Mountain Fork.  Many miles to the north, a spur of the Plain extended eastward, in the elbow of which it was my intention to locate the new ranch.  A corner was established, a meridian line was run north beyond the Salt Fork and a random one west to the foothills.  After a few days one surveyor ran the principal lines while the other did the cross-sectioning and correcting back, both working from the same camp, the wagon following up the work.  Antelope were seen by the thousands, frequently buffaloes were sighted, and scarcely a day passed but our rifles added to the larder of our commissary supplies.  Within a month we located four hundred sections, covering either side of the Double Mountain Fork, and embracing a country ten miles wide by forty long.  Coming back to our original meridian line across to the Salt Fork, the work of surveying that valley was begun, when I was compelled to turn homeward.  A list of contracts to be let by the War and Interior departments would be ready by December 1, and my partners relied on