Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 4.djvu/62

52 The heads of families did not so readily depart from their early habits of economy, but the children soon reveled in their magnificent possessions. Girls and boys alike became semi-nomads, or properly speaking, fell into the ways of the baronial English or the planter class of the South. As a consequence of their newly found competence and leisure "they took to horse," and strange, what a fascination comes over a human being when he takes to horse. In truth, that boy who did not admire the splendid aboriginal equestrians of the Great Plains and get filled with the spirit of the wild and free, as he saw them scurrying along the mountain side or sweeping down into the valley with the speed of the wind; that boy must have been an unchangeable clodhopper or a born philosopher.

Very few of them escaped the uncivilizing contamination, and many a youth, fresh from an unfinished course at school, had his book education cut sadly short by bestriding a cayuse and becoming a practical cowboy. The infatuation was not confined to the boys. The girls, too, had as much fondness for the noble brute, and were as expert and graceful in his management. Some of them have ridden seventy-five miles in a day. As a means of social communication at that time it had no equal; and for stock raising and the round-up in such a country, the horseman was unapproachable. Still, with all such advantages, and they were many, which could have been turned into permanent profit, the cowboy generation, though having a "heap of fun," and no doubt genuine pleasure, let the earth slip from under his feet. How could it be otherwise? Who could deny them? A party of boys and girls on their favorite steeds, the former in