His host, "George Lane," as he is called everywhere, is known as far as the States and England as one of the cattle kings. He is a Westerner of the Westerners, and an individuality even among them. Tall and loose-built, with an authentic Bret Harte quality in action and speech, he can flash a glance of shrewdness or humour from the deep eyes under their shaggy, pent-house brows. He is one of the biggest ranch owners in the West (perhaps the biggest); his judgment on cattle or horses is law, and he has no frills.
His attractive ranch on the plains, where the rolling lands meet the foot-hills of the Rockies, has an air of splendid spaciousness. We did not go to Bar U, but a friend took us out on a switchback automobile run over what our driver called a "hellofer" road, to just such another ranch near Cockrane, and we could judge what these estates were like.
They are lonely but magnificent. They extend with lakes, close, tight patches of bush and small and occasional woods over undulating country to the sharp, bare wall of the snow-capped Rockies. The light is marvellous. Calgary is 3,500 feet up, and the level mounts steadily to the mountains. At this altitude the sunlight has an astonishing clarity, and everything is seen in a sharp and brilliant light.
In the rambling but comfortable house of the ranch the Prince was entertained with cattleman's fare, and on the Tuesday (after a ten-mile run before breakfast) he was introduced to the ardours of the cattleman's calling. He mounted a broncho and with his host joined the cowboys in rounding several thousand head of cattle, driving them in towards the branding corrals.
This is no task for an idler or a slacker. The bunch was made up mainly of cows with calves, or steers of less than a year old, who believed in the policy of self-determination, being still unbranded and still conspicuously independent. Most of them, in fact, had seen little or nothing of man in their life of lonely pasturage over the wide plains.
Riding continually at a gallop and in a whirlwind of movement and dust and horns, the Prince helped to bunch the mass into a compact circle, and then joined with the others in riding into the nervous herd, in order to separate the calves from the mothers, and the unbranded steers from those already marked with the sign of Bar U.