But Charlie and I started in the cattle business too late to get the full benefit of the open range. The cattlemen were like the Indians. At one time they had everything they wanted—free range and free water—but the sheepmen soon began to squat on the watering places and it wasn’t many years until they had outnumbered the cattlemen.
There was a general hatred between them, as the cattle wouldn’t graze or water where there were sheep and the sheep would go everywhere. That was bad—but was nothing compared to when the farmers came from the East and homesteaded the land. I seen that country change in two years from where there was open range everywhere to where there wasn’t a foot of government land left, either in Montana or across the Canadian line, and in 1910 we had a very dry year and had to gather our cattle and bring them home. So decided to sell out. The farmers filed on every water hole in the country and they all had dogs, so the cattle didn’t have a chance. Some of the old-timers hung on for awhile and reminded me again of the Indians, as they said the farmer couldn’t last and would starve out and the country would all go back to open range. But when I seen those farmers raise fifty bushels of wheat to the acre on that virgin soil I could see the handwriting on the wall.
Course that land soon wore out for raising grain and most of those settlers sure had a hard time to get by but they are still there. It never will be a good farming country, but they have ruined it for the cattleman. They have even drove the sheep out.
One time when the sheep and cattlemen were at war, I knew two cattlemen that was very hard put by the sheep. They had monopolized all the free range and water, and as it has always been commonly understood that saltpeter would kill sheep, they decided to work on the sheepmen. So they sent away and got one hundred pounds of saltpeter and as it was a very serious crime to poison the range, they were very careful. They took the saltpeter in front of a band of sheep that was grazing on their range. One of them rode next to the sheepherder so he couldn’t see the sack the other one had on his horse. Then they cut a hole in the sack and rode slowly in front of the sheep and distributed the one hundred pounds. One of those fellows was quite a large cattleman and after the job was completed he got scared and left that part of the country for about a week so that in case of an investigation he would have an alibi that he was not at home at the time of the poisoning.