these holes and the cattle come to these places to drink. It was a common thing in the old days when the cattle man had driven his herd a hundred miles to a favorite water-hole, to find it was full of drowned sheep. Even the cattle themselves sometimes push each other into the water till some are drowned.
"But the exciting thing in the cattle game in the old days was the great drive over the Santa Fe trail from New Mexico to Montana. Every spring the great herds were started from the south and driven northward for nearly a thousand miles and in the fall they were turned back southward and driven to their winter quarters. As the cowboys say, 'Them was the days'; days of rustling, of stampedes, of fights with other herdsmen, and the sheep and goat men. No cow-puncher ever complained in those days that he lacked for excitement. The days were full of it, full of excitement and danger and the hardest kind of hard work from sunup to sundown, and also through the night. For in those days they always set what they called the night watch. Then the herdsman rode round and round the cattle all night long singing his cow-puncher songs. There is something about the human voice which seems to soothe the cattle and this was the cow-puncher's easiest way to keep them quiet. Thus it is that the hundreds of cow-puncher's songs have come into existence, many of them very beautiful and full of local color."
