on the wind and poison the very dust of the earth. Northern cattle grazing the range crossed by these Texas herds, or coming within several miles of their trail, contracted this devastating fever and perished.[1]
No cure was known for it; no preventive except freezing weather. Local cattle could graze with safety the polluted ranges after a winter had passed. The situation had grown so desperate, Texas cattle coming in such vastly increasing numbers year after year, that the livestock industry on the Kansas range was threatened with ruination.
Something had to be done to stop this indiscriminate invasion, this sowing of plague over the free grazing lands. There was neither state nor federal law to regulate the entry of these southern herds, it being a hard matter to convince legislators that cattle apparently entirely healthy could be carriers of this most fatal malady.
For the lack of any law to help them, the Kansas stockmen were driven to the expedient of banding together and establishing, for mutual protection, a quarantine against Texas trail herds. This quarantine line they had fixed at the southern boundary of the state, where they proposed to apply their regulation by force of arms if necessary.
Guards were already patrolling the southern border to watch for the coming of the first Texas herds and summon sufficient force to stop them at the line. It was as a recruit to this force that Zora Moore had engaged Dunham, subject to the approval of her
- ↑ The tick was not then known as the carrier of Texas fever.
