John Moore was one of the barons of the Arkansas. He owned several thousand acres of land, which in all did not represent a great outlay of money in that time, much of it good for nothing but grazing, good for nothing else to this day. In the valley of the Arkansas, where his house stood on a little lift that brought it above flood-water, his possessions embraced much land that could have been turned to agricultural use if its owner had been a farming man.
But such would have been a contemptuous use of the land to John Moore, who did not so much as cultivate a garden to give his family summer greens. He was a cattleman of the old type; cattle was all he knew, or wanted to know. His value of the valley lands was not based on their productive potentiality under the plow, but on the amount of herbage grown there during the summer months for the use of his herds when the upland ranges were covered with snow.
At such times the cattle were worked down into the valley, where they found tall grass that had been carefully guarded against trespass all summer, fairly succulent still, and life-sustaining; and shelter against the cruel sharp blasts of winter storms under the shallow banks of the river, among the willows and cottonwood
