In the Indian Nations they had crossed the Washita, where now stands the thriving town of Chickasha, Oklahoma. El Reno, of Oklahoma, was grassland then, near the ford of the North Fork of the Canadian. Kingfisher was not dreamed of on the trail from the North Fork to the Cimarron; and beyond that the city of Enid was to wait until long after cattle days were gone and the cattle trail had moved itself much farther to the west. Above them they aimed for Caldwell, just across the Kansas line then but a ragged frontier town. Thence the wagon tongue pointed toward Wichita, when Wichita was hardly more than a furrow in the ground, “a mile long and an inch wide.” A railroad was still unforeseen in any of these vicinities in 1867; but railroads soon were to follow, almost in the footsteps of the earliest herd to Abilene. So much, to make understandable the exultation of these men as they discovered for themselves a country, or a succession of countries, absolutely virgin so far as the white man was concerned; a pastoral empire that never has had a parallel. Whether by accident or design, the location of their northbound path was a lucky or a shrewd one. Scarcely anywhere else would there have been so few Indians to disturb them, nor could their experience easily be repeated. The depredations of the tribesmen, their begging of the drovers, their demands of tribute of all the northbound herds were still in the future, since as yet the Indians had not learned of the northern passing of the white men which was to come in a great wave in the ensuing years; and since not many tribes knew this herd was passing. The Del Sol men were pioneers. How rich, how wildly alluring, this unsullied world which now was all their own to enjoy! Their wild cattle now advanced quite usually in sight of an almost continuous spectacle of wild buffalo, wild horses, wild deer. At times the herd had to be held while a body of buffalo was parted by rifle fire to let them through. There seemed no end to the animal life of the region into which they came. It was all so different from Texas now that they felt themselves strangers in a foreign land. Their next river was the Cimarron, one more stream heading down from the high, dry buffalo plains of the Panhandle to the sandy reaches and the flat loam lands to the eastward. Making down out of the strip of scrubby timber which they encountered below their crossing, the herdsmen made short work of the Cimarron, which was at so low a stage that the carts were driven through and the cattle did not have to swim at all. Their start had been approximately at the thirtieth degree of latitude. They had now reached, just above the Cimarron crossing, the parallel of thirty-six, which later represented, as well as any arbitrary delineation, the vague dividing line between the southern and the northern ranges.