During those years, at the Rock River ranch in Stanislaus County, where the plains meet the first hummocks of the Nevada foothills, I have seen that long, lean line of staggering, starving, dying kine stretching away as far as the eye could reach, and at every hundred yards lay a dead or dying animal. So they went for days, urged forward by the vaquero’s lash and their own agony for something to eat. Even when they gained the grass of the mountains it was only to find it all eaten off and the ground trodden to a dry, red, powdery dust by the hungry legions which had preceded them. It was a dreadful sight, for those poor brutes are as human in their sufferings through deprivation of food and water, when at night they lay down and moaned on the parched red earth, as men, women, and children would be. Well, the strongest survived and a portion reached the country about Eureka Valley. They came in, fed well during the summer, and one-third at least never went out again. The vaqueros could not keep them together in that rough country. They wandered about, climbed miles of mountain-sides, found little plateaus or valleys hidden away here or there, where they feasted on the rich “bunch grass.” They gained, by devious windings, high mountain-tops and little nooks quite hidden from their keepers’ eyes and quite past finding out. The herdsmen could not collect or drive them all out in the fall. They were left behind. All went well with them until the first snows of winter. Then instinctively those cattle sought to make their way out of the mountain fastnesses. Instinctively, too, they travelled westward toward the plains. And at the same time the first fall of snow was covered with tracks of deer, bear and Indians, all going down to the warmer regions. But the cattle were too late. Their progress was slow. More and more snow came and they were stopped. Some thus impeded trod down the snow into a corral, round which they tramped and tramped until they froze to death. Some of these cattle were thus embayed along the track of the Sonora and Mono road, and the white man making his way out was obliged to turn aside, for the wide, sharp-horned beast “held the fort” and threatened impalement to all that entered. Others, finding the south and sunny sides of the mountains, lived there until February, browsing on the oak leaves and bark. These we killed occasionally and buried the meat in the snow about our house. But it was beef quite juiceless, tasteless, tough and stringy. It was literally starvation beef for those who ate it, and the soup we made from it was in color and consistency a thin and almost transparent fluid.