Before the deep ruts had been cut in the old Santa Fe Trail in that year of excessive rains; before the first wheel had rolled over the prairie soil to prove that wagons could safely make the long and tiresome trip; before even the first pack trains of heavily laden mules plodded to or from the Missouri frontier, and even before the pelt-loaded mules of the great fur companies crossed Kansas soil to the trading posts of the East, Mexican hunters rode from the valley of Taos and Santa Fe to procure their winter meat from the vast brown herds of buffalo migrating over their curious, crescent-shaped course to and from the regions of the Arkansas, Canadian, and Cimarron. They dried the strips of succulent meat in the sun or over fires, the fuel for the latter having been supplied by the buffalo themselves on previous migrations; they stripped the hides from the prostrate bodies and cured them, and trafficked with the bands of Indians which followed the herds as persistently as did the great, gray wolves. Of these _ciboleros_, swarthy-skinned hunters of Mexico, some more hardy and courageous than their fellows, or by avarice turned trader, ventured further afield and were not balked by the high, beetling cliffs which bordered a great, forbidding plateau lying along and below the capricious Cimarron, in places a river of hide-and-seek in the sands, wet one day and dry the next. From the mesa-like northern edge, along the warning arroyos of the Cimarron, where erosion, Nature's patient sculptor, carved miracles of artistry in the towering clays, shales, and sandstones, to the great sand hills billowing along its far-flung other edges, this barren waste of dreary sand and grisly alkali was a vast, simmering playground for dancing heat waves and fantastic mirage, and its treacherous pools of nauseous, alkaline waters shrunk daily from their encrusted edges and gleamed malignantly under a glowering, molten sun. Arroyos, level plain, shifting sand, and imponderable dust, with a scrawny, scanty, hopeless vegetation which the whimsical winds buried and then dug up again, this high desert plateau lay like a thing of death, cursing and accursed. It sloped imperceptibly southward, its dusty soil gradually breaking into billowy ridges constantly more marked and with deeper troughs, by insensible gradations becoming low sand hills, ever growing more separate and higher until at last they were beaten down and strewn broadcast by more persistent winds, and limited by the firmer soils which were blessed with more frequent rains to coax forth a thin cover of protecting, anchoring vegetation. To the west they intruded nearly to the Rio Pecos, a stream which in almost any other part of the country would have been regarded as insignificant, but here was given greatness because its liquid treasure was beyond price and because it was permanent, though timid.