The coming of the barb-wire fence and the railroad killed the cowboy as a picturesque element of recklessness and lawlessness in south-west Texas. It suppressed him and localized him and limited him to his own range, and made his revolver merely an ornament. Before the barb-wire fence appeared, the cattle wandered from one range to another, and the man of fifteen thousand acres would over-stock, knowing that when his cattle could not find enough pasturage on his range they would move over to the range of his more prosperous neighbor. Consequently, when the men who could afford it began to fence their ranges, the smaller owners who had over-bred, saw that their cattle would starve, and so cut the fences in order to get back to the pastures which they had used so long. This, and the shutting off of water-tanks and of long-used trails brought on the barb-wire fence wars which raged long and fiercely between the cowboys and fence men of rival ranches and the Texas Rangers. The barb-wire fences did more than this; they shut off the great trails that stretched from Corpus Christi through the Pan Handle of Texas, and on up through New Mexico and Colorado and through the Indian Territory to Dodge City. The coming of the railroad also made this trailing of cattle to the markets superfluous, and almost destroyed one of the most remarkable features of the West. This trail was not, of course, an actual trail, and marked as such, but a general driveway forty miles wide and thousands of miles long. The herds of cattle that were driven over it numbered from three hundred to three thousand head, and were moving constantly from the early spring to the late fall. [Illustration: FIXING A BREAK IN THE WIRE FENCE] No caravan route in the far Eastern countries can equal this six months’ journey through three different States, and through all changes of weather and climate, and in the face of constant danger and anxiety. This procession of countless cattle on their slow march to the north was one of the most interesting and distinctive features of the West.