



Produced by Annie McGuire








[Illustration: HARPER'S ROUND TABLE]

Copyright, 1896, by HARPER & BROTHERS. All Rights Reserved.

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PUBLISHED WEEKLY. NEW YORK, TUESDAY, APRIL 7, 1896. FIVE CENTS A COPY.

VOL. XVII.--NO. 858. TWO DOLLARS A YEAR.

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[Illustration]

HOW TO START IN LIFE.

RANCHING.

BY HON. THEODORE ROOSEVELT.


There are in every community young men to whom life at the desk or
behind the counter is unutterably dreary and unattractive, and who long
for some out-of-door occupation which shall, if possible, contain a
spice of excitement. These young men can be divided into two
classes--first, those who, if they get a chance to try the life for
which they long, will speedily betray their utter inability to lead it;
and, secondly, those who possess the physical capacity and the peculiar
mental make-up necessary for success in an employment far out of the
usual paths of civilized occupations. A great many of these young men
think of ranching as a business which they might possibly take up, and
what I am about to say is meant as much for a warning to one class as
for advice to the other.

Ranching is a rather indefinite term. In a good many parts of the West a
ranch simply means a farm; but I shall not use it in this sense, since
the advantages and disadvantages of a farmer's life, whether it be led
in New Jersey or Iowa, have often been dwelt upon by men infinitely more
competent than I am to pass judgment. Accordingly, when I speak of
ranching I shall mean some form of stock-raising or sheep-farming as
practised now in the wilder parts of the United States, where there is
still plenty of land which, because of the lack of rainfall, is not very
productive for agricultural purposes.

The first thing to be remembered by any boy or young man who wishes to
go West and start life on a cattle ranch, horse ranch, or sheep ranch is
that he must know the business thoroughly before he can earn any salary
to speak of, still less start out on his own accord. A great many young
fellows apparently think that a cowboy is born and not made, and that in
order to become one all they have to do is to wish very hard to be one.
Now, as a matter of fact, a young fellow trained as a bookkeeper would
take quite as long to learn the trade of a cowboy as the average cowboy
would take to learn the trade of bookkeeper. The first thing that the
beginner anywhere in the wilder parts of the West has to learn is the
capacity to stand monotony, fatigue, and hardship; the next thing is to
learn the nature of the country.

A young fellow from the East who has been brought up on a farm, or who
has done hard manual labor as a machinist, need not go through a
novitiate of manual labor in order to get accustomed to the roughness
that such labor implies; but a boy just out of a high-school, or a young
clerk, will have to go through just such a novitiate before he will be
able to command a dollar's pay. Both alike will have to learn the nature
of the country, and this can only be learned by actual experience on the
ground. Again, the beginner must remember that though there are
occasional excitement and danger in a ranchman's life, it is only
occasional, while the monotony of hard and regular toil is not often
broken. Except in the matter of fresh air and freedom from crowding, a
small ranchman often leads a life of as grinding hardness as the average
dweller in a New York tenement-house. His shelter is a small log hut, or
possibly a dug-out in the side of a bank, or in summer a shabby tent.
For food he will have to depend mainly on the bread of his own baking,
on fried fat pork, and on coffee or tea with sugar and no milk. Of
course he will occasionally have some canned stuff or potatoes. The
furniture of the hut is of the roughest description--a roll of blankets
for bedding, a bucket, a tin wash-basin, and a tin mug, with perhaps a
cracked looking-glass four inches square.

He will not have much society of any kind, and the society he does have
is not apt to be over-refined. If he is a lad of a delicate, shrinking
nature and fastidious habits, he will find much that is uncomfortable,
and will need to show no small amount of pluck and fortitude if he is to
hold his own. The work, too, is often hard and often wearisome from mere
sameness. It is generally done on horseback even on a sheep ranch, and
always on a cow ranch. The beginner must learn to ride with indifference
all kinds of rough and dangerous horses before he will be worth his
keep.

With all this before him, the beginner will speedily find out that life
on a Western ranch is very far from being a mere holiday. A young man
who desires to start in the life ought, if possible, to have with him a
little money--just enough to keep body and soul together--until he can
gain a foothold somewhere. No specific directions can be given him as to
where to start. Wyoming, most of Montana, the western edge of the
Dakotas, western Texas, and some portions of the Rocky Mountain States
still offer chances for a man to go into the ranch business. In
different seasons in the different localities business may be good or
bad, and it would be impossible to tell where was the best place to
start. Wherever the beginner goes, he ought to make up his mind at the
outset to start by doing any kind of work he can. Let him chop wood,
hoe, do any chore that will bring him in twenty-five cents. If he is
once able to start by showing that he is willing to work hard and do
something, he can probably get employment of some kind, although this
employment will almost certainly be very ill paid and not attractive.
Perhaps it will be to dig in a garden, or to help one of the men drive
ox