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under the stars; six-shooters at their belts, rifles swung to their pommels; themselves a half-wild breed, born to the saddle on the Texas plains, as skilful horsemen as the world ever knew, as adept in gun play as in horsemanship, rough fellows in a row; courage and loyalty as much a part of their heritage as hardship and danger.

The long journey came to an end at a point thirty-five miles north of the present little city of Roswell. There where the Pecos makes a deep curve and the valley opens out into flat meadows flanked by table-top hills, Chisum established a ranch in a grove of cottonwoods on the river’s margin, later to become famous throughout the Southwest as Bosque Grande, and settled down to fight his way to prosperity and kingship.

Chisum was born in Tennessee in 1824. His family has been identified with the South from the time his first English forbear set foot on Virginia soil in the early colonial period. Claiborne and Lucy Chisum were his father and mother. No need ever to ask from what part of the country a man named Claiborne hails; the name is as Southern as grits, sorghum, or corn pone. When John Chisum was born, Tennessee itself was a frontier state. The wilderness country lying just across the Mississippi River had become United States territory only twenty-one years before by Jefferson's purchase of Louisiana from Napoleon.

Born a frontiersman, the pioneer spirit was strong in Claiborne Chisum and in 1837, with his family and all his household goods and gods stowed in a covered wagon, he trekked westward across the wild, almost untraversed lands beyond the Mississippi and settled near what is now the town of Paris just south of Red River, the northern boundary of Texas.