While reading the memoirs of old time trail drivers and cowboys collected in a book called 
THE TEXAS BREED by Don Hedgpeth, I came across a story by a man named Carl Benedict.  Mr. Benedict was a young cowboy when the herds of Texas longhorns were gathered and took "up the trail".  His accounts of the late 1800's are some of the best narratives I have found.  He was also present when the longhorns were bred out of existence, fences were put up across the prairies and windmills appeared that allowed farmers and small ranchers to exist.  He says it best with the last lines of his 1943 story ..... "I have never been back to that country, and do not want to go back, because it would be painful to me to see the open prairies where we used to throw round ups together, now cut up into farms and to hear farmers' cow-bells jingling in the Pease River breaks where once we chased the big free steers".