Quotation from: The Little Lady of the Big House

Written by: Jack London

Here, during a stay of six months, Young Dick, soft of frame and
unbreakable, achieved a knowledge of horses and horsemanship, and of
men in the rough and raw, that became a life asset. More he learned.
There was John Chisum, owner of the Jingle-bob, the Bosque Grande, and
of other cattle ranches as far away as the Black River and beyond.
John Chisum was a cattle king who had foreseen the coming of the
farmer and adjusted from the open range to barbed wire, and who, in
order to do so, had purchased every forty acres carrying water and got
for nothing the use of the millions of acres of adjacent range that
was worthless without the water he controlled. And in the talk by the
camp-fire and chuck wagon, among forty-dollar-a-month cowboys who had
not foreseen what John Chisum foresaw, Young Dick learned precisely
why and how John Chisum had become a cattle king while a thousand of
his contemporaries worked for him on wages.