This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

There's a pretty famous novel about the old American West called Lonesome Dove.

Published in 1985, it won a Pulitzer Prize and was later made into a TV

mini series. It's one of the best books ever written, I think. That's our own Katie

Mingle. So in the book, a group of cowboys from Texas,

cattlemen, as they were once called,

drives a huge herd of cattle through the great open west,

all the way from Texas up to Montana.

It's an epic adventure story.

The writing is just gorgeous.

Here's a passage.

As they rode north, they saw more buffalo, mostly small bunches of 20 or 30.

The third day north of the Yellowstone they killed a crippled buffalo calf and dined on its liver.

In the morning when they left there were a number of buzzards

and two or three prairie wolves hanging around,

waiting for them to leave the carcass.

It was a beautiful morning, crisp for an hour or two, and then sunny and warm.

The country rolled on to the north, as it had for thousands of miles, brown in the distance,

the prairie grasses waving in the breeze.

The book, which is fiction, takes place in the 1870s.

And the reason we're talking about it is that basically everything about that scene was about to become impossible. The whole premise of the book

really was about to become impossible. In just a few years, cattle drives would come to an end.

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