Mac's Land — Reg Quist

Mac's Land is a story about a family. A family with parents, children and grandparents. A family that loves one another. A family working hard to operate a cattle ranch in the pioneer days of the West. A family with heavy responsibilities. A family with hopes and dreams. In other words, a normal pioneer family. There were thousands of them just like the McTavish family. Don't come here looking for heroes. Don't expect to find swaggering men with hands quicker than lightening who can shoot the eye out of a squirrel at fifty paces. Come here looking for real people, people you would like to call ‘neighbor, friend'. Mac McTavish is a rancher. In a new land where the grass seemed to be never ending, he was among the first to realize that the grazing couldn't be infinite. The grass was showing more poorly as the short years came and went. As the herds grew, the land suffered and might soon die, as indeed it did in too many parts of the West. Mac decided that on his Bar-M he would do something about saving the land. He told his neighbors that he was cutting his herds back and was fencing the land. The open grazing era had to stop. Not everyone liked his proposal.