His name was usually Nester or Little Fellow. It was the old story of
the tortoise and the hare. The Little Fellow was from the first destined
to win. His steady advance, now on this flank, now on that, just back
of the vanguard pushing westward, had marked the end of all our earlier
frontiers. The same story now was being written on the frontier of the
Plains.
But in the passing of this last frontier the type of the land-seeking
man, the type of the American, began to alter distinctly. The million
dead of our cruel Civil War left a great gap in the American population
which otherwise would have occupied the West and Northwest after the
clearing away of the Indians. For three decades we had been receiving
a strong and valuable immigration from the north of Europe. It was in
great part this continuous immigration which occupied the farming lands
of upper Iowa, Minnesota, and the Dakotas. Thus the population of the
Northwest became largely foreign. Each German or Scandinavian who found
himself prospering in this rich new country was himself an immigration
agency. He sent back word to his friends and relatives in the Old World
and these came to swell the steadily thickening population of the New.
We have seen that the enterprising cattlemen had not been slow to reach
out for such resources as they might. Perhaps at one time between 1885
and 1890 there were over ten million acres of land illegally fenced in
on the upper range by large cattle companies. This had been done without
any color of law whatever; a man simply threw out his fences as far as
he liked, and took in range enough to pasture all the cattle that he
owned. His only pretext was "I saw it first." For the Nester who wanted
a way through these fences out into the open public lands, he cherished
a bitter resentment. And yet the Nester must in time win through, must
eventually find the little piece of land which he was seeking.
The government at Washington was finally obliged to take action. In
the summer of 1885, acting under authorization of Congress, President
Cleveland ordered the removal of all illegal enclosures and forbade any
person or association to prevent the peaceful occupation of the public
land by homesteaders. The President had already cancelled the leases by
which a great cattle company had occupied grazing lands in the Indian
Territory. Yet, with even-handed justice he kept the land boomers also
out of these coveted lands, until the Dawes Act of 1887 allotted the
tribal lands to the Indians in severalty and threw open the remainder
to the impatient homeseekers. Waiting thousands were ready at the Kansas
line, eager for the starting gun which was to let loose a mad stampede
of crazed human beings.
It always was contended by the cowman that these settlers coming in on
the semi-arid range could not make a living there, that all they could
do was legally to starve to death some good woman. True, many of them
could not last out in the bitter combined fight with nature and the
grasping conditions of commerce and transportation of that time. The
western Canadian farmer of today is a cherished, almost a petted being.
But no one ever showed any mercy to the American farmer who moved out
West.
As always has been the case, a certain number of wagons might be seen
passing back East, as well as the somewhat larger number steadily moving
westward. There were lean years and dry years, hot years, yellow years
here and there upon the range. The phrase written on one disheartened
farmer's wagon top, "Going back to my wife's folks," became historic.
The railways were finding profit in carrying human beings out to the
cow-range just as once they had in transporting cattle. Indeed, it did
not take the wiser railroad men long to see that they could afford to
set down a farmer, at almost no cost for transportation, in any part
of the new West. He would after that be dependent upon the railroad in
every way. The railroads deliberately devised the great land boom of
1886, which was more especially virulent in the State of Kansas. Many of
the roads had lands of their own for sale, but what they wanted most was
the traffic of the settlers. They knew the profit to be derived from the
industry of a dense population raising products which must be shipped,
and requiring imports which also must be shipped. One railroad even
offered choice breeding-stock free on request. The same road, and others
also, preached steadily the doctrine of diversified farming. In short,
the railroads, in their own interests, did all they could to make
prosperous the farms or ranches of the West. The usual Western homestead
now was part ranch and part farm, although the term "ranch" continued
for many years to cover all the meanings of the farm of whatever sort.
There appeared now in the new country yet another figure of the Western
civilization, the land-boomer, with his irresponsible and unregulated
statements in regard to the values of these Western lands. These men
were not always desirable citizens, although of course no industry was
more solid or more valuable than that of legitimate handling of the
desirable lands. "Public spirit" became a phrase now well known in any
one of scores of new towns springing up on the old cow-range, each of
which laid claims to be the future metropolis of the world. In any one
of these towns the main industry was that of selling lands or "real
estate." During the Kansas boom of 1886 the land-boomers had their desks
in the lobbies of banks, the windows of hardware stores--any place and
every place offering room for a desk and chair.
Now also flourished apace the industry of mortgage loans. Eastern
money began to flood the western Plains, attracted by the high rates of
interest. In 1886 the customary banking interest in western Kansas was
two per cent a month. It is easy to see that very soon such a state of
affairs as this must collapse. The industry of selling town lots far out
in the cornfields, and of buying unimproved subdivision property with
borrowed money at usurious rates of interest, was one riding for its own
fall.
None the less the Little Fellow kept on going out into the West. We
did not change our land laws for his sake, and for a time he needed no
sympathy. The homestead law in combination with the preemption act and
the tree claim act would enable a family to get hold of a very sizable
tract of land. The foundations of many comfortable fortunes were laid in
precisely this way by thrifty men who were willing to work and willing
to wait.
It was not until 1917 that the old homestead law limiting the settler
to a hundred and sixty acres of land was modified for the benefit of the
stock-raiser. The stock-raising homestead law, as it is called, permits
a man to make entry for not more than six hundred and forty acres of
unappropriated land which shall have been designated by the Secretary
of the Interior as "stock-raising land." Cultivation of the land is not
required, but the holder is required to make "permanent improvements"
to the value of a dollar and twenty-five cents an acre, and at least
one-half of these improvements must be made within three years after the
date of entry. In the old times the question of proof in "proving up"
was very leniently considered. A man would stroll down to the land
office and swear solemnly that he had lived the legal length of time on
his homestead, whereas perhaps he had never seen it or had no more than
ridden across it. Today matters perhaps will be administered somewhat
more strictly; for of all those millions of acres of open land once in
the West there is almost none left worth the holding for farm purposes.
Such dishonest practices were, however, indignantly denied by those who
fostered the irrigation and dry-farming booms which made the last phase
of exploitation of the old range. A vast amount of disaster was worked
by the failure of numberless irrigation companies, each of them offering
lands to the settlers through the medium of most alluring advertising.
In almost every case the engineers underestimated the cost of getting
water on the land. Very often the amount of water available was not
sufficient to irrigate the land which had been sold to settlers.
In countless cases the district irrigation bonds-which were offered
broadcast by Eastern banks to their small investors--were hardly worth
the paper on which they were written. One after another these wildcat
irrigation schemes, purporting to assure sudden wealth in apples,
pears, celery, garden truck, cherries, small fruits, alfalfa, pecans,
eucalyptus or catalpa trees-anything you liked--went to the wall.
Sometimes whole communities became straitened by the collapse of these
overblown enterprises. The recovery was slow, though usually the result
of that recovery was a far healthier and more stable condition of
society.
This whole question of irrigation and dry farming, this or that phase
of the last scrambling, feverish settling on the last lands, was sorely
wasteful of human enterprise and human happiness. It was much like the
spawning rush of the salmon from the sea. Many perish. A few survive.
Certainly there never was more cruel injustice done than that to the
sober-minded Eastern farmers, some of them young men in search of
cheaper homes, who sold out all they had in the East and went out to
the dry country to farm under the ditch, or to take up that still more
hazardous occupation--successful sometimes, though always hard and
always risky--dry farming on the benches which cannot be reached with
irrigating waters.
Strangely changed was all the face of the cattle range by these
successive and startling innovations. The smoke of many little homes
rose now, scattered over all that tremendous country from the Rockies
to the edge of the short grass country, from Texas to the Canadian line.
The cattle were not banished from the range, for each little farmer
would probably have a few cows of his own; and in some fashion the great
cowmen were managing to get in fee tracts of land sufficient for their
purposes. There were land leases of all sorts which enabled the thrifty
Westerner who knew the inside and out of local politics to pick up
permanently considerable tracts of land. Some of these ranches held
together as late as 1916; indeed, there are some such oldtime holdings
still existent in the West, although far more rare than formerly was the
case.
Under all these conditions the price of land went up steadily. Land
was taken eagerly which would have been refused with contempt a decade
earlier. The parings and scraps and crumbs of the Old West now were
fought for avidly.
The need of capital became more and more important in many of the great
land operations. Even the government reclamation enterprises could not
open lands to the settler on anything like the old homestead basis. The
water right cost money--sometimes twenty-five or thirty dollars an acre;
in some of the private reclamation enterprises, fifty dollars an acre,
or even more. Very frequently when the Eastern farmer came out to settle
on such a tract and to meet the hard, new, and expensive conditions of
life in the semi-arid regions he found that he could not pay out on
the land. Perhaps he brought two or three thousand dollars with him. It
usually was the industrial mistake of the land-boomer to take from
this intending settler practically all of his capital at the start.
Naturally, when the new farmers were starved out and in one way or
another had made other plans, the country itself went to pieces. That
part of it was wisest which did not kill the goose of the golden
egg. But be these things as they may be and as they were, the whole
readjustment in agricultural values over the once measureless and
valueless cow country was a stupendous and staggering thing.
Now appeared yet another agency of change. The high dry lands of many
of the Rocky Mountain States had long been regarded covetously by an
industry even more cordially disliked by the cattleman than the industry
of farming. The sheepman began to raise his head and to plan certain
things for himself in turn. Once the herder of sheep was a meek and
lowly man, content to slink away when ordered. The writer himself in the
dry Southwest once knew a flock of six thousand sheep to be rounded up
and killed by the cattlemen of a range into which they had intruded.
The herders went with the sheep. All over the range the feud between the
sheepmen and the cowmen was bitter and implacable. The issues in those
quarrels rarely got into the courts but were fought out on the ground.
The old Wyoming dead-line of the cowmen against intruding bands of
Green River sheep made a considerable amount of history which was never
recorded.
The sheepmen at length began to succeed in their plans. Themselves not
paying many taxes, not supporting the civilization of the country, not
building the schools or roads or bridges, they none the less claimed the
earth and the fullness thereof.
After the establishment of the great forest reserves, the sheepmen
coveted the range thus included. It has been the governmental policy to
sell range privileges in the forest reserves for sheep, on a per capita
basis. Like privileges have been extended to cattlemen in certain of the
reserves. Always the contact and the contest between the two industries
of sheep and cows have remained. Of course the issue even in this
ancient contest is foregone--as the cowman has had to raise his cows
under fence, so ultimately must the sheepman also buy his range in fee
and raise his product under fence.
The wandering bands of sheep belong nowhere. They ruin a country. It
is a pathetic spectacle to see parts of the Old West in which sheep
steadily have been ranged. They utterly destroy all the game; they even
drive the fish out of the streams and cut the grasses and weeds down
to the surface of the earth. The denuded soil crumbles under their
countless hoofs, becomes dust, and blows away. They leave a waste, a
desert, an abomination.
There were yet other phases of change which followed hard upon the heels
of our soldiers after they had completed their task of subjugating the
tribes of the buffalo Indians. After the homesteads had been proved up
in some of the Northwestern States, such as Montana and the Dakotas,
large bodies of land were acquired by certain capitalistic farmers. All
this new land had been proved to be exceedingly prolific of wheat, the
great new-land crop. The farmers of the Northwest had not yet learned
that no country long can thrive which depends upon a single crop. But
the once familiar figures of the bonanza farms of the Northwest--the
pictures of their long lines of reapers or self-binders, twenty, thirty,
forty, or fifty machines, one after the other, advancing through the
golden grain--the pictures of their innumerable stacks of wheat--the
figures of the vast mileage of their fencing--the yet more stupendous
figures of the outlay required to operate these farms, and the splendid
totals of the receipts from such operations--these at one time were
familiar and proudly presented features of boom advertising in the upper
portions of our black land belt, which day just at the eastern edge of
the old Plains.
There was to be repeated in this country something of the history of
California. In the great valleys, such as the San Joaquin, the first
interests were pastoral, and the cowmen found a vast realm which seemed
to be theirs forever. There came to them, however, the bonanza wheat
farmers, who flourished there about 1875 and through the next decade.
Their highly specialized industry boasted that it could bake a loaf of
bread out of a wheat field between the hours of sunrise and sunset. The
outlay in stock and machinery on some of these bonanza ranches ran
into enormous figures. But here, as in all new wheat countries, the
productive power of the soil soon began to decrease. Little by little
the number of bushels per acre lessened, until the bonanza farmer found
himself with not half the product to sell which he had owned the first
few years of his operations. In one California town at one time a
bonanza farmer came in and covered three city blocks with farm machinery
which he had turned over to the bank owning the mortgages on his lands
and plant. He turned in also all his mules and horses, and retired worse
than broke from an industry in which he had once made his hundreds of
thousands. Something of this same story was to follow in the Dakotas.
Presently we heard no more of the bonanza wheat farms; and a little
later they were not. The one-crop country is never one of sound
investing values; and a land boom is something of which to
beware--always and always to beware.
The prairie had passed; the range had passed; the illegal fences had
passed; and presently the cattle themselves were to pass--that is to
say, the great herds. As recently as five years ago (1912) it was my
fortune to be in the town of Belle Fourche, near the Black Hills--a
region long accustomed to vivid history, whether of Indians, mines, or
cows--at the time when the last of the great herds of the old industry
thereabouts were breaking up; and to see, coming down to the cattle
chutes to be shipped to the Eastern stockyards, the last hundreds of
the last great Belle Fourche herd, which was once numbered in thousands.
They came down out of the blue-edged horizon, threading their way from
upper benches down across the dusty valley. The dust of their travel
rose as it had twenty years earlier on the same old trail. But these
were not the same cattle. There was not a longhorn among them; there has
not been a longhorn on the range for many years. They were sleek, fat,
well-fed animals, heavy and stocky, even of type, all either whitefaces
or shorthorns. With them were some old-time cowmen, men grown gray in
range work. Alongside the herds, after the ancient fashion of trailing
cattle, rode cowboys who handled their charges with the same old skill.
But even the cowboys had changed. These were without exception men from
the East who had learned their trade here in the West. Here indeed
was one of the last acts of the great drama of the Plains. To many an
observer there it was a tragic thing. I saw many a cowman there the
gravity on whose face had nothing to do with commercial loss. It was the
Old West he mourned. I mourned with him.
Naturally the growth of the great stockyards of the Middle West had an
effect upon all the cattle-producing country of the West, whether
those cattle were bred in large or in small numbers. The dealers of the
stockyards, let us say, gradually evolved a perfect understanding among
themselves as to what cattle prices ought to be at the Eastern end of
the rails. They have always pleaded poverty and explained the extremely
small margin of profit under which they have operated. Of course, the
repeated turn-over in their business has been an enormous thing;
and their industry, since the invention of refrigerator cars and the
shipment of dressed beef in tins, has been one which has extended to
all the corners of the world. The great packers would rather talk of
"by-products" than of these things. Always they have been poor, so very
poor!
For a time the railroads east of the stockyard cities of Kansas City and
Chicago divided up _pro rata_ the dressed beef traffic. Investigation
after investigation has been made of the methods of the stockyard firms,
but thus far the law has not laid its hands successfully upon them.
Naturally of late years the extremely high price of beef has made
greater profit to the cattle raiser; but that man, receiving eight or
ten cents a pound on the hoof, is not getting rich so fast as did his
predecessor, who got half of it, because he is now obliged to feed hay
and to enclose his range. Where once a half ton of hay might have been
sufficient to tide a cow over the bad part of the winter, the Little
Fellow who fences his own range of a few hundred acres is obliged to
figure on two or three tons, for he must feed his herd on hay through
the long months of the winter.
The ultimate consumer, of course, is the one who pays the freight and
stands the cost of all this. Hence we have the swift growth of American
discontent with living conditions. There is no longer land for free
homes in America. This is no longer a land of opportunity. It is no
longer a poor man's country. We have arrived all too swiftly upon the
ways of the Old World. And today, in spite of our love of peace, we are
in an Old World's war!
The insatiable demand of Americans for cheap lands assumed a certain
international phase at the period lying between 1900 and 1913 or
later--the years of the last great boom in Canadian lands. The Dominion
Government, represented by shrewd and enterprising men able to handle
large undertakings, saw with a certain satisfaction of its own the swift
passing from the market of all the cheap lands of the United States.
It was proved to the satisfaction of all that very large tracts of
the Canadian plains also would raise wheat, quite as well as had the
prairies of Montana or Dakota. The Canadian railroads, with lands to
sell, began to advertise the wheat industry in Alberta and Saskatchewan.
The Canadian Government went into the publicity business on its own
part. To a certain extent European immigration was encouraged, but the
United States really was the country most combed out for settlers for
these Canadian lands. As by magic, millions of acres in western Canada
were settled.
The young American farmers of our near Northwest were especially coveted
as settlers, because they knew how to farm these upper lands far better
than any Europeans, and because each of them was able to bring a little
capital of ready money into Canada. The publicity campaign waged by
Canadians in our Western States in one season took away more than a
hundred and fifty thousand good young farmers, resolved to live under
another flag. In one year the State of Iowa lost over fifteen million
dollars of money withdrawn from bank deposits by farmers moving across
the line into Canada.
The story of these land rushes was much the same there as it had been
with us. Not all succeeded. The climatic conditions were far more
severe than any which we had endured, and if the soil for a time in some
regions seemed better than some of our poorest, at least there waited
for the one-crop man the same future which had been discovered for
similar methods within our own confines. But the great Canadian
land booms, carefully fostered and well developed, offered a curious
illustration of the tremendous pressure of all the populations of the
world for land and yet more land.
In the year 1911 the writer saw, all through the Peace River Valley and
even in the neighborhood of the Little Slave Lake, the advance-guard
of wheat farmers crowding out even beyond the Canadian frontier in the
covetous search for yet more cheap land. In 1912 I talked with a
school teacher, who herself had homestead land in the Judith Basin
of Montana--once sacred to cows--and who was calmly discussing the
advisability of going up into the Peace River country to take up yet
more homestead land under the regulations of the Dominion Government!
In the year 1913 I saw an active business done in town lots at Fort
McMurray, five hundred miles north of the last railroad of Alberta, on
the ancient Athabasca waterway of the fur trade!
Who shall state the limit of all this expansion? The farmer has ever
found more and more land on which he could make a living; he is always
taking land which his predecessor has scornfully refused. If presently
there shall come the news that the land boomer has reached the mouth
of the Mackenzie River--as long ago he reached certain portions of the
Yukon and Tanana country--if it shall be said that men are now
selling town lots under the Midnight Sun--what then? We are building a
government railroad of our own almost within shadow of Mount McKinley
in Alaska. There are steamboats on all these great sub-Arctic rivers.
Perhaps, some day, a power boat may take us easily where I have stood,
somewhat wearied, at that spot on the Little Bell tributary of
the Porcupine, where a slab on a post said, "Portage Road to Ft.
McPherson"--a "road" which is not even a trail, but which crosses the
most northerly of all the passes of the Rockies, within a hundred miles
of the Arctic Ocean.
Land, land, more land! It is the cry of the ages, more imperative and
clamorous now than ever in the history of the world and only arrested
for the time by the cataclysm of the Great War. The earth is well-nigh
occupied now. Australia, New Zealand, Canada, even Africa, are
colonization grounds. What will be the story of the world at the end
of the Great War none may predict. For the time there will be more land
left in Europe; but, unbelievably soon, the Great War will have been
forgotten; and then the march of the people will be resumed toward such
frontiers of the world as yet may remain. Land, land, more land!
Always in America we have occupied the land as fast as it was feasible
to do so. We have survived incredible hardships on the mining frontier,
have lived through desperate social conditions in the cow country, have
fought many of our bravest battles in the Indian country. Always it
has been the frontier which has allured many of our boldest souls. And
always, just back of the frontier, advancing, receding, crossing it
this way and that, succeeding and failing, hoping and despairing--but
steadily advancing in the net result--has come that portion of the
population which builds homes and lives in them, and which is not
content with a blanket for a bed and the sky for a roof above.
We had a frontier once. It was our most priceless possession. It has not
been possible to eliminate from the blood of the American West, diluted
though it has been by far less worthy strains, all the iron of the old
home-bred frontiersmen. The frontier has been a lasting and ineradicable
influence for the good of the United States. It was there we showed our
fighting edge, our unconquerable resolution, our undying faith. There,
for a time at least, we were Americans.
We had our frontier. We shall do ill indeed if we forget and abandon its
strong lessons, its great hopes, its splendid human dreams.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
ANDY ADAMS, "The Log of a Cowboy," 1903. "The Outlet," 1905. Homely but
excellently informing books done by a man rarely qualified for his task
by long experience in the cattle business and on the trail. Nothing
better exists than Adams's several books for the man who wishes
trustworthy information on the early American cattle business.
GEORGE A. FORSYTH, "The Story of the Soldier," 1900.
GEORGE BIRD GRINNELL, "The Story of the Indian," 1895.
EMERSON HOUGH, "The Story of the Cowboy," 1897.
CHARLES HOWARD SHINN, "The Story of the Mine," 1901.
CY WARMAN, "The Story of the Railroad," 1898. The foregoing books of
Appleton's interesting series known as "The Story of the West" are
valuable as containing much detailed information, done by contemporaries
of wide experience.
FRANCIS PARKMAN, "The Oregon Trail," 1901, with preface by the author to
the edition of 18991. This is a reprint of the edition published in 1857
under the title "Prairie and Rocky Mountain Life," or "The California
and Oregon Trail," and has always been held as a classic in the
literature of the West. It holds a certain amount of information
regarding life on the Plains at the middle of the last century. The
original title is more accurate than the more usual one "The Oregon
Trail," as the book itself is in no sense an exclusive study of that
historic highway.
COLONEL R. B. MARCY, U. S. A., "Thirty Years of Army Life on the
Border," 1866. An admirable and very informing book done by an Army
officer who was also a sportsman and a close observer of the conditions
of the life about him. One of the standard books for any library of
early Western literature.
EMERSON HOUGH, "The Story of the Outlaw," 1907. A study of the Western
desperado, with historical narratives of famous outlaws, stories of
noted border movements, Vigilante activities, and armed conflicts on the
border.
NATHANIEL PITT LANGFORD, "Vigilante Days and Ways," 1893. A storehouse
of information done in graphic anecdotal fashion of the scenes in the
early mining camps of Idaho and Montana. Valuable as the work of a
contemporary writer who took part in the scenes he describes.
JOHN C. VAN TRAMP, "Prairie and Rocky Mountain Adventures or Life in
the West," 1870. A study of the States and territorial regions of our
Western empire, embracing history, statistics, and geography,
with descriptions of the chief cities of the West. In large part a
compilation of earlier Western literature.
SAMUEL BOWLES, "Our New West," 1869. Records of travel between the
Mississippi River and the Pacific Ocean, with details regarding scenery,
agriculture, mines, business, social life, etc., including a full
description of the Pacific States and studies of the "Mormons, Indians,
and Chinese" at that time.
HIRAM MARTIN CHITTENDEN, "The American Fur Trade of the Far West," 1902.
The work of a distinguished Army officer. Done with the exact care of an
Army engineer. An extraordinary collection of facts and a general view
of the picturesque early industry of the fur trade, which did so much
toward developing the American West. See also his "History of Steamboat
Navigation on the Missouri River" (1903).
A. J. SOWELL, "Early Settlers and Indian Fighters of Southwest Texas,"
1900. A local book, but done with contemporary accuracy by a man who
also studied the Texas Rangers and who was familiar with some of the
earlier frontier characters of the Southwest.
The foregoing volumes are of course but a few among the many scores or
hundreds which will have been read avidly by every man concerned with
frontier life or with the expansion of the American people to the West.
Space lacks for a fuller list, but the foregoing readings will serve to
put upon the trail of wider information any one interested in these and
kindred themes.
Let especial stress again be laid upon the preeminent value of books
done by contemporaries, men who wrote, upon the ground, of things which
they actually saw and actually understood. It is not always, or perhaps
often, that these contemporary books achieve the place which they ought
to have and hold.
Among the many books dealing with the Indians and Indian Wars, the
following may be mentioned: J. P. DUNN, "Massacres of the Mountains, A
History of the Indian Wars of the Far West," 1886.
L. E. TEXTOR, "Official Relations between the United States and the
Sioux Indians," 1896.
G. W. MANYPENNY, "Our Indian Wards," 1880.
There is an extensive bibliography appended to Frederic L. Paxson's "The
Last American Frontier" (1910), the first book to bring together the
many aspects of the Far West.