CHAPTER IX_The New Nation

THE LAST OF THE FRONTIER

Five statutes that received the signature of Grover Cleveland are

documentary proof of the new problems and the changing attitude of the

National Administration during the eighties. They indicate that the

chief function of the National Government had ceased to be to moderate

among a group of self-sufficient States and had come to be the direction

of such interests as were national in importance or extent. On February

4, 1887, the Interstate Commerce Law was passed in recognition of a

transportation system that had become national; and four days later the

Dawes Bill, providing that lands should be issued to Indians in

severalty, marked the disappearance of the wild Indian from the border.

In 1889 a Department of Agriculture, with a seat in the Cabinet, and a

law for the survey of irrigation sites in the Far West, mark the

interest of a nation in the prosperity of its whole area and population;

while laws of 1889 and 1890 admitting six new States extended the chain

of commonwealths for the first time from ocean to ocean. A process that

had been under way since Jamestown and Plymouth Rock had culminated in

the occupation of the whole breadth of the continent.

The first continental railroad, the Union Pacific, chartered in 1862

and finished in 1869, was admittedly a national project. Its purpose was

to bind the Pacific Slope to the East in a period when sectionalism was

a menace to national unity. Its opening was the first step in the

completion of an intricate system of lines extending to the Pacific.

Direct federal aid was given to the road in the form of land grants,

right of way, and a loan of bonds.

Other continental railroads were authorized in the later sixties. In

1864 a Northern Pacific, to connect Lake Superior and Puget Sound, made

its appearance. In 1866 the Atlantic & Pacific was given the right to

run from a southwestern terminal at Springfield, Missouri, to southern

California. In 1871 the Texas Pacific was designed to connect the head

of navigation on the Red River, near Shreveport and Texarkana, with Fort

Yuma and San Diego. Additional lines with continental possibilities

received charters from the Western States,--the Denver & Rio Grande, the

Chicago, Burlington & Quincy, and the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe,--and

received indirectly a share of the public domain as an inducement to

build. Congress stopped making land grants for this purpose in 1871, but

not until more lines than could be used for twenty years had been

allowed.

All the continental railways were begun before 1873, were checked by the

five years of depression, and were revived about 1878. When they began

again to build there was associated with them a new project for an old

continental route.

The interoceanic canal had been foreseen ever since the first white man

stood on the Isthmus and gazed at the Pacific. Its construction had been

stimulated by the gold discoveries and the California emigration of

1848-49, and had been arranged for in a treaty signed with Great Britain

in 1850. No means to build the canal were found, however, and the

project drifted along until De Lesseps finished his canal at Suez, and

the new interest in continental communication in America resuscitated

the canal at Panama. In 1878 a French company, with De Lesseps at its

head, obtained a concession from Colombia. It began work in 1880, at

once arousing the jealousy of the United States which was shown in the

efforts of Hayes, Garfield, and Arthur to abrogate the Clayton-Bulwer

Treaty and procure for the United States a free hand at the Isthmus.

Cleveland reverted to the policy of a neutralized canal in 1885, but

interest on either side was premature, since no canal was built for

thirty years.

The continental railways aroused keen interest in problems of

transportation by their completion between 1881 and 1885. The Northern

Pacific was finished under the direction of Henry Villard, a German

journalist who had been a correspondent in the Civil War and had managed

the interests of foreign investors after 1873. He gained control of the

partly finished Northern Pacific and the local lines of Oregon through a

holding company known as the Oregon & Transcontinental. In September,

1883, he took a special train, full of distinguished visitors, over his

lines to witness the driving of the last spike near Helena, Montana. On

the way out, they stopped at Bismarck to help lay the corner-stone for

an ambitious new capitol of the Territory of Dakota. From Duluth to

Tacoma the new line brought in immigrants whose freight made its chief

business.

South of the Northern Pacific, the original main line of the Union

Pacific ran from Omaha up the Platte Trail through Cheyenne to Ogden,

with a branch from Kansas City to Denver and Cheyenne. Between the main

line and the branch the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy constructed a road

that reached Denver in May, 1882. Here it met, in 1883, the Denver & Rio

Grande, a narrow-gauge road that penetrated the divide by way of the

canyon of the Arkansas River, and extended to the Great Salt Lake. The

two roads together offered a competition to the Union Pacific for its

whole length from the Missouri River to Ogden, and drove that road to

extend feeder branches south to the Gulf and north into Oregon.

Farther south the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe stretched the whole length

of Kansas and followed the old trail to Santa Fe and the Rio Grande, and

thence to Old Mexico. Its owners cooperated with the owners of the

Atlantic & Pacific franchise, and the Southern Pacific of California, to

build a connecting link between the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe at

Albuquerque and the Colorado River at the Needles. From this point the

Southern Pacific traversed the valleys of California. In October, 1883,

trains were running from San Francisco to St. Louis over this road.

[Illustration: By 1870 the railway net had covered the eastern half of

the United States and had just begun its Pacific extension. There were

52,914 miles of railroad.]

[Illustration: By 1890 the railway mileage of the United States had

increased to 163,597, extending the railway net over the whole

trans-Missouri region, and reinforced by lines in Canada and Mexico.

THE WESTERN RAILROADS AND THE CONTINENTAL FRONTIER, 1870-1890

(Based upon the maps showing density of population in the Eleventh

Rand-McNally Official Rail-Census, and upon Appleton's Railway Guide,

November, 1871, and the way Guide, August, 1891.)]

The Southern Pacific of California met the other continental lines at

the Fort Yuma crossing of the Colorado River. The Texas Pacific had got

only to Fort Worth before the panic of 1873. It now built across Texas

toward El Paso. Subsidiary corporations owned by the Southern Pacific

men built the line between El Paso and Fort Yuma, and enabled a through

service to start to St. Louis in January, and to New Orleans in October,

1882. Yet another Southern Pacific line was opened through San Antonio

and Houston, tapping the commerce of the Gulf shore, and running trains

to New Orleans in February, 1883.

The opening of great lines in the United States in the early eighties

was part of a similar movement throughout the world. In Canada, Sir

Donald Smith, later raised to the peerage as Lord Strathcona, was

beginning the Canadian Pacific from Port Arthur to Vancouver, while on

the Continent of Europe the first train of the "Orient Express" left

Paris for Constantinople in June, 1883. In November, 1883, the American

railroads, realizing that they were a national system, agreed upon a

scheme of standard time by which to run their trains. Heretofore every

road had followed what local time it chose, to the confusion of the

traveling public.

Most of the continental railways had extensive land grants, of from

twenty to forty sections per mile of track, but whether they had lands

to sell or not they were vitally interested in the settlement of the

regions through which they ran. Each encouraged immigration and

colonization. Their literature, scattered over Europe, was one factor in

the heavy drift of population that started after 1878. Six new Western

States were created in the ten years after their completion.

The youngest American Territory in the eighties was Wyoming, created in

1868, and the youngest State was Colorado, admitted in 1876. After

Colorado, the political division of the West embraced eight organized

Territories: Dakota, Montana, Idaho, and Washington along the Canadian

line, Wyoming and Utah in the middle, Arizona and New Mexico on the

Mexican border. Besides these Territories there was the unorganized

remnant of the Indian country known as Indian Territory, and attracting

the covetous glances of frontiersmen in all the near-by Western States.

Agriculture was the main reliance of the wave of pioneers that poured

over the plains along the lines of the railroads. In the valley of the

Red River of the North, wheat-farming was their staple industry. As the

Old South had devoted itself to the staple crop of cotton, so this new

region took up the single crop of wheat, bringing to its cultivation

great machines, white labor, and a modified factory system. South of the

wheat country, corn dominated in Kansas, Iowa, and Nebraska, and went to

market either as grain or in the converted form of hogs or stock. In

Texas the cotton-fields pushed into new areas. The farm lands completely

surrounded the Indian Territory, in which a diversified agriculture was

known to be both possible and profitable.

Across the United States, from Canada to Mexico, the advance line of

farms pushed from the well-watered bottoms of the Mississippi Valley

into the plains that rise toward the Rocky Mountains. Near the

ninety-seventh meridian the rainfall of this region becomes insufficient

for general farming in ordinary years. But the solicitations of

land-sellers brought settlers into the sub-humid region, while for a few

years in the eighties the rainfall was greater than the average.

Permanent climatic changes were imagined by the hopeful. A Governor of

Kansas stated, in 1886, "with absolute certainty, that great areas in

the Western third of Kansas are becoming more fertile," while an Eastern

Senator, who was generally well informed, believed in 1888 that "the

whole Territory of Dakota is as capable of sustaining population as

Iowa."

Between the farming frontier and the mountains the cattlemen expanded

the grazing industry, with profits that were enlarged because of the

markets that the railroads brought them. The "long drive" from Texas to

Montana became a familiar idea on the border, while the cowboys in their

lonely watches developed a folk-song literature that is typically

American. Between the cattlemen and the sheepmen there was permanent

war, for the sheep injured the grass they grazed over. Although both

industries were trespassers on the public lands the herders resented the

appearance of the flocks as an intrusion upon their domain.

Kansas City rose suddenly to prominence as the meeting-place of the

railways of the West and Southwest with those of the East. Near to the

line that divided steady agriculture from the nomadic life of the

plains it became a convenient market for both. Here the packers

developed the traffic in fresh beef that the new railways with their

refrigerator cars made possible. The cities of the East, in need of more

fresh meat than the local farmers could provide, found their supply on

the plains of the Far West.

Beyond the plains, the mountain regions changed less from the advent of

the railways than any other section of the remote West. They had

attracted population to their camps during the Civil War, and now they

grew in size and permanence. But only such regions reached permanent

importance as had valleys to be irrigated and fields to be cultivated.

Without agriculture no important region has flourished in the West.

Toward the end of the eighties the pressure of the population for more

homestead lands brought about the opening of Oklahoma. Here, for over

half a century, the Indian tribes had lived in full possession. After

the Civil War the plains tribes had been colonized here too. Now, as the

lands were awarded to the Indians in severalty under the Dawes Act, the

old tribal holdings were surrendered and large areas were offered to

white settlement. After ten years of ejectment and restraint the

Oklahoma boomers were let into the country in 1889. Guthrie and Oklahoma

City were created overnight, and in 1890 the Territory of Oklahoma

received permanent organization.

Before the last continental railway was finished, the Territories were

asking for statehood and were showing advance in population to justify

it. When Villard aided in the corner-stone laying at Bismarck in 1883

there were already three clearly defined groups of population in Dakota

and an ultimate division had been determined upon by the settlers.

Repeatedly, in the decade, the Dakota colonists framed constitutions and

signed petitions, and the Republicans in Congress sought to give them

statehood. The Democratic House, which prevailed from 1883 to 1889, saw

no reason for creating more Republican States, as these would likely be,

and found pretexts for holding up the bills. Montana, less advanced than

Dakota, and Idaho and Wyoming which were yet more primitive, joined the

forces of the statehood advocates. Arizona and New Mexico did the same,

and Utah had been a suitor since 1850. Washington, with a growing

population on Puget Sound and in the Spokane country, was obviously not

long to be denied.

For party purposes, the Democrats resisted the demands for statehood

until the election of 1888 insured Republican control through every

branch of the United States Government. Thereafter there was no point to

resistance, and Cleveland, in 1889, signed an "omnibus" bill under which

North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, and Washington were admitted. Idaho

and Wyoming, defeated at this time, were let in by the Republicans in

1890. The unorganized frontier was now all but gone, and the pioneers of

these new States used Pullman cars and read the monthly magazines like

any other citizens.

Arizona and New Mexico were excluded from the new States of 1889 and

1890 because a Republican Congress expected them to be Democratic, and

both remained Territories for more than twenty succeeding years. Utah,

with ample population, was kept where the Federal Government could

control it because of the practices taught by its Church. The Mormons

had made a prosperous Territory in Utah by 1850. They had flourished

ever since, but their institution of polygamy frightened the United

States and created permanent hostility to their admission. In 1882 the

Territory was placed under a commission, and thereafter polygamous

citizens were brought to punishment. In 1890 the Church gave up the

fight and formally abandoned the obnoxious doctrine, but the surrender

came too late to accomplish admission at this time.

THE DISTRIBUTION OF THE PUBLIC DOMAIN, 1789-1904

The large rectangle represents the total land area of the United States,

excluding Alaska and the Islands

1,902,000,000 Acres

+-----------------------------------------------------------+-------------+

| |Land area of |

| |the thirteen |

| |original |

| |states |

| |and Maine, |

| |Vermont, West|

| Public lands remaining in the possession |Virginia, |

| of the United States in 1904 |Kentucky, |

| about 700,000,000 Acres |Tennessee, |

| |and Texas, |

| |in none |

| |of which |

| |has the |

| |public domain|

| |ever existed |

+-----------+------------+------------+---------------------+ |

|122,000,000|137,000,000 | 164,000,000| 319,000,000 | Report of the |

| | of the |

| Land area of the twenty-nine states constituting the | General Land |

| public domain. 1,442,000,000 Acres | Office, 1905) |

+---------------------------------------------------------+---------------+

By 1890 the good agricultural lands of the United States were nearly all

in private hands. Their occupation had been hastened in the last five

years by facility of access and the efforts of the railways. With the

disappearance of free lands a new period in America began, as was

recognized at the time, and has become clearer ever since.

Out of forty-eight States comprising the United States in 1912, and

including about 1,902,000,000 acres, twenty-nine with 1,442,000,000

acres had been erected in the public domain to which Congress had once

owned title. By cession, purchase, or conquest this domain had been

acquired between 1781 and 1853; it had been treated as a national asset

and governed with what efficiency Congress possessed. By 1903 the United

States had transferred to individuals about half its public land and

nearly all its farm land. It retained many millions of acres, but these

were mountain or desert, and were not usable by the individual farmer

who had been the typical unit in the occupation of the West.

Already, by 1880, the statisticians had recognized that the period of

free land was at an end, and had turned their attention to the abuses

which had arisen in the administration of the estate. From the

beginning, it had been difficult to compel the West to respect national

land laws. The squatter who occupied lands without title had always been

an obstacle to uniform administration. Evasion of the law had rarely

been frowned upon by Western opinion, which had hoped to get the public

lands into private hands by the quickest route. In the region where the

laws had to be enforced, opinion prevented it, while the National

Administration, before the adoption of civil service reform, was

incapable of directing with accuracy and uniform policy any

administrative scheme which must be so highly technical as a land

office. The Preemption, Homestead, and Timber Culture Laws were all

framed in the interest of the small holder, but were all perverted by

fraud and collusion. The United States invited much of the fraud by

making no provision by which those industries which had a valid need for

a large acreage could get it legally.

Among the special abuses that were observed now that it was too late to

remedy them were the violations of the law and the lawless seizures of

the public lands. The cattle companies took and fenced what they needed

and drove out "trespassers" by force. Mail contractors complained of

illegal inclosures which they dare not cross, but which diverted the

United States mail from its lawful course. Yet such was the general land

law that against all but the United States Government the possessors

could maintain their possession. If the Government could not or would

not interfere, there was no redress.

These abuses had been noticed for many years, and were specially

advertised in the early eighties by the enormous holdings of a few

British noblemen. The problem of absentee landlordism was exciting

Ireland in these years. When Cleveland became President his Commissioner

of the General Land Office, Sparks, turned cheerfully and vigorously to

reform, and denounced the discreditable condition the more readily

because it had appeared under Republican administration. He held up the

granting of homestead and preemption titles for the purpose of

examination and inspection, and demanded the repeal of the Preemption

Law. He was successful in recovering some of the lands that had been

offered to the railways to aid in their construction.

The railway land grants were notorious because the railways had rarely

been done on contract time, and had in theory forfeited their grants.

The estimated area offered them was about 214,000,000 acres, and the

question arose as to the extent to which forfeiture should be imposed

upon them. The spectacular completion of their lines and their efforts

to bring a population into the West, and the vast size of the

corporations that owned them, had aroused a hostile opinion that

supported the Democratic Administration in its efforts to save what

lands it could. Some fifty million acres were restored to the domain by

this fight, but the restoration only emphasized the fact that most of

the good lands were gone.

Out of the demand for the reform of the public lands grew a new interest

in the condition of the lands that were left. The Department of

Agriculture was created at the end of Cleveland's term, and Governor

Jeremiah Rusk was appointed as its first Secretary by Harrison. Rusk

accepted cheerfully his place as "the tail of the Cabinet," asserting

that as such he was expected "to keep the flies off," and set about

rearranging or organizing a group of scientific bureaus. Since most of

the remaining lands could not be used without irrigation, the surveys

undertaken by Congress started a new phase of public science, and led

ultimately to the rise of a positive theory of conservation.

The problems of national communication, Western settlement, and public

lands resulted from the completion of the continental railways, while

the railways themselves gave a new significance to transportation in

America. During the years of the Granger movement the doctrine had been

established that railroads are quasi-public and are subject to

regulation by public authority. In the Granger Cases in 1877 the Supreme

Court recognized the right of the States to establish rates by law, even

when these rates, by becoming part of a through rate, had an incidental

effect upon interstate commerce. The problem had been viewed as local

or regional during the seventies. Most of the States had passed railway

laws and had proceeded to accumulate a volume of statistical information

upon the railway business, that was increased by such public

investigations as the Windom and Hepburn Reports and by lawsuits that

revealed the nature of special favors and rebates.

Before the States had gone far in the direction of railway regulation it

was discovered that no State could regulate an interstate railway with

precision and justice. The great systems built up by Villard and Gould

and Vanderbilt and Huntington dominated whole regions and precipitated

the question of the effectiveness of state action. The continental

lines, necessarily long and traversing several States, emphasized the

inequality between the powers of a State and the problem to be met.

Their national character pointed to national control.

In Congress there were repeated attempts after 1873 to secure the

passage of an Interstate Commerce Act. In continuation of this campaign

a committee headed by Senator Shelby M. Cullom, of Illinois, made a new

investigation in 1885, and reported early in 1886 that supervision and

publicity were required, and that these could best be obtained through a

federal commission with large powers of taking testimony and examining

books. The committee was convinced, as the public was already convinced,

that the problem had become national.

The Supreme Court reached the same opinion in 1886 when it handed down a

new decision in the case of the Wabash Railway Company vs. Illinois.

Here it reversed or modified its own decision in the Granger Cases. In

1877 it had ruled that railways are subject to regulation and that the

States under their police powers may regulate. It now adhered to its

major premise, but declared that such regulation as affected an

interstate rate is exclusively a federal function. In effect it

determined that if there was to be regulation of the great systems it

could only be at the hands of Congress.

The regulation of interstate commerce was not a party measure. It had

its advocates in both parties, and found its opponents in the railroad

lobby that resented any public interference with the business of the

roads. The railway owners and directors were slower than the public in

accepting the doctrine of the quasi-public nature of their business. It

was a powerful argument against them that their size and influence were

such that they could and did ruin or enrich individual customers, and

that they could make or destroy whole regions of the West. Enough

positive proof of favoritism existed to give point to the demand that

the business must cease to discriminate.

The Interstate Commerce Act became a law February 4, 1887. It created a

commission of five, with a six-year term and the proviso that not more

than three of the commissioners should belong to one party. It forbade a

group of practices which had resulted in unfair discrimination and gave

to the commission considerable powers in investigation and interference.

The later interpretation of the law deprived the commission of some of

the powers that, it was thought, had been given to it, but during the

next nineteen years the Interstate Commerce Commission was a central

figure in the solution of the railroad problem. The work of this

commission, like the work of irrigation and agriculture, was technical,

calling for expert service, and aiding in the process that was changing

the character of the National Administration as one function after

another was called into service for the first time.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

In 1893 F.J. Turner called attention to the _Significance of the

Frontier in American History_ (in American Historical Association,

Annual Report, 1893). His theory has been elaborated by F.L. Paxson,

_The Last American Frontier_ (1910), and K. Coman, _Economic Beginnings

of the Far West_ (1912). There is no good account of the public lands.

T. Donaldson, _The Public Domain_ (1881), is inaccurate, antiquated, and

clumsy, but has not been supplanted. Many useful tables are in the

report of the Public Lands Commission created by President Roosevelt (in

58th Congress, 3d session, Senate Document, No. 189, Serial No. 4766).

The general spirit of the frontier in the eighties has been appreciated

by Owen Wister, in _The Virginian_ (1902), and _Members of the Family_

(1911), and by E. Talbot, in _My People of the Plains_ (1906). J.A.

Lomax has preserved some of its folklore in _Cowboy Songs and Other

Frontier Ballads_ (1910). The best narratives on the continental

railways are J.P. Davis, _Union Pacific Railway_ (1894), and E.V.

Smalley, _The Northern Pacific Railroad_ (1883). Many contributory

details are in H. Villard, _Memoirs_ (2 vols., 1904), E.P. Oberholtzer,

_Jay Cooke_ (2 vols., 1907), and in the appropriate volumes of H.H.

Bancroft, _Works_. L.H. Haney has compiled the formal documents in his

_Congressional History of Railroads_ (in Bulletins of the University of

Wisconsin, Nos. 211 and 342). The debate over the Isthmian Canal may be

read in J.D. Richardson, _Messages and Papers of the Presidents_; the

Foreign relations Reports, 1879-83; L.M. Keasbey, _The Nicaragua Canal

and the Monroe Doctrine_ (1896); J.B. Henderson, _American Diplomatic

Questions_ (1901); and J. Latane, _Diplomatic Relations of the United

States and Spanish America_ (1900).