The old order of developing new regions in the West was reversed when
the railroad era began. Formerly the country was settled first, and the
towns grew up to supply the needs of the rural population. Afterwards
the towns were created by speculators far in advance of the farming
settlement; and by the conveniences they afforded for selling crops,
and buying implements, lumber and household supplies, they attracted
farmers to their vicinity. Each new frontier town is an advertisement
of the surrounding country, upon the settlement of which it must
depend for its existence. The towns-folk are untiring in their praises
of the soil and climate, and if you believe them the next grade of
human felicity to living in their raw little village is to live upon a
farm in the neighborhood. Whatever happens in the way of disagreeable
weather, they assure you it is good for the crops. If it snows in May
or hails in June, they come up smiling, and remark blandly that it
is just what the crops need. The creation of a new town on a line of
railroad pushing its track out into the vacant, treeless spaces of
the far West, is an interesting process to observe. A speculator, or
a company of speculators, look over the ground carefully fifty or a
hundred miles in advance of the temporary terminus of the railroad,
and hit upon a site which they think has special advantages, and
is far enough away from the last town. They make a treaty with the
railroad company for a section of land, agreeing, perhaps, to share
the prospective profits on the sale of lots. Then they "scrip" the
adjoining sections of Government land, or take it up with desert land
claims. A large amount of land scrip is afloat on the market issued in
pursuance of Indian treaties, Agricultural College grants, old Military
Bounty Land acts and other peculiar features of our complicated Public
Land System. The speculator with his pocket stocked with scrip is able
to pick out any choice sections not occupied by homestead or preëmption
claimants. Having thus obtained a sufficient body of land to operate
with, the founding of the new town is trumpeted in the newspapers, and
in all the frontier region for hundreds of miles there is a stir of
excitement about the coming city. Billings, on the Yellowstone, is a
good example of a town made by this process. In the beginning it had
no existence save in the brains of its inventors. The bare prairie was
staked out in streets, avenues and parks, on a scale for a city of
twenty thousand inhabitants. A map was engraved, and within a few weeks
after the place got its name, the "Billings boom" began to be talked of
as far east as St. Paul. Billings lots were advertised in every town
from St. Paul to Miles City, and whole blocks were sold in Chicago and
New York. The purchasers, as a rule, knew no more about the valley of
the Yellowstone than about that of the Congo, and few of them could
have put their finger on a spot upon a map within a hundred miles of
Billings. They heard there was a boom, and were eager to take their
chances for profit or loss. It was enough for them to hear the place
spoken of as the future metropolis of the Yellowstone Valley. Within
sixty days from the time when Billings got a local habitation and a
name, lots to the value of $220,000 were sold within its limits, and
before thirty days more had elapsed the purchasers had advanced the
imaginary value of their holdings from one hundred to three hundred per
cent.
Charles Dickens once said that the typical American would hesitate
about entering heaven, unless assured that he could go further West.
The men who lead the advance of the army of civilization on the
frontier skirmish line do not come from the rear. They are always
the scouts and pickets. The people of the six-weeks-old town do not
come from the East. As a rule they are from the one-year-old and
two-year-old towns a little further back. Most of the men I met in
the Yellowstone country were from Eastern Dakota, or the Black Hills
region, or from Western Minnesota. When asked why they left homes so
recently made in a new country, their reply was invariably that they
wanted to get further West.