HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES - CHARLES A. BEARD Part 7 doc

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same year also a third line was opened to the Pacific by way of the Atchison, Topeka and

Santa Fé, making connections through Albuquerque and Needles with San Francisco. The

fondest hopes of railway promoters seemed to be realized.

UNITED STATES IN 1870

Western Railways Precede Settlement.—In the Old World and on our Atlantic

seaboard, railways followed population and markets. In the Far West, railways usually

preceded the people. Railway builders planned cities on paper before they laid tracks

connecting them. They sent missionaries to spread the gospel of "Western opportunity" to

people in the Middle West, in the Eastern cities, and in Southern states. Then they carried

their enthusiastic converts bag and baggage in long trains to the distant Dakotas and still

farther afield. So the development of the Far West was not left to the tedious processes of

time. It was pushed by men of imagination—adventurers who made a romance of money￾making and who had dreams of empire unequaled by many kings of the past.

These empire builders bought railway lands in huge tracts; they got more from the

government; they overcame every obstacle of cañon, mountain, and stream with the aid

of science; they built cities according to the plans made by the engineers. Having the

towns ready and railway and steamboat connections formed with the rest of the world,

they carried out the people to use the railways, the steamships, the houses, and the land. It

was in this way that "the frontier speculator paved the way for the frontier agriculturalist

who had to be near a market before he could farm." The spirit of this imaginative

enterprise, which laid out railways and towns in advance of the people, is seen in an

advertisement of that day: "This extension will run 42 miles from York, northeast

through the Island Lake country, and will have five good North Dakota towns. The

stations on the line will be well equipped with elevators and will be constructed and

ready for operation at the commencement of the grain season. Prospective merchants

have been active in securing desirable locations at the different towns on the line. There

are still opportunities for hotels, general merchandise, hardware, furniture, and drug

stores, etc."

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Copyright by Underwood and

Underwood, N.Y.

A TOWN ON THE PRAIRIE

Among the railway promoters and builders in the West, James J. Hill, of the Great

Northern and allied lines, was one of the most forceful figures. He knew that tracks and

trains were useless without passengers and freight; without a population of farmers and

town dwellers. He therefore organized publicity in the Virginias, Iowa, Ohio, Indiana,

Illinois, Wisconsin, and Nebraska especially. He sent out agents to tell the story of

Western opportunity in this vein: "You see your children come out of school with no

chance to get farms of their own because the cost of land in your older part of the country

is so high that you can't afford to buy land to start your sons out in life around you. They

have to go to the cities to make a living or become laborers in the mills or hire out as

farm hands. There is no future for them there. If you are doing well where you are and

can safeguard the future of your children and see them prosper around you, don't leave

here. But if you want independence, if you are renting your land, if the money-lender is

carrying you along and you are running behind year after year, you can do no worse by

moving.... You farmers talk of free trade and protection and what this or that political

party will do for you. Why don't you vote a homestead for yourself? That is the only

thing Uncle Sam will ever give you. Jim Hill hasn't an acre of land to sell you. We are not

in the real estate business. We don't want you to go out West and make a failure of it

because the rates at which we haul you and your goods make the first transaction a loss....

We must have landless men for a manless land."

Unlike steamship companies stimulating immigration to get the fares, Hill was

seeking permanent settlers who would produce, manufacture, and use the railways as the

means of exchange. Consequently he fixed low rates and let his passengers take a good

deal of live stock and household furniture free. By doing this he made an appeal that was

answered by eager families. In 1894 the vanguard of home seekers left Indiana in

fourteen passenger coaches, filled with men, women, and children, and forty-eight freight

cars carrying their household goods and live stock. In the ten years that followed,

100,000 people from the Middle West and the South, responding to his call, went to the

Western country where they brought eight million acres of prairie land under cultivation.

When Hill got his people on the land, he took an interest in everything that increased

the productivity of their labor. Was the output of food for his freight cars limited by bad

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drainage on the farms? Hill then interested himself in practical ways of ditching and

tiling. Were farmers hampered in hauling their goods to his trains by bad roads? In that

case, he urged upon the states the improvement of highways. Did the traffic slacken

because the food shipped was not of the best quality? Then live stock must be improved

and scientific farming promoted. Did the farmers need credit? Banks must be established

close at hand to advance it. In all conferences on scientific farm management,

conservation of natural resources, banking and credit in relation to agriculture and

industry, Hill was an active participant. His was the long vision, seeing in conservation

and permanent improvements the foundation of prosperity for the railways and the

people.

Indeed, he neglected no opportunity to increase the traffic on the lines. He wanted no

empty cars running in either direction and no wheat stored in warehouses for the lack of

markets. So he looked to the Orient as well as to Europe as an outlet for the surplus of the

farms. He sent agents to China and Japan to discover what American goods and produce

those countries would consume and what manufactures they had to offer to Americans in

exchange. To open the Pacific trade he bought two ocean monsters, the Minnesota and

the Dakota, thus preparing for emergencies West as well as East. When some Japanese

came to the United States on their way to Europe to buy steel rails, Hill showed them

how easy it was for them to make their purchase in this country and ship by way of

American railways and American vessels. So the railway builder and promoter, who

helped to break the virgin soil of the prairies, lived through the pioneer epoch and into the

age of great finance. Before he died he saw the wheat fields of North Dakota linked with

the spinning jennies of Manchester and the docks of Yokohama.

THE EVOLUTION OF GRAZING AND AGRICULTURE

The Removal of the Indians.—Unlike the frontier of New England in colonial days

or that of Kentucky later, the advancing lines of home builders in the Far West had little

difficulty with warlike natives. Indian attacks were made on the railway construction

gangs; General Custer had his fatal battle with the Sioux in 1876 and there were minor

brushes; but they were all of relatively slight consequence. The former practice of

treating with the Indians as independent nations was abandoned in 1871 and most of them

were concentrated in reservations where they were mainly supported by the government.

The supervision of their affairs was vested in a board of commissioners created in 1869

and instructed to treat them as wards of the nation—a trust which unfortunately was often

betrayed. A further step in Indian policy was taken in 1887 when provision was made for

issuing lands to individual Indians, thus permitting them to become citizens and settle

down among their white neighbors as farmers or cattle raisers. The disappearance of the

buffalo, the main food supply of the wild Indians, had made them more tractable and

more willing to surrender the freedom of the hunter for the routine of the reservation,

ranch, or wheat field.

The Cowboy and Cattle Ranger.—Between the frontier of farms and the mountains

were plains and semi-arid regions in vast reaches suitable for grazing. As soon as the

railways were open into the Missouri Valley, affording an outlet for stock, there sprang

up to the westward cattle and sheep raising on an immense scale. The far-famed

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American cowboy was the hero in this scene. Great herds of cattle were bred in Texas;

with the advancing spring and summer seasons, they were driven northward across the

plains and over the buffalo trails. In a single year, 1884, it is estimated that nearly one

million head of cattle were moved out of Texas to the North by four thousand cowboys,

supplied with 30,000 horses and ponies.

During the two decades from 1870 to 1890 both the cattle men and the sheep raisers

had an almost free run of the plains, using public lands without paying for the privilege

and waging war on one another over the possession of ranges. At length, however, both

had to go, as the homesteaders and land companies came and fenced in the plain and

desert with endless lines of barbed wire. Already in 1893 a writer familiar with the

frontier lamented the passing of the picturesque days: "The unique position of the

cowboys among the Americans is jeopardized in a thousand ways. Towns are growing up

on their pasture lands; irrigation schemes of a dozen sorts threaten to turn bunch-grass

scenery into farm-land views; farmers are pre-empting valleys and the sides of

waterways; and the day is not far distant when stock-raising must be done mainly in

small herds, with winter corrals, and then the cowboy's days will end. Even now his

condition disappoints those who knew him only half a dozen years ago. His breed seems

to have deteriorated and his ranks are filling with men who work for wages rather than

for the love of the free life and bold companionship that once tempted men into that

calling. Splendid Cheyenne saddles are less and less numerous in the outfits; the

distinctive hat that made its way up from Mexico may or may not be worn; all the civil

authorities in nearly all towns in the grazing country forbid the wearing of side arms;

nobody shoots up these towns any more. The fact is the old simon-pure cowboy days are

gone already."

Settlement under the Homestead Act of 1862.—Two factors gave a special stimulus

to the rapid settlement of Western lands which swept away the Indians and the cattle

rangers. The first was the policy of the railway companies in selling large blocks of land

received from the government at low prices to induce immigration. The second was the

operation of the Homestead law passed in 1862. This measure practically closed the long

controversy over the disposition of the public domain that was suitable for agriculture. It

provided for granting, without any cost save a small registration fee, public lands in lots

of 160 acres each to citizens and aliens who declared their intention of becoming citizens.

The one important condition attached was that the settler should occupy the farm for five

years before his title was finally confirmed. Even this stipulation was waived in the case

of the Civil War veterans who were allowed to count their term of military service as a

part of the five years' occupancy required. As the soldiers of the Revolutionary and

Mexican wars had advanced in great numbers to the frontier in earlier days, so now

veterans led in the settlement of the middle border. Along with them went thousands of

German, Irish, and Scandinavian immigrants, fresh from the Old World. Between 1867

and 1874, 27,000,000 acres were staked out in quarter-section farms. In twenty years

(1860-80), the population of Nebraska leaped from 28,000 to almost half a million;

Kansas from 100,000 to a million; Iowa from 600,000 to 1,600,000; and the Dakotas

from 5000 to 140,000.

The Diversity of Western Agriculture.—In soil, produce, and management, Western

agriculture presented many contrasts to that of the East and South. In the region of arable