The Passing of the Frontier: A Chronicle of the Old West

om the first destined to win. His steady advance, now on this flank, now on that, just back of the vanguard pushing westw

learing 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 N

y 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 fir

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

e 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

er number steadily moving westward. There were lean years and dry years, hot years, yellow years here and there upon

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

stry 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 wo

ry 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

thy. 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 o

ck-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 str

derestimated 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, pu

mon 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

attle 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 We

en eagerly which would have been refused with contempt a decade earlier. Th

n 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. Natur

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 th

taxes, not supporting the civilization of the country, not building the schools o

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 cour

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 surfa

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

ay 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

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,

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; an

lly 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

ntent 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 ma

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 i

ble 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

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. B

p 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 homeste

ertain 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

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 la

f 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

s 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

if we forget and abandon its strong lessons,

GRAPHI

n rarely qualified for his task by long experience in the cattle business and on the trail. Nothing better exist

, "The Story of t

LL, "The Story of

"The Story of t

INN, "The Story o

n's interesting series known as "The Story of the West" are valuable as cont

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 t

ry informing book done by an Army officer who was also a sportsman and a close observer of the cond

sperado, with historical narratives of famous outlaws, stories of noted b

e in graphic anecdotal fashion of the scenes in the early mining camps of Idaho and Monta

ates and territorial regions of our Western empire, embracing history, statistics, and geography, with

Ocean, with details regarding scenery, agriculture, mines, business, social life, etc., including a f

t care of an Army engineer. An extraordinary collection of facts and a general view of the picturesque early industry of the fur trad

book, but done with contemporary accuracy by a man who also studied the Texas Range

n concerned with frontier life or with the expansion of the American people to the West. Space lacks for a fuller list, but

wrote, upon the ground, of things which they actually saw and actually understood. It is not always

the following may be mentioned: J. P. DUNN, "Massacres of the

ions between the United State

Y, "Our Indian

. Paxson's "The Last American Frontier" (1910), the first