The United States Since the Civil War Part 3

CHAPTER III

ECONOMIC FOUNDATIONS OF THE NEW ERA

With the close of Grant's administration, the main immediate problems connected with political reconstruction came to an end. During the war, however, important economic and social developments had been taking place throughout the United States which were destined to take on greater and greater significance. The reconstruction problem looked backward to the war; the new developments looked forward to a new America. Reconstruction affected fewer and fewer people as time went on; the later changes ultimately transformed the daily life of every individual in the nation. Not only did they determine the means by which he earned his livelihood, but the comforts which he enjoyed, the conditions of rural or urban life which surrounded him, the ease with which he visited other portions of the country or obtained information concerning them, the number and variety of the foreign products that could be brought to him, the political problems upon which he thought and voted, and the att.i.tude of the government toward his cla.s.s in society. Most of these changes were distinguishable during the twenty-five years following the war and could be stated in brief and definite terms.

From the standpoint of population, the growth of the country before 1890, although not so rapid as it had been before the war, was both constant and important. Between 1870 and 1890 the numbers of people increased from nearly thirty-nine millions to nearly sixty-three millions, the rate each decade being not far from twenty-five per cent.

Six states added more than a million each to their population--New York and Pennsylvania in the Northeast; Ohio, Illinois and Kansas in the Middle West; and Texas in the South. No fewer than seventeen others expanded by half a million or more--ten of the seventeen being in the valley drained by the Mississippi River system.

Detailed study of particular sections of the country discloses a continuous shifting of population which indicates changes in the economic life of the people. In northern New England, the numbers increased slowly. Both Maine and New Hampshire lost from 1860 to 1870; nearly half of Maine's counties and nearly two-thirds of Vermont's lost population between 1880 and 1890; the people were abandoning the rural districts to flock to the cities or migrate to the West. Shipbuilding fell off in Maine; the dairy interests languished in Vermont, less wheat was being planted and the farmers, no longer growing wool, were selling their flocks. Most of the growth was to be found in the industrial counties. The traditional New England thrift, however, was not lost with the migration of the people, for savings bank deposits were increasing, and the state of Vermont was free from debt in 1880, and all its counties in 1890. The South, between 1870 and 1890, increased in numbers a little less rapidly than the country as a whole.

On the Atlantic Coast the greatest relative expansion was in Florida; in the western South, in Texas. The increase was almost wholly native, as immigration did not flow into that section.

The great expansion of the Middle West, from Ohio to Kansas, was based upon the public land policy of the federal government. Substantially all this region had once been in the possession of the United States, which had early adopted the system of laying out townships six miles on a side, with subdivisions one mile square, (containing 640 acres), called sections. An important feature of the policy had been the encouragement of education and of transportation through the gift of large grants of the public land. Moreover, settlement had been stimulated by the disposal of land to purchasers at extremely liberal figures. In 1862 the famous Homestead Act had inaugurated a still more generous policy. Under this law the citizen might settle upon a quarter-section and receive a t.i.tle after five years of actual occupation, with no charge other than a slight fee. Millions of acres were taken up in this way both by natives and by immigrants. 1,300,000 people poured into Illinois between 1870 and 1890; over 1,000,000 into Kansas, and nearly that number into Nebraska; in the Dakotas a young man of college age in 1890 might have remembered almost the entire significant portion of the history of his state and have been one of the oldest inhabitants. The frontier of settlement advanced from the western edge of Missouri into mid-Kansas, and almost met the growing population of the Far West, whose economic possibilities had already attracted attention.

The discovery of gold-dust in a mill-race in California had drawn the "Forty-niners" to

... lands of gold That lay toward the sun.

For a few years fabulous sums of the precious metal had been extracted from the ground by the hordes of treasure-seekers who had come from all over the world by boat, pack-animal or "prairie schooner," around Cape Horn, across the Isthmus of Panama or over the western mountains.

When the yield of the mines had slackened, some of the population had filtered off to newer fields, but more had settled down to exploit the agricultural and lumber resources of California. In Nevada a rich vein of silver called the "Comstock Lode" had been discovered; in 1873 a group operating the "Virginia Consolidated" mine struck the great "bonanza," and the output reached unheard of proportions. The success of the mines, however, was essential to Nevada, which had few other resources to develop, and when the yield slowed down the population growth of the state noticeably slackened. In Colorado during the late fifties some prospectors had struck gold, and another rush had made "Pike's Peak or Bust" its slogan. Some had returned, "Busted by Thunder," but others had better fortune, discovered gold, silver or lead, and helped lay the foundations of Denver and Leadville. In Idaho and Montana, in Wyoming and South Dakota and other states, prospectors found gold, silver, copper and lead, and thus attracted much of the population that later settled down to occupations which were less feverish and more reliable than mining. In general, the advance of population into the Middle West was more or less regular, as wave on wave made its way into the Mississippi Basin; in the Far West, however, population extended in long arms up the fertile valleys of Washington, Oregon and California, or was found in scattered islands where mineral wealth had been discovered in the Rocky Mountain region.

From the standpoint of absolute growth, the expansion of most of the far western states was not imposing, but the relative increase was suggestive of the future. Colorado nearly quadrupled in a decade, (1870-1880), and Washington equalled the record in the following ten years. California grew faster from 1870 to 1890 than it had done in the gold days, indicating that its development was based on something more lasting than a fickle vein of ore. Meanwhile politicians were fanning the desire of the growing territories to become states, and in 1889 Montana and Washington were admitted, and in the following year Idaho and Wyoming. Of these, Washington alone had a population equivalent to the federal ratio for representation in the House.[1]

Utah was kept outside for a few years longer, until the Mormon Church gave satisfactory indication that anti-polygamy laws were being enforced.

The migration westward, which has been a constant factor in American development since early times, continued unabated after the Civil War; indeed the restless spirit aroused by the four years of conflict undoubtedly tended to increase this steady shift toward the West. By 1890 approximately a fifth of the native Americans were to be found in states other than those in which they had been born. 95,000 natives of Maine, for example, were to be found in Ma.s.sachusetts; 17,000 were in California; and considerable numbers in every state between the two.

The North Carolinians were equally well distributed. 43,000 were in South Carolina, 18,000 in Texas, and 5,500 in Washington. Every state had contributed to populate every other, although in general the migration tended to take place on east and west lines, and predominantly westward.

Within the westward-moving tide of population were swirling eddies--cities--which tended to attract to themselves larger and larger proportions of the surrounding people. In 1870 two men in every ten lived in cities whose population was 8,000 or more; by 1890 another man in every ten had forsaken rural life. Large cities like Boston and New York sucked in surrounding districts, and so const.i.tuted metropolitan centers with problems new to American life. Such cities as Birmingham, Kansas City, and Seattle were just appearing in 1880, but their growth was very rapid; Los Angeles increased ten fold and Minneapolis thirteen, between 1870 and 1890; Denver, having received ten newcomers between 1860 and 1870, added 102,000 in the following twenty years.

In the country as a whole the concentration in cities was most marked in the area north of the Potomac and Ohio rivers and east of the Mississippi; the South remained rural, as before the war. With the growth of urban population came questions of lighting and water supply, street railway transportation and munic.i.p.al government, industry, education, health and morals.[2]

Immigration, another constant factor in American development, underwent important changes during the twenty-five years from 1865 to 1890. Greater in prosperous years and smaller during years of depression, the inward tide reached its climax in 1882, when 789,000 aliens reached the new world. That year, in several respects, was a turning point in the history of immigration into the United States.

It was in this year that the Chinese were excluded; that immigration from Italy, Austria-Hungary, and Russia became of sufficient size to be impressive; and that the first inclusive federal immigration act was pa.s.sed. The immigration law of 1882 defined, in general, the policy which the nation has pursued ever since. It placed a tax of fifty cents on all incomers to be paid by the ship companies; it forbade the landing of objectionable persons, such as convicts and lunatics; and it placed on the owners of vessels the expense of returning immigrants not permitted to land. All these provisions were amended or developed in later laws, like that of 1885 forbidding persons or corporations to prepay the transportation of laborers or to encourage immigration under contract to perform work. The greater part of the foreign population settled in the manufacturing and urban North. Put into simplest terms, the census of 1890 showed that of every hundred aliens who had come to the United States between 1870 and 1890, thirty-seven were to be found in the states from Maine to Pennsylvania, four from Delaware to Texas, forty-seven from Ohio to Kansas and twelve in the Far West (for the most part Chinese).

Of the great economic interests of the United States, the most widespread was agriculture. In the Northeast, to be sure, the amount of improved farm land had been growing steadily less since 1850 and the people had been turning their energies into other activities. In the South, on the other hand, agriculture formed the main economic resource and the twenty-five years following the war were, for the most part, consumed in recovering from that struggle. Although conditions varied from place to place, the situation in many portions of the South was little short of pitiable. Not only were factories, public buildings and railroads, houses and barns, tools and seeds destroyed, capital and credit gone, mining at a standstill and banks ruined, but bands of thieves infested many districts, federal officers were frequently dishonest and defrauded the people, and the entire labor system was wiped out at a stroke. The negroes had not been ideal workmen as slaves; now, as freedmen, they found difficulty in adjusting themselves to the economic obligations of their new status, and evinced a tendency to rove about restlessly, instead of settling down to the stern task of helping to rebuild the shattered South.

It was manifest that the first problem was to revive the agricultural activities of the old days, and that the main resource must be cotton, the demand for which in the markets of the North and of Europe was such as to make it the best "money crop." A labor system was introduced known as share-farming or cropping. Under this system the plantation owner who had more property than he could cultivate under the new conditions let parts of his land to tenants, supplying them with buildings, tools, seed and perhaps credit at the village store for the supplies necessary for the year. The tenant, who had neither money nor credit with which to buy land, furnished the labor, and at the harvest each received a specified share of the product, commonly a half. The system had its disadvantages; it kept the farmer always in debt, and since the only valuable security which the plantation owner had was the crop--the land being almost unsalable--he insisted on the cultivation of cotton, which was a safe crop, and avoided experimentation and diversification. On the other hand, the system enabled the land owner to take advantage of the labor supply and to supervise the untutored negro,--and it kept the South alive. In addition to the large plantations, cultivated by several tenant farmers, the number of small farms tilled by independent owners or renters increased. Due to this tendency and to the opening of many small holdings in the Southwest, the size of the average farm diminished, so that the small farmer began to replace the plantation owner as the typical southerner.

Owing to the insistence of land owners upon cotton culture, the South first caught up with its _ante-bellum_ production in the cultivation of this staple, for shortly before 1880 the crop exceeded that of 1860. The production of tobacco, the second great southern crop, sharply shifted after the war from the Atlantic Coast states, except North Carolina, to the Mississippi region, especially to Kentucky.

Maryland, indeed, never again produced much more than half as great a crop as she did in 1860, while Virginia did not equal her former record until the opening of the twentieth century, although the South as a whole recovered in the late eighties. Rice culture, likewise, did not recover readily for South Carolina alone produced almost as much in 1860 as the entire South in 1890, and not until the development of production in Louisiana after 1890 did the crop a.s.sume its former importance. The production of sugar in Louisiana in 1890 was but little greater than it had been in 1860, and in the production of cereals the South did not keep pace with the upper Mississippi Valley before 1890. On the other hand the rapid growth of Texas was one of the outstanding features of southern development during the period, for that state improved an amount of farm land between 1870 and 1890, roughly equivalent to the combined areas of New Hampshire, Vermont, and Ma.s.sachusetts. There was observable, moreover, a certain hopefulness, a certain resiliency of purpose, a pride in the achievements of the past and in the possibilities of the future. In these respects the South was a new South by 1890.

Greater than the South as a food-producing area, was the belt of states from Ohio and Michigan to Kansas and the Dakotas:

Where there's more of reaping and less of sowing, That's where the West begins.

The increased occupation of the public lands, the growth of population, improvements in transportation and the greater use of agricultural machinery, which could be employed to advantage on the large and relatively level farms, led to developments that were destined to have an important effect on the history of the nation. Agricultural machinery, such as the reaper, had been known long before the war, but the reduction of the labor supply from 1861 to 1865 had compelled farmers to replace men with machines. A reaper that merely cut the grain and tossed it aside, gave way at last to one which not only cut the grain, but gathered it into sheaves and bound the sheaves with twine. So great was the effect of the harvester upon western agriculture that William H. Seward declared that it "pushed the frontier westward at the rate of thirty miles a year."

Due to the facts already mentioned, the number of mid-western farms increased nearly a million from 1870 to 1890, and the acreage in improved farm land grew by an amount equivalent to the combined areas of the British Isles, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Denmark, with a generous margin to spare. The production of corn, wheat, oats and other cereals became so great as to demand an outlet to the East and to the markets of the world. Elevators for the storage of grain were constructed with a capacity of 300,000 to 1,000,000 bushels, and improvements were made in the methods of loading and unloading the product. Despite the growth of the agricultural interests of the Middle West, however, the farmer did not reach prosperity. For twenty years after 1873 prices fell steadily both in the United States and in other countries of the world, and the agricultural cla.s.ses found themselves receiving a smaller and smaller return for their products. Unrest grew to distress, and distress to acute depression, while the demands of the farmers for relief frequently determined the trend of mid-western politics.[3]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Relative Prices--1865-1890]

Less general than agriculture, but more characteristic of the period after the war, was the development of manufacturing. The census of 1870 was faulty and inadequate, but it was sufficiently accurate to indicate that the manufacturing region was preeminently that north of the Potomac-Ohio river line and east of the Mississippi. By 1890 it was apparent that the industrial interests were shifting slightly toward the West; nevertheless the leading states were those of southern New England, and New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. In these states no fewer than four hundred and forty-seven industries employed more than a million dollars of capital each. The manufacturing of cotton, woolen and silk for the rest of the country was done here; foundry products, iron and steel manufactures, silver and bra.s.s goods, refined petroleum, boots and shoes, paper and books, with a host of other articles, were sent from this section to every part of the world. All along the line, from Ma.s.sachusetts to Pennsylvania, capital engaged in manufacturing doubled between 1880 and 1890, and the number of employees greatly increased.

Although the industrial life of the South belongs, for the most part, to the years since 1890, the coal and iron deposits of Alabama were known and utilized before that year, the number of cotton mill spindles in North Carolina tripled between 1880 and 1890, and cotton expositions were held in Atlanta in 1881 and New Orleans in 1884. It was in the eighties, also, that the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad and the Norfolk and Western led to the exploitation of the coal deposits of Virginia and West Virginia, especially the famous Pocahontas field.

Some aspects of the growth of manufacturing in the North are well ill.u.s.trated in the development of the mineral resources around Lake Superior. The presence of copper and iron in this region had long been known, but they had not been utilized until a decade before the Civil War, and even then the output had been greatly restricted by insufficient transportation facilities. By the close of the war, however, a ca.n.a.l had been constructed which allowed the pa.s.sage of barges from Lake Superior to Lake Huron, and railroads had been laid to a few important mining centers. The Marquette iron range in northern Michigan, the Gogebic in Wisconsin and Michigan, the Menominee near Marquette, the Vermilion Lake and Mesabec ore-beds near Duluth,--all these combined to yield millions of tons of ore, caused the development of numerous mining towns and laid the foundations of a gigantic expansion in the production of steel. As the iron and steel industry with its furnaces, machinery and skilled labor was already established at points in Illinois, Ohio and western Pennsylvania, it was cheaper to transport the ore to these places than to transfer the industry to the mines. Ore vessels were constructed capable of carrying mammoth cargoes; docks, railroads and ca.n.a.ls were built; and the products of the mines taken to lake and inland cities. Improvements, meanwhile, were being continually made in the steel industry, such as the Bessemer process, by which the impurities were burned out of the iron ore, and exactly enough carbon introduced into the molten metal to transform it into steel.

Although the steel industry was established in many places, its most dramatic growth occurred in those parts of eastern Ohio and western Pennsylvania that center about the city of Pittsburg. Placed strategically at the point where the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers join to form the Ohio, in the midst of an area rich in coal, petroleum and natural gas, Pittsburg rapidly became the center of a region in which the development of manufacturing and the construction of railroads dwarfed other interests. A large portion of the ore mined in the Lake Superior fields was carried to the Pittsburg district to be transformed into steel products of all kinds. Moreover, the fortunes made by private individuals in the region, and the inflow of alien laborers to work in the factories and on the railroads raised weighty social and industrial problems.

Manifestly the extension of agriculture and industry in so large a country as the United States was dependent upon the corresponding growth of the means of transportation, both by water and by rail. A detailed account of the expansion of the railway net, with the accompanying' implications in the fields of finance and politics, is a matter for later consideration. Certain of its general features may be mentioned, however, because they are intimately interwoven with the economic developments which have just been explained. The concentration of the population in the cities, of which New York and Chicago were outstanding examples, was one of these features. From the time of the first census, the city of New York continued to maintain its position as the most populous city of the nation. Between 1850 and 1890 it added a round million to its numbers, containing 1,515,000 persons at the later date. Moreover it was the center of a thriving and thickly settled region extending from New Haven on the one side to Philadelphia on the other--the most densely populated area in America. The uninterrupted expansion of the city indicated that the reasons for its growth were constant in their operation. And, in fact, the reasons were not difficult to find. It was blessed with one of the world's finest harbors and had access to the interior of the state by way of the Hudson and Mohawk rivers. These natural advantages had long since been recognized and had been increased by the construction of the Erie Ca.n.a.l in 1825 which, with the Great Lakes and the several ca.n.a.ls connecting the Lakes with the Ohio Valley, had given New York an early hold and almost a monopoly on the trade between the upper Mississippi, the Lakes and the coast. The city, therefore, became an importing and exporting center; its shipping interests grew, immigration flowed in, and its manufacturing establishments soon outstripped those of any other industrial center; the great printing and publishing, banking and commercial firms were drawn irresistibly to the most populous city, and Wall Street became the synonym for the financial center of the nation.

In 1840 Chicago had been an unimportant settlement of 4500 persons, but by the opening of the war it had grown to twenty-five times that size, and added 800,000 between 1870 and 1890. It had early become evident that the city was the natural outlet toward the East for the grain trade and the slaughtering and meatpacking industry of the upper Mississippi Valley. Before the late sixties, however, railway connection was defective, being composed of many short lines rather than of one continuous road, so that freight had to be loaded and unloaded many times during its pa.s.sage to the seaboard. This situation, which had been merely inconvenient before the war, had become little short of intolerable during the struggle, because the closing of the Mississippi had cut off from the Middle West its water outlet toward the South and had diverted more freight to the railroads. After the war, Cornelius Vanderbilt, president of the Hudson River Railroad, combined a number of the shorter roads so as to give uninterrupted communication between Chicago and New York, to tap the trade of the Mississippi Valley, and to compete with water traffic by way of the Great Lakes and the Erie Ca.n.a.l. Other railroads saw the possibilities in the western trade, and the Baltimore and Ohio, the Grand Trunk, and the Erie followed the lead of Vanderbilt. A similar development, although on a smaller scale, accompanied the growth of other northern cities. The retroactive effects of the roads on the distribution of the population are too detailed for discussion, but a single example may typify many. In 1870 the Maine farmer supplied much of the meat consumed in Boston; by 1895, he was getting his own meat from the West.

He must, therefore, adapt himself to the new conditions if he could, move to the manufacturing cities as so many of his neighbors did, or migrate to the West.

Like the growth of New York and Chicago, the development of California had an important effect on the history of American railway transportation. Although it had been agitated for many years, the project for a railroad from the Mississippi to the Pacific Coast had not reached the construction stage until the congressional acts of 1862 and 1864 provided for a line to be built from Omaha to San Francisco.

The Union Pacific Railroad had been incorporated to build the eastern end, while the western end was to be constructed by the Central Pacific Railroad Company, a California corporation. The latter act, that of 1864, had given the roads substantial financial a.s.sistance and half the public land on a strip forty miles wide along the line of the track.

Many difficulties had stood in the way--lack of funds, problems of construction and inadequate labor supply. Eventually they had all been overcome by the energy and skill of such men as Stanford, Crocker and Huntington. Imported Chinese coolies had met the labor demand and construction was speeded up. Actual building had begun in 1863 and six years later the two roads met at Promontory Point near Ogden in Utah, where the last spike was driven, the engines

Facing on the single track, Half a world behind each back.

During the four years following the completion of the transcontinental line, 24,000 miles of new railroad were constructed, much of which was built into the wilderness ahead of settlement. So great an expansion, coming at a time when immense stretches of new land were being opened and industry being developed on a large scale, could hardly fail to result in over-speculation. The results appeared in 1873. Jay Cooke and Company, the most important financial concern in the country had been back of the Northern Pacific Railroad, marketing large quant.i.ties of its bonds and so providing capital for construction, the purchase of equipment, the payment of wages and so on. Obviously a large amount of money was thus being put into an enterprise from which returns would come only after a considerable period; and yet construction had to be continued, or what was already invested would be lost. What Cooke was doing for the Northern Pacific was being done for the Chesapeake and Ohio by Fisk and Hatch, and by other firms for speculative enterprises in every corner of the land.

The process of putting capital into fixed form could hardly go on forever, and several events led to a final crash. In 1871 and 1872 great fires in Chicago and Boston destroyed millions of dollars' worth of property. Early in 1873 the government investigation of the Credit Mobilier Company led to widespread distrust of the roads and made investors conservative about buying bonds. On September 18, 1873, Jay Cooke and Company found itself unable to continue business and closed its doors. The failure was a thunderbolt to the financial world.

Indeed, so unbelievable was the news that an energetic policeman arrested a small newsboy who shouted his "Extra--All about the failure of Jay Cooke."

If Jay Cooke and Company fell, the sky might fall. People rushed to withdraw their funds from the banks. Fisk and Hatch opened their doors for fifteen minutes and received calls for $1,500,000. They closed at once. The smaller financial inst.i.tutions followed the bigger ones.

Stocks fell, the Exchange was closed, there was a money famine.

Industrial concerns, dependent on the banks, failed by scores.

Industrial paralysis, with railroad receiverships, laborers out of employment, riots and their accompaniments, showed how deep-seated had been the trouble. Not until late in the decade did business recover its former prosperity.

With the return of more stable conditions the construction of railroads continued unabated. The Northern Pacific ran near the Canadian line and connected the upper Mississippi Valley with the coast, carrying in its trail the manners and customs of the East. Two lines in the South were extended to the Pacific, so that by the middle eighties four great main avenues gave pa.s.sage through a region over which, so recently, the miner and the trapper had forced a dangerous path.

The fact that it was often necessary, in building the railroads across the plains, to detail half the working force to protect the remainder against the Indians, calls attention to one unmistakable result of the conquest of the Far West. The construction of the railroads spelled the doom of the wild Indian. Far back in 1834 the government had adopted the policy of setting aside large tracts of land west of the Mississippi for the use of the Indian tribes. Most of the savages had been stationed in an immense area between southern Minnesota and Texas, while other smaller reservations had been scattered over most of the states west of the river. On the whole, the government had dealt with the Indians in tribes, not as individuals. The rapid inflow of population to the fertile lands, together with the rush of prospectors to newly discovered supplies of gold and silver, caused increasing demands from the Indians for protection, and from the whites for the extinguishment of Indian land t.i.tles.

The cla.s.sical ill.u.s.tration of this tendency is found in the case of the Sioux Indians in South Dakota. The discovery of gold in the region of the Black Hills, on the Sioux reservation, aroused agitation for the removal of the tribe to make way for settlers and miners. But the execution of the scheme was not so simple as its conception. The removal of the Sioux necessitated the transfer of the Poncas, a peaceful tribe which lay immediately east. The latter, not unnaturally, objected, quarrels arose and eventually the Poncas were practically broken to pieces. The Sioux, not satisfied, attempted to regain the Black Hills, fought the famous Sioux War of 1876, led by Sitting Bull, but were crushed and forced to give up the unequal contest.

It would not be worth while to enter into the details of the numerous Indian conflicts after the Civil War. It is enough to notice that stirring accounts of them may be read in the memoirs of such soldiers as Custer, Sheridan and Miles, and that they cost millions of dollars and hundreds of lives. Finally it became evident that the attempt to deal with the Indians in tribes was a failure and it was determined to break up the tribal holdings of land so as to give each individual a small piece for his private property, and to open the remainder to settlement by the whites. In pursuance of such a policy, the Dawes Act of 1887 provided for the allotment of a quarter-section to each head of a family, with the proviso that the owner should not sell the land within twenty-five years. This was intended to protect the Indian from shrewd "land-sharks." Citizenship was given with the ownership of the land, in the hope that a sort of a.s.similation might gradually take place, and earnest attempts were made to provide education for the red-man. Not all these hopes were realized, however, and the later Burke Act, 1906, attempted further protection.

While the Indian was being restricted to a small part of the great region west of the Mississippi, there was being enacted on the plains one of the most picturesque of all American dramas. Beyond the settled parts of the states just west of the "Father of Waters," bounded north and south by Canada and the Rio Grande, and extending west to the Rocky Mountain foot-hills, lay a huge empire of rolling territory. It was gra.s.s-covered, but lacked sufficient rainfall to make it fertile, so that it was considered, as part of it had early been called, "the great American desert."

Cattle turned loose long before by Spanish ranchers down in the Southwest had multiplied, spread out over the plains, and run wild--wild as Texas steers. A combination of circ.u.mstances disclosed the fact that these cattle could be improved by breeding, corraled and driven north over the "Long Trail," to be slaughtered in Omaha, Kansas City, St. Louis and Chicago for the people of eastern cities. The round-up, when the cattle were collected; the drive, under command of the boss and his cow-boys,

loose in the unfenced blue riding the sunset rounds;

the great ranches in the North, where the herds were fattened for the market;--all this formed the background of an attractive romance.

Obviously, however, the drive was dependent on great stretches of open country, with free grazing and free access to water, and it is also manifest that these conditions could not long endure in the face of constant westward migration. Homesteaders followed the railroads out across the plains, and the cheapening of wire fence led to the enclosure of great farms including the best grazing lands and the water supply. By 1890, therefore, the great drives were a tale that is told.