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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 3033 ***
+THE PASSING OF THE FRONTIER
+
+A CHRONICLE OF THE OLD WEST
+
+By Emerson Hough
+
+
+New Haven: Yale University Press
+
+Toronto: Glasgow, Brook & Co.
+
+London: Humphrey Milford
+
+Oxford University Press
+
+1918
+
+
+
+
+
+Contents
+
+THE PASSING OF THE FRONTIER
+
+   Chapter I.   The Frontier In History
+   Chapter II.   The Range
+   Chapter III.   The Cattle Trails
+   Chapter IV.   The Cowboy
+   Chapter V.   The Mines
+   Chapter VI.   The Pathways Of The West
+   Chapter VII.   The Indian Wars
+   Chapter VIII.  The Cattle Kings
+   Chapter IX.   The Homesteader
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE PASSING OF THE FRONTIER
+
+
+
+
+Chapter I. The Frontier In History
+
+The frontier! There is no word in the English language more stirring,
+more intimate, or more beloved. It has in it all the elan of the old
+French phrase, _En avant!_ It carries all of the old Saxon command,
+Forward!! It means all that America ever meant. It means the old hope of
+a real personal liberty, and yet a real human advance in character and
+achievement. To a genuine American it is the dearest word in all the
+world.
+
+What is, or was, the frontier? Where was it? Under what stars did it
+lie? Because, as the vague Iliads of ancient heroes or the nebulous
+records of the savage gentlemen of the Middle Ages make small specific
+impingement on our consciousness today, so also even now begin the tales
+of our own old frontier to assume a haziness, an unreality, which makes
+them seem less history than folklore. Now the truth is that the American
+frontier of history has many a local habitation and many a name. And
+this is why it lies somewhat indefinite under the blue haze of the
+years, all the more alluring for its lack of definition, like some old
+mountain range, the softer and more beautiful for its own shadows.
+
+The fascination of the frontier is and has ever been an undying thing.
+Adventure is the meat of the strong men who have built the world for
+those more timid. Adventure and the frontier are one and inseparable.
+They suggest strength, courage, hardihood--qualities beloved in men
+since the world began--qualities which are the very soul of the United
+States, itself an experiment, an adventure, a risk accepted. Take away
+all our history of political regimes, the story of the rise and fall
+of this or that partisan aggregation in our government; take away our
+somewhat inglorious military past; but leave us forever the tradition
+of the American frontier! There lies our comfort and our pride. There
+we never have failed. There, indeed, we always realized our ambitions.
+There, indeed, we were efficient, before that hateful phrase was known.
+There we were a melting-pot for character, before we came to know
+that odious appellation which classifies us as the melting-pot of the
+nations.
+
+The frontier was the place and the time of the strong man, of the
+self-sufficient but restless individual. It was the home of the rebel,
+the protestant, the unreconciled, the intolerant, the ardent--and
+the resolute. It was not the conservative and tender man who made our
+history; it was the man sometimes illiterate, oftentimes uncultured, the
+man of coarse garb and rude weapons. But the frontiersmen were the true
+dreamers of the nation. They really were the possessors of a national
+vision. Not statesmen but riflemen and riders made America. The noblest
+conclusions of American history still rest upon premises which they
+laid.
+
+But, in its broadest significance, the frontier knows no country. It
+lies also in other lands and in other times than our own. When and what
+was the Great Frontier? We need go back only to the time of Drake
+and the sea-dogs, the Elizabethan Age, when all North America was a
+frontier, almost wholly unknown, compellingly alluring to all bold
+men. That was the day of new stirrings in the human heart. Some strange
+impulse seemed to act upon the soul of the braver and bolder Europeans;
+and they moved westward, nor could have helped that had they tried. They
+lived largely and blithely, and died handsomely, those old Elizabethan
+adventurers, and they lie today in thousands of unrecorded graves upon
+two continents, each having found out that any place is good enough for
+a man to die upon, provided that he be a man.
+
+The American frontier was Elizabethan in its quality--childlike, simple,
+and savage. It has not entirely passed; for both Elizabethan folk and
+Elizabethan customs are yet to be found in the United States. While
+the half-savage civilization of the farther West was roaring on its
+way across the continent--while the day of the keelboatman and the
+plainsman, of the Indian-fighter and the miner, even the day of the
+cowboy, was dawning and setting--there still was a frontier left far
+behind in the East, near the top of the mountain range which made the
+first great barrier across our pathway to the West. That frontier, the
+frontier of Boone and Kenton, of Robertson and Sevier, still exists and
+may be seen in the Cumberland--the only remaining part of America which
+is all American. There we may find trace of the Elizabethan Age--idioms
+lost from English literature and American speech long ago. There we may
+see the American home life as it went on more than a hundred years
+ago. We may see hanging on the wall the long muzzle-loading rifle of an
+earlier day. We may see the spinning-wheel and the loom. The women still
+make in part the clothing for their families, and the men still make
+their own household furniture, their own farming implements, their own
+boots.
+
+This overhanging frontier of America is a true survival of the days of
+Drake as well as of the days of Boone. The people are at once godly and
+savage. They breed freely; they love their homes; they are ever ready
+for adventure; they are frugal, abstemious, but violent and strong.
+They carry on still the half-religious blood feuds of the old Scotch
+Highlands or the North of Ireland, whence they came. They reverence
+good women. They care little for material accumulations. They believe in
+personal ease and personal independence. With them life goes on not in
+the slow monotony of reiterated performance, but in ragged profile, with
+large exertions followed by large repose. Now that has been the fashion
+of the frontier in every age and every land of all the world. And so,
+by studying these people, we may even yet arrive at a just and
+comprehensive notion of what we might call the "feel" of the old
+frontier.
+
+There exists, too, yet another Saxon frontier in a far-off portion
+of the world. In that strange country, Australia, tremendous unknown
+regions still remain, and the wild pastoral life of such regions bids
+fair to exist yet for many years. A cattle king of Queensland held
+at one time sixty thousand square miles of land. It is said that the
+average size of pastoral holdings in the northern territory of Australia
+is two hundred and seventy-five thousand acres. Does this not recall the
+old times of free range in the American West?
+
+This strange antipodal civilization also retains a curious flavor
+of Elizabethan ideas. It does not plan for inordinate fortunes, the
+continual amassing of money, but it does deliberately plan for the use
+by the individual of his individual life. Australian business hours are
+shorter than American. Routine is less general. The individual takes
+upon himself a smaller load of effort. He is restive under monotony. He
+sets aside a great part of his life for sport. He lives in a large and
+young day of the world. Here we may see a remote picture of our own
+American West--better, as it seems to me, than that reflected in the
+rapid and wholly commercialized development of Western Canada, which is
+not flavored by any age but this.
+
+But much of the frontier of Australia is occupied by men of means who
+had behind them government aid and a semi-paternal encouragement in
+their adventures. The same is true in part of the government-fostered
+settlement of Western Canada. It was not so with the American West. Here
+was not the place of the rich man but of the poor man, and he had no one
+to aid him or encourage him. Perhaps no man ever understood the American
+West who did not himself go there and make his living in that country,
+as did the men who found it and held it first. Each life on our old
+frontier was a personal adventure. The individual had no government
+behind him and he lacked even the protection of any law.
+
+Our frontier crawled west from the first seaport settlements, afoot, on
+horseback, in barges, or with slow wagon-trains. It crawled across the
+Alleghanies, down the great river valleys and up them yet again; and at
+last, in days of new transportation, it leaped across divides, from one
+river valley to another. Its history, at first so halting, came to be
+very swift--so swift that it worked great elisions in its own story.
+
+In our own day, however, the Old West generally means the old cow
+country of the West--the high plains and the lower foothills running
+from the Rio Grande to the northern boundary. The still more ancient
+cattle-range of the lower Pacific Slope will never come into acceptance
+as the Old West. Always, when we use these words, we think of buffalo
+plains and of Indians, and of their passing before the footmen and
+riders who carried the phantom flag of Drake and the Virgin Queen from
+the Appalachians to the Rockies--before the men who eventually made good
+that glorious and vaunting vision of the Virginia cavaliers, whose party
+turned back from the Rockfish Gap after laying claim in the name of King
+George on all the country lying west of them, as far as the South Sea!
+
+The American cow country may with very good logic arrogate to itself
+the title of the real and typical frontier of all the world. We call
+the spirit of the frontier Elizabethan, and so it was; but even as the
+Elizabethan Age was marked by its contact with the Spanish civilization
+in Europe, on the high seas, and in both the Americas, so the last
+frontier of the American West also was affected, and largely, deeply,
+by Spanish influence and Spanish customs. The very phraseology of range
+work bears proof of this. Scores of Spanish words are written indelibly
+in the language of the Plains. The frontier of the cow-range never was
+Saxon alone.
+
+It is a curious fact also, seldom if ever noted, that this Old West of
+the Plains was very largely Southern and not Northern on its Saxon
+side. No States so much as Kentucky and Tennessee and, later,
+Missouri--daughters of Old Virginia in her glory--contributed to the
+forces of the frontiersmen. Texas, farther to the south, put her stamp
+indelibly upon the entire cattle industry of the West. Visionary,
+impractical, restless, adventurous, these later Elizabethan
+heroes--bowing to no yoke, insisting on their own rights and scorning
+often the laws of others, yet careful to retain the best and most
+advantageous customs of any conquered country--naturally came from those
+nearest Elizabethan countries which lay abandoned behind them.
+
+If the atmosphere of the Elizabethan Age still may be found in
+the forgotten Cumberlands, let us lay claim to kinship with yonder
+roystering heroes of a gallant day; for this was ever the atmosphere
+of our own frontier. To feel again the following breezes of the Golden
+Hind, or see again, floating high in the cloudless skies, the sails of
+the Great Armada, was the privilege of Americans for a double decade
+within the memory of men yet living, in that country, so unfailingly
+beloved, which we call the Old West of America.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Chapter II. The Range
+
+When, in 1803, those two immortal youths, Meriwether Lewis and William
+Clark, were about to go forth on their great journey across the
+continent, they were admonished by Thomas Jefferson that they would in
+all likelihood encounter in their travels, living and stalking about,
+the mammoth or the mastodon, whose bones had been found in the great
+salt-licks of Kentucky. We smile now at such a supposition; yet it was
+not unreasonable then. No man knew that tremendous country that lay
+beyond the mouth of the Missouri.
+
+The explorers crossed one portion of a vast land which was like to
+nothing they had ever seen--the region later to become the great
+cattle-range of America. It reached, although they could know nothing of
+that, from the Spanish possessions on the south across a thousand miles
+of short grass lands to the present Canadian boundary-line which certain
+obdurate American souls still say ought to have been at 54 degrees 40
+minutes, and not where it is! From the Rio Grande to "Fifty-four forty,"
+indeed, would have made nice measurements for the Saxon cattle-range.
+
+Little, however, was the value of this land understood by the explorers;
+and, for more than half a century afterwards, it commonly was supposed
+to be useless for the occupation of white men and suitable only as a
+hunting-ground for savage tribes. Most of us can remember the school
+maps of our own youth, showing a vast region marked, vaguely, "The Great
+American Desert," which was considered hopeless for any human industry,
+but much of which has since proved as rich as any land anywhere on the
+globe.
+
+Perhaps it was the treeless nature of the vast Plains which carried the
+first idea of their infertility. When the first settlers of Illinois and
+Indiana came up from south of the Ohio River they had their choice of
+timber and prairie lands. Thinking the prairies worthless--since land
+which could not raise a tree certainly could not raise crops--these
+first occupants of the Middle West spent a generation or more, axe in
+hand, along the heavily timbered river-bottoms. The prairies were long
+in settling. No one then could have predicted that farm lands in that
+region would be worth three hundred dollars an acre or better, and that
+these prairies of the Mississippi Valley would, in a few generations,
+be studded with great towns and would form a part of the granary of the
+world.
+
+But, if our early explorers, passing beyond the valley of the Missouri,
+found valueless the region of the Plains and the foothills, not so the
+wild creatures or the savage men who had lived there longer than science
+records. The buffalo then ranged from the Rio Grande to the Athabaska,
+from the Missouri to the Rockies, and beyond. No one seems to have
+concluded in those days that there was after all slight difference
+between the buffalo and the domestic ox. The native cattle, however, in
+untold thousands and millions, had even then proved beyond peradventure
+the sustaining and strengthening nature of the grasses of the Plains.
+
+Now, each creature, even of human species, must adjust itself to its
+environment. Having done so, commonly it is disposed to love that
+environment. The Eskimo and the Zulu each thinks that he has the best
+land in the world. So with the American Indian, who, supported by the
+vast herds of buffalo, ranged all over that tremendous country which
+was later to be given over to the white man with his domestic cattle.
+No freer life ever was lived by any savages than by the Horse Indians
+of the Plains in the buffalo days; and never has the world known a
+physically higher type of savage.
+
+On the buffalo-range--that is to say, on the cattle-range which was to
+be--Lewis and Clark met several bands of the Sioux--the Mandans and
+the Assiniboines, the Blackfeet, the Shoshones. Farther south were the
+Pawnees, the Kaws, the Otoes, the Osages, most of whom depended in part
+upon the buffalo for their living, though the Otoes, the Pawnees, the
+Mandans, and certain others now and then raised a little corn or a few
+squashes to help out their bill of fare. Still farther south dwelt the
+Kiowas, the Comanches, and others. The Arapahoes, the Cheyennes, the
+Crows, and the Utes, all hunters, were soon to come into the ken of the
+white man. Of such of these tribes as they met, the youthful captains
+made accounting, gravely and with extraordinary accuracy, but without
+discovering in this region much future for Americans. They were
+explorers and not industrial investigators.
+
+It was nearly half a century after the journey of Lewis and Clark that
+the Forty-Niners were crossing the Plains, whither, meanwhile, the
+Mormons had trekked in search of a country where they might live as they
+liked. Still the wealth of the Plains remained untouched. California was
+in the eyes of the world. The great cow-range was overleaped. But, in
+the early fifties, when the placer fields of California began to be less
+numerous and less rich, the half-savage population of the mines roared
+on northward, even across our northern line. Soon it was to roll back.
+Next it worked east and southeast and northeast over the great dry
+plains of Washington and Oregon, so that, as readily may be seen, the
+cow-range proper was not settled as most of the West was, by a directly
+westbound thrust of an eastern population; but, on the contrary, it was
+approached from several different angles--from the north, from the east,
+from the west and northwest, and finally from the south.
+
+The early, turbulent population of miners and adventurers was crude,
+lawless, and aggressive. It cared nothing whatever for the Indian
+tribes. War, instant and merciless, where it meant murder for the most
+part, was set on foot as soon as white touched red in that far western
+region.
+
+All these new white men who had crowded into the unknown country of the
+Plains, the Rockies, the Sierras, and the Cascades, had to be fed. They
+could not employ and remain content with the means by which the red
+man there had always fed himself. Hence a new industry sprang up in the
+United States, which of itself made certain history in that land. The
+business of freighting supplies to the West, whether by bull-train or
+by pack-train, was an industry sui generic, very highly specialized,
+and pursued by men of great business ability as well as by men of great
+hardihood and daring.
+
+Each of these freight trains which went West carried hanging on its
+flank more and more of the white men. As the trains returned, more and
+more was learned in the States of the new country which lay between the
+Missouri and the Rockies, which ran no man knew how far north, and no
+man could guess how far south. Now appears in history Fort Benton, on
+the Missouri, the great northern supply post--just as at an earlier date
+there had appeared Fort Hall, one of the old fur-trading posts beyond
+the Rockies, Bent's Fort on the Arkansas, and many other outposts of the
+new Saxon civilization in the West.
+
+Later came the pony express and the stage coach which made history and
+romance for a generation. Feverishly, boisterously, a strong, rugged,
+womanless population crowded westward and formed the wavering, now
+advancing, now receding line of the great frontier of American story.
+
+But for long there was no sign of permanent settlement on the Plains,
+and no one thought of this region as the frontier. The men there
+who were prospecting and exploiting were classified as no more than
+adventurers. No one seems to have taken a lesson from the Indian and the
+buffalo. The reports of Fremont long since had called attention to the
+nourishing quality of those grasses of the high country, but the day of
+the cowboy had not yet dawned. There is a somewhat feeble story which
+runs to the effect that in 1866 one of the great wagon-trains, caught by
+the early snows of winter, was obliged to abandon its oxen on the range.
+It was supposed that, of course, the oxen must perish during the winter.
+But next spring the owners were surprised to find that the oxen, so far
+from perishing, had flourished very much--indeed, were fat and in good
+condition. So runs the story which is often repeated. It may be true,
+but to accredit to this incident the beginnings of the cattle industry
+in the Indian country would surely be going too far. The truth is that
+the cow industry was not a Saxon discovery. It was a Latin enterprise,
+flourishing in Mexico long before the first of these miners and
+adventurers came on the range.
+
+Something was known of the Spanish lands to the south through the
+explorations of Pike, but more through the commerce of the prairies--the
+old wagon trade from the Missouri River to the Spanish cities of Sante
+Fe and Chihuahua. Now the cow business, south of the Rio Grande,
+was already well differentiated and developed at the time the first
+adventurers from the United States went into Texas and began to crowd
+their Latin neighbors for more room. There it was that our Saxon
+frontiersmen first discovered the cattle industry. But these
+southern and northern riflemen--ruthless and savage, yet strangely
+statesmanlike--though they might betimes drive away the owners of the
+herds, troubled little about the herds themselves. There was a certain
+fascination to these rude strangers in the slow and easeful civilization
+of Old Spain which they encountered in the land below them. Little
+by little, and then largely and yet more largely, the warriors of San
+Jacinto reached out and began to claim lands for themselves--leagues
+and uncounted leagues of land, which had, however, no market value. Well
+within the memory of the present generation large tracts of good land
+were bought in Texas for six cents an acre; some was bought for half
+that price in a time not much earlier. Today much of that land is
+producing wealth; but land then was worthless--and so were cows.
+
+This civilization of the Southwest, of the new Republic of Texas, may
+be regarded as the first enduring American result of contact with the
+Spanish industry. The men who won Texas came mostly from Kentucky and
+Tennessee or southern Ohio, and the first colonizer of Texas was a
+Virginian, Stephen Fuller Austin. They came along the old Natchez Trace
+from Nashville to the Mississippi River--that highway which has so much
+history of its own. Down this old winding trail into the greatest valley
+of all the world, and beyond that valley out into the Spanish country,
+moved steadily the adventurers whose fathers had but recently crossed
+the Appalachians. One of the strongest thrusts of the American
+civilization thus entered the cattle-range at its lower end, between the
+Rio Grande and the Red River.
+
+In all the several activities, mining, freighting, scouting, soldiering,
+riding pony express, or even sheer adventuring for what might come,
+there was ever a trading back and forth between home-staying men and
+adventuring men. Thus there was an interchange of knowledge and of
+customs between East and West, between our old country and our
+new. There was an interchange, too, at the south, where our Saxon
+civilization came in touch with that of Mexico.
+
+We have now to note some fundamental facts and principles of the cattle
+industry which our American cattlemen took over ready-made from the
+hands of Mexico.
+
+The Mexicans in Texas had an abundance of small, hardy horses of African
+and Spanish breed, which Spain had brought into the New World--the same
+horses that the Moors had brought into Spain--a breed naturally hardy
+and able to subsist upon dry food. Without such horses there could
+have been no cattle industry. These horses, running wild in herds, had
+crossed to the upper Plains. La Verendrye, and later Lewis and Clark,
+had found the Indians using horses in the north. The Indians, as we have
+seen, had learned to manage the horse. Formerly they had used dogs to
+drag the travois, but now they used the "elk-dog," as they first called
+the horse.
+
+In the original cow country, that is, in Mexico and Texas, countless
+herds of cattle were held in a loose sort of ownership over wide and
+unknown plains. Like all wild animals in that warm country, they bred
+in extraordinary numbers. The southern range, indeed, has always been
+called the breeding range. The cattle had little value. He who wanted
+beef killed beef. He who wanted leather killed cattle for their hides.
+But beyond these scant and infrequent uses cattle had no definite value.
+
+The Mexican, however, knew how to handle cows. He could ride a horse,
+and he could rope cattle and brand them. Most of the cattle of a wide
+range would go to certain water-holes more or less regularly, where they
+might be roughly collected or estimated. This coming of the cattle to
+the watering-places made it unnecessary for owners of cattle to acquire
+ranch land. It was enough to secure the water-front where the cows must
+go to drink. That gave the owner all the title he needed. His right to
+the increase he could prove by another phenomenon of nature, just as
+inevitable and invariable as that of thirst. The maternal instinct of a
+cow and the dependence of the calf upon its mother gave the old rancher
+of immemorial times sufficient proof of ownership in the increase of
+his herd. The calf would run with its own mother and with no other cow
+through its first season. So that if an old Mexican _ranchero_ saw a
+certain number of cows at his watering-places, and with them calves,
+he knew that all before him were his property--or, at least, he claimed
+them as such and used them.
+
+Still, this was loose-footed property. It might stray away after all,
+or it might be driven away. Hence, in some forgotten time, our shrewd
+Spaniard invented a system of proof of ownership which has always lain
+at the very bottom of the organized cow industry; he invented the method
+of branding. This meant his sign, his name, his trade-mark, his proof of
+ownership. The animal could not shake it off. It would not burn off in
+the sun or wash off in the rain. It went with the animal and could not
+be eradicated from the animal's hide. Wherever the bearer was seen, the
+brand upon its hide provided certain identification of the owner.
+
+Now, all these basic ideas of the cow industry were old on the lower
+range in Texas when our white men first drifted thither. The cattle
+industry, although in its infancy, and although supposed to have no
+great future, was developed long before Texas became a republic. It
+never, indeed, changed very much from that time until the end of its own
+career.
+
+One great principle was accepted religiously even in those early and
+crude days. A man's cow was _his_ cow. A man's brand was HIS brand.
+There must be no interference with his ownership. Hence certain other
+phases of the industry followed inevitably. These cattle, these calves,
+each branded by the iron of the owner, in spite of all precautions,
+began to mingle as settlers became more numerous; hence came the idea of
+the round-up. The country was warm and lazy. If a hundred or a thousand
+cows were not collected, very well. If a calf were separated from its
+mother, very well. The old ranchers never quarreled among themselves.
+They never would have made in the South anything like a cattle
+association; it was left for the Yankees to do that at a time when cows
+had come to have far greater values. There were few arguments in the
+first rodeos of the lower range. One rancher would vie with his neighbor
+in generosity in the matter of unbranded calves. Haggling would have
+been held contemptible. On the lower range in the old times no one cared
+much about a cow. Why should one do so? There was no market for cows--no
+one who wished to buy them. If one tendered a Mexican cinquo pesos for a
+yearling or a two-year-old, the owner might perhaps offer the animal as
+a gift, or he might smile and say "_Con mucho gusto_" as he was handed a
+few pieces of silver. There were plenty of cows everywhere in the world!
+
+Let us, therefore, give the old Spaniard full credit alike in
+picturesque romance and in the organized industry of the cow. The
+westbound thrust which came upon the upper part of the range in the days
+of more shrewd and exacting business methods was simply the best-known
+and most published phase of frontier life in the cow country; hence we
+have usually accepted it as typical. It would not be accurate to say
+that the cattle industry was basically much influenced or governed by
+northern or eastern men. In practically all of its great phenomena the
+frontier of the old cow-range was southern by birth and growth.
+
+There lay, then, so long unused, that vast and splendid land so soon to
+write romantic history of its own, so soon to come into the admiration
+or the wonder of a great portion of the earth--a land of fascinating
+interest to the youth of every country, and a region whose story holds
+a charm for young and old alike even today. It was a region royal in
+its dimensions. Far on the west it was hedged by the gray-sided and
+white-topped mountains, the Rockies. Where the buffalo once lived, the
+cattle were to live, high up in the foothills of this great mountain
+range which ran from the Rio Grande to Canada. On the east, where lay
+the Prairies rather than the Plains, it was a country waving with high
+native grasses, with many brilliant flowers hiding among them, the
+sweet-william, the wild rose, and often great masses of the yellow
+sunflower.
+
+From the Rio Grande to the Athabaska, for the greater part, the frontier
+sky was blue and cloudless during most of the year. The rainfall was
+not great. The atmosphere was dry. It was a cheerful country, one of
+optimism and not of gloom. In the extreme south, along the Rio Grande,
+the climate was moister, warmer, more enervating; but on the high
+steppes of the middle range in Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, western
+Nebraska, there lay the finest out-of-doors country, man's country the
+finest of the earth.
+
+But for the time, busy with more accustomed things, mining and
+freighting and fighting and hunting and trading and trapping, we
+Americans who had arrived upon the range cared little for cows. The
+upper thrust of the great herds from the south into the north had not
+begun. It was after the Civil War that the first great drives of cattle
+from the south toward the north began, and after men had learned in
+the State of Texas that cattle moved from the Rio Grande to the upper
+portions of the State and fed on the mesquite grass would attain greater
+stature than in the hot coast country. Then swiftly, somewhat luridly,
+there leaped into our comprehension and our interest that strange
+country long loosely held under our flag, the region of the Plains, the
+region which we now call the Old West.
+
+In great bands, in long lines, slowly, towheaded, sore-footed, the vast
+gatherings of the prolific lower range moved north, each cow with its
+title indelibly marked upon its hide. These cattle were now going to
+take the place of those on which the Indians had depended for their
+living these many years. A new day in American history had dawned.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Chapter III. The Cattle Trails
+
+The customary method of studying history by means of a series of events
+and dates is not the method which we have chosen to employ in this study
+of the Old West. Speaking generally, our minds are unable to assimilate
+a condensed mass of events and dates; and that is precisely what would
+be required of us if we should attempt here to follow the ways of
+conventional history. Dates are at best no more than milestones on the
+pathway of time; and in the present instance it is not the milestones
+but the road itself with which we are concerned. Where does the road
+begin? Why comes it hither? Whither does it lead? These are the real
+questions.
+
+Under all the exuberance of the life of the range there lay a steady
+business of tremendous size and enormous values. The "uproarious
+iniquity" of the West, its picturesqueness, its vividness--these were
+but froth on the stream. The stream itself was a steady and somber
+flood. Beyond this picturesqueness of environment very few have cared to
+go, and therefore sometimes have had little realization of the vastness
+of the cowboy's kingdom, the "magnitude of the interests in his care, or
+the fortitude, resolution, and instant readiness essential to his daily
+life." The American cowboy is the most modern representative of a human
+industry that is second to very few in antiquity.
+
+Julius Caesar struck the note of real history: _Quorum pars magna
+fui_--"Of which I was a great part." If we are to seek the actual truth,
+we ought most to value contemporary records, representations made by men
+who were themselves a part of the scenes which they describe. In that
+way we shall arrive not merely upon lurid events, not alone upon the
+stereotyped characters of the "Wild West," but upon causes which are
+much more interesting and immensely more valuable than any merely
+titillating stories from the weirdly illustrated Apocrypha of the
+West. We must go below such things if we would gain a just and lasting
+estimate of the times. We ought to look on the old range neither as a
+playground of idle men nor as a scene of hysterical and contorted human
+activities. We ought to look upon it from the point of view of its uses
+to mankind. The explorers found it a wilderness, the home of the red man
+and the buffalo. What were the underlying causes of its settlement and
+development?
+
+There is in history no agency so wondrous in events, no working
+instrumentality so great as transportation. The great seeking of all
+human life is to find its level. Perhaps the first men traveled
+by hollowed logs down stream. Then possibly the idea of a sail was
+conceived. Early in the story of the United States men made commercial
+journeys from the head of the Ohio to the mouth of the Mississippi
+by flatboats, and came back by keelboats. The pole, the cordelle, the
+paddle, and the sail, in turn helped them to navigate the great streams
+which led out into the West. And presently there was to come that
+tremendous upheaval wrought by the advent of the iron trails which,
+scorning alike waterways and mountain ranges, flung themselves almost
+directly westward across the continent.
+
+The iron trails, crossing the northern range soon after the Civil War,
+brought a market to the cattle country. Inevitably the men of the
+lower range would seek to reach the railroads with what they had to
+sell--their greatest natural product, cattle on the hoof. This was the
+primary cause of the great northbound drives already mentioned, the
+greatest pastoral phenomena in the story of the world.
+
+The southern herds at that time had no market at their doors. They had
+to go to the market, and they had to go on foot. That meant that they
+must be driven northward by cattle handlers who had passed their days
+in the wild life of the lower range. These cowmen of course took their
+character and their customs northward with them, and so they were
+discovered by those enthusiastic observers, newly arrived by rail, whom
+the cowmen were wont to call "pilgrims."
+
+Now the trail of the great cattle drives--the Long Trail-was a thing of
+tremendous importance of itself and it is still full of interest. As it
+may not easily be possible for the author to better a description of it
+that was written some twenty years ago, that description is here again
+set down. *
+
+
+    * "The Story of the Cowboy," by E. Hough. Appleton. 1897.
+Reprinted by permission.
+
+The braiding of a hundred minor pathways, the Long Trail lay like a vast
+rope connecting the cattle country of the South with that of the North.
+Lying loose or coiling, it ran for more than two thousand miles along
+the eastern edge of the Rocky Mountains, sometimes close in at their
+feet, again hundreds of miles away across the hard tablelands or the
+well-flowered prairies. It traversed in a fair line the vast land of
+Texas, curled over the Indian Nations, over Kansas, Colorado, Nebraska,
+Wyoming, and Montana, and bent in wide overlapping circles as far west
+as Utah and Nevada; as far east as Missouri, Iowa, even Illinois; and as
+far north as the British possessions. Even today you may trace plainly
+its former course, from its faint beginnings in the lazy land of
+Mexico, the Ararat of the cattle-range. It is distinct across Texas, and
+multifold still in the Indian lands. Its many intermingling paths still
+scar the iron surface of the Neutral Strip, and the plows have not
+buried all the old furrows in the plains of Kansas. Parts of the path
+still remain visible in the mountain lands of the far North. You may
+see the ribbons banding the hillsides today along the valley of the
+Stillwater, and along the Yellowstone and toward the source of the
+Missouri. The hoof marks are beyond the Musselshell, over the Bad Lands
+and the coulees and the flat prairies; and far up into the land of
+the long cold you may see, even today if you like, the shadow of that
+unparalleled pathway, the Long Trail of the cattle-range. History has no
+other like it.
+
+The Long Trail was surveyed and constructed in a century and a day.
+Over the Red River of the South, a stream even today perhaps known but
+vaguely in the minds of many inhabitants of the country, there
+appeared, almost without warning, vast processions of strange horned
+kine--processions of enormous wealth, owned by kings who paid no
+tribute, and guarded by men who never knew a master. Whither these were
+bound, what had conjured them forth, whence they came, were questions
+in the minds of the majority of the population of the North and East
+to whom the phenomenon appeared as the product of a day. The answer to
+these questions lay deep in the laws of civilization, and extended far
+back into that civilization's history. The Long Trail was finished in a
+day. It was begun more than a century before that day, and came forward
+along the very appointed ways of time.... Thus, far down in the vague
+Southwest, at some distant time, in some distant portion of old,
+mysterious Mexico, there fell into line the hoof prints which made the
+first faint beginnings of the Long Trail, merely the path of a half
+nomadic movement along the line of the least resistance.
+
+The Long Trail began to deepen and extend. It received then, as it
+did later, a baptism of human blood such as no other pathway of the
+continent has known. The nomadic and the warlike days passed, and
+there ensued a more quiet and pastoral time. It was the beginning of a
+feudalism of the range, a barony rude enough, but a glorious one,
+albeit it began, like all feudalism, in large-handed theft and generous
+murdering. The flocks of these strong men, carelessly interlapping,
+increased and multiplied amazingly. They were hardly looked upon as
+wealth. The people could not eat a tithe of the beef; they could not
+use a hundredth of the leather. Over hundreds and hundreds of miles of
+ownerless grass lands, by the rapid waters of the mountains, by the
+slow streams of the plains or the long and dark lagoons of the low coast
+country, the herds of tens grew into droves of hundreds and thousands
+and hundreds of thousands. This was really the dawning of the American
+cattle industry.
+
+Chips and flakes of the great Southwestern herd began to be seen in the
+Northern States. As early as 1857 Texas cattle were driven to Illinois.
+In 1861 Louisiana was, without success, tried as an outlet. In 1867
+a venturous drover took a herd across the Indian Nations, bound for
+California, and only abandoned the project because the Plains Indians
+were then very bad in the country to the north. In 1869 several herds
+were driven from Texas to Nevada. These were side trails of the main
+cattle road. It seemed clear that a great population in the North needed
+the cheap beef of Texas, and the main question appeared to be one of
+transportation. No proper means for this offered. The Civil War stopped
+almost all plans to market the range cattle, and the close of that war
+found the vast grazing lands of Texas covered fairly with millions of
+cattle which had no actual or determinate value. They were sorted and
+branded and herded after a fashion, but neither they nor their increase
+could be converted into anything but more cattle. The cry for a market
+became imperative.
+
+Meantime the Anglo-Saxon civilization was rolling swiftly toward the
+upper West. The Indians were being driven from the Plains. A solid army
+was pressing behind the vanguard of soldier, scout, and plainsman. The
+railroads were pushing out into a new and untracked empire. They carried
+the market with them. The market halted, much nearer, though still some
+hundred of miles to the north of the great herd. The Long Trail tapped
+no more at the door of Illinois, Missouri, Arkansas, but leaped north
+again definitely, this time springing across the Red River and up to the
+railroads, along sharp and well-defined channels deepened in the year of
+1866 alone by the hoofs of more than a quarter of a million cattle.
+
+In 1871, only five years later, over six hundred thousand cattle crossed
+the Red River for the Northern markets. Abilene, Newton, Wichita,
+Ellsworth, Great Bend, Dodge, flared out into a swift and sometime evil
+blossoming. Thus the men of the North first came to hear of the Long
+Trail and the men who made it, although really it had begun long ago and
+had been foreordained to grow.
+
+By this time, 1867 and 1868, the northern portions of the region
+immediately to the east of the Rocky Mountains had been sufficiently
+cleared of their wild inhabitants to admit a gradual though precarious
+settlement. It had been learned yet again that the buffalo grass and
+the sweet waters of the far North would fatten a range broadhorn to a
+stature far beyond any it could attain on the southern range. The
+Long Trail pushed rapidly even farther to the north where there still
+remained "free grass" and a new market. The territorial ranges needed
+many thousands of cattle for their stocking, and this demand took a
+large part of the Texas drive which came to Abilene, Great Bend, and
+Fort Dodge. Moreover, the Government was now feeding thousands of its
+new red wards, and these Indians needed thousands of beeves for rations,
+which were driven from the southern range to the upper army posts and
+reservations. Between this Government demand and that of the territorial
+stock ranges there was occupation for the men who made the saddle their
+home.
+
+The Long Trail, which had previously found the black corn lands of
+Illinois and Missouri, now crowded to the West, until it had reached
+Utah and Nevada, and penetrated every open park and mesa and valley of
+Colorado, and found all the high plains of Wyoming. Cheyenne and Laramie
+became common words now, and drovers spoke as wisely of the dangers of
+the Platte as a year before they had mentioned those of the Red River
+or the Arkansas. Nor did the Trail pause in its irresistible push to
+the north until it had found the last of the five great transcontinental
+lines, far in the British provinces. Here in spite of a long season of
+ice and snow the uttermost edges of the great herd might survive, in a
+certain percentage at least, each year in an almost unassisted struggle
+for existence, under conditions different enough, it would seem, from
+those obtaining at the opposite extreme of the wild roadway over which
+they came.
+
+The Long Trail of the cattle-range was done! By magic the cattle
+industry had spread over the entire West. Today many men think of that
+industry as belonging only to the Southwest, and many would consider
+that it was transferred to the North. Really it was not transferred
+but extended, and the trail of the old drive marks the line of that
+extension.
+
+Today the Long Trail is replaced by other trails, product of the swift
+development of the West, and it remains as the connection, now for the
+most part historical only, between two phases of an industry which, in
+spite of differences of climate and condition, retain a similarity in
+all essential features. When the last steer of the first herd was driven
+into the corral at the Ultima Thule of the range, it was the pony of the
+American cowboy which squatted and wheeled under the spur and burst down
+the straggling street of the little frontier town. Before that time, and
+since that time, it was and has been the same pony and the same man who
+have traveled the range, guarding and guiding the wild herds, from the
+romantic to the commonplace days of the West.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Chapter IV. The Cowboy
+
+The Great West, vast and rude, brought forth men also vast and rude. We
+pass today over parts of that matchless region, and we see the red hills
+and ragged mountain-fronts cut and crushed into huge indefinite shapes,
+to which even a small imagination may give a human or more than human
+form. It would almost seem that the same great hand which chiseled out
+these monumental forms had also laid its fingers upon the people of this
+region and fashioned them rude and ironlike, in harmony with the stern
+faces set about them.
+
+Of all the babes of that primeval mother, the West, the cowboy was
+perhaps her dearest because he was her last. Some of her children lived
+for centuries; this one for not a triple decade before he began to
+be old. What was really the life of this child of the wild region of
+America, and what were the conditions of the experience that bore him,
+can never be fully known by those who have not seen the West with wide
+eyes--for the cowboy was simply a part of the West. He who does not
+understand the one can never understand the other.
+
+If we care truly to see the cowboy as he was and seek to give our wish
+the dignity of a real purpose, we should study him in connection with
+his surroundings and in relation to his work. Then we shall see him not
+as a curiosity but as a product--not as an eccentric driver of horned
+cattle but as a man suited to his times.
+
+Large tracts of that domain where once the cowboy reigned supreme have
+been turned into farms by the irrigator's ditch or by the dry-farmer's
+plan. The farmer in overalls is in many instances his own stockman
+today. On the ranges of Arizona, Wyoming, and Texas and parts of Nevada
+we may find the cowboy, it is true, even today: but he is no longer the
+Homeric figure that once dominated the plains. In what we say as to
+his trade, therefore, or his fashion in the practice of it, we speak
+in terms of thirty or forty years ago, when wire was unknown, when the
+round-up still was necessary, and the cowboy's life was indeed that of
+the open.
+
+By the costume we may often know the man. The cowboy's costume was
+harmonious with its surroundings. It was planned upon lines of
+such stern utility as to leave no possible thing which we may call
+dispensable. The typical cowboy costume could hardly be said to contain
+a coat and waistcoat. The heavy woolen shirt, loose and open at the
+neck, was the common wear at all seasons of the year excepting winter,
+and one has often seen cowboys in the winter-time engaged in work about
+the yard or corral of the ranch wearing no other cover for the upper
+part of the body but one or more of these heavy shirts. If the cowboy
+wore a coat he would wear it open and loose as much as possible. If
+he wore a "vest" he would wear it slouchily, hanging open or partly
+unbuttoned most of the time. There was a reason for this slouchy habit.
+The cowboy would say that the vest closely buttoned about the body would
+cause perspiration, so that the wearer would quickly chill upon ceasing
+exercise. If the wind were blowing keenly when the cowboy dismounted to
+sit upon the ground for dinner, he would button up his waistcoat and be
+warm. If it were very cold he would button up his coat also.
+
+The cowboy's boots were of fine leather and fitted tightly, with light
+narrow soles, extremely small and high heels. Surely a more irrational
+foot-covering never was invented; yet these tight, peaked cowboy boots
+had a great significance and may indeed be called the insignia of a
+calling. There was no prouder soul on earth than the cowboy. He was
+proud of being a horseman and had a contempt for all human beings who
+walked. On foot in his tight-toed boots he was lost; but he wished it
+to be understood that he never was on foot. If we rode beside him and
+watched his seat in the big cow saddle we found that his high and narrow
+heels prevented the slipping forward of the foot in the stirrup, into
+which he jammed his feet nearly full length. If there was a fall, the
+cowboy's foot never hung in the stirrup. In the corral roping,
+afoot, his heels anchored him. So he found his little boots not so
+unserviceable and retained them as a matter of pride. Boots made for
+the cowboy trade sometimes had fancy tops of bright-colored leather. The
+Lone Star of Texas was not infrequent in their ornamentation.
+
+The curious pride of the horseman extended also to his gloves. The
+cowboy was very careful in the selection of his gloves. They were made
+of the finest buckskin, which could not be injured by wetting. Generally
+they were tanned white and cut with a deep cuff or gauntlet from which
+hung a little fringe to flutter in the wind when he rode at full speed
+on horseback.
+
+The cowboy's hat was one of the typical and striking features of his
+costumes. It was a heavy, wide, white felt hat with a heavy leather
+band buckled about it. There has been no other head covering devised so
+suitable as the Stetson for the uses of the Plains, although high and
+heavy black hats have in part supplanted it today among stockmen. The
+boardlike felt was practically indestructible. The brim flapped a little
+and, in time, was turned up and perhaps held fast to the crown by a
+thong. The wearer might sometimes stiffen the brim by passing a thong
+through a series of holes pierced through the outer edge. He could
+depend upon his hat in all weathers. In the rain it was an umbrella; in
+the sun a shield; in the winter he could tie it down about his ears with
+his handkerchief.
+
+Loosely thrown about the cowboy's shirt collar was a silk kerchief. It
+was tied in a hard knot in front, and though it could scarcely be said
+to be devoted to the uses of a neck scarf, yet it was a great comfort to
+the back of the neck when one was riding in a hot wind. It was sure to
+be of some bright color, usually red. Modern would-be cowpunchers do not
+willingly let this old kerchief die, and right often they over-play it.
+For the cowboy of the "movies," however, let us register an unqualified
+contempt. The real range would never have been safe for him.
+
+A peculiar and distinctive feature of the cowboy's costume was his
+"chaps" (_chaparejos_). The chaps were two very wide and full-length
+trouser-legs made of heavy calfskin and connected by a narrow belt
+or strap. They were cut away entirely at front and back so that they
+covered only the thigh and lower legs and did not heat the body as
+a complete leather garment would. They were intended solely as a
+protection against branches, thorns, briers, and the like, but they were
+prized in cold or wet weather. Sometimes there was seen, more often on
+the southern range, a cowboy wearing chaps made of skins tanned with
+the hair on; for the cowboy of the Southwest early learned that goatskin
+left with the hair on would turn the cactus thorns better than any other
+material. Later, the chaps became a sort of affectation on the part of
+new men on the range; but the old-time cowboy wore them for use, not as
+a uniform. In hot weather he laid them off.
+
+In the times when some men needed guns and all men carried them, no
+pistol of less than 44-caliber was tolerated on the range, the solid
+framed 45-caliber being the one almost universally used. The barrel
+was eight inches long, and it shot a rifle cartridge of forty grains
+of powder and a blunt-ended bullet that made a terrible missile. This
+weapon depended from a belt worn loose resting upon the left hip and
+hanging low down on the right hip so that none of the weight came upon
+the abdomen. This was typical, for the cowboy was neither fancy gunman
+nor army officer. The latter carries the revolver on the left, the butt
+pointing forward.
+
+An essential part of the cow-puncher's outfit was his "rope." This was
+carried in a close coil at the side of the saddle-horn, fastened by one
+of the many thongs scattered over the saddle. In the Spanish country
+it was called _reata_ and even today is sometimes seen in the Southwest
+made of rawhide. In the South it was called a _lariat_. The modern rope
+is a well-made three-quarter-inch hemp rope about thirty feet in length,
+with a leather or rawhide eye. The cowboy's quirt was a short heavy
+whip, the stock being of wood or iron covered with braided leather and
+carrying a lash made of two or three heavy loose thongs. The spur in the
+old days had a very large rowel with blunt teeth an inch long. It was
+often ornamented with little bells or oblongs of metal, the tinkling of
+which appealed to the childlike nature of the Plains rider. Their use
+was to lock the rowel.
+
+His bridle--for, since the cowboy and his mount are inseparable, we
+may as well speak of his horse's dress also--was noticeable for its
+tremendously heavy and cruel curbed bit, known as the "Spanish bit." But
+in the ordinary riding and even in the exciting work of the old round-up
+and in "cutting out," the cowboy used the bit very little, nor exerted
+any pressure on the reins. He laid the reins against the neck of the
+pony opposite to the direction in which he wished it to go, merely
+turning his hand in the direction and inclining his body in the same
+way. He rode with the pressure of the knee and the inclination of the
+body and the light side-shifting of both reins. The saddle was the
+most important part of the outfit. It was a curious thing, this saddle
+developed by the cattle trade, and the world has no other like it. Its
+great weight--from thirty to forty pounds--was readily excusable when
+one remembers that it was not only seat but workbench for the cowman.
+A light saddle would be torn to pieces at the first rush of a maddened
+steer, but the sturdy frame of a cow-saddle would throw the heaviest
+bull on the range. The high cantle would give a firmness to the cowboy's
+seat when he snubbed a steer with a sternness sufficient to send it
+rolling heels over head. The high pommel, or "horn," steel-forged and
+covered with cross braids of leather, served as anchor post for this
+same steer, a turn of the rope about it accomplishing that purpose at
+once. The saddle-tree forked low down over the pony's back so that the
+saddle sat firmly and could not readily be pulled off. The great broad
+cinches bound the saddle fast till horse and saddle were practically one
+fabric. The strong wooden house of the old heavy stirrup protected
+the foot from being crushed by the impact of the herd. The form of the
+cow-saddle has changed but little, although today one sees a shorter
+seat and smaller horn, a "swell front" or roll, and a stirrup of open
+"ox-bow" pattern.
+
+The round-up was the harvest of the range. The time of the calf round-up
+was in the spring after the grass had become good and after the calves
+had grown large enough for the branding. The State Cattle Association
+divided the entire State range into a number of round-up districts.
+Under an elected round-up captain were all the bosses in charge of the
+different ranch outfits sent by men having cattle in the round-up. Let
+us briefly draw a picture of this scene as it was.
+
+Each cowboy would have eight or ten horses for his own use, for he had
+now before him the hardest riding of the year. When the cow-puncher went
+into the herd to cut out calves he mounted a fresh horse, and every few
+hours he again changed horses, for there was no horse which could long
+endure the fatigue of the rapid and intense work of cutting. Before the
+rider stretched a sea of interwoven horns, waving and whirling as the
+densely packed ranks of cattle closed in or swayed apart. It was
+no prospect for a weakling, but into it went the cow-puncher on his
+determined little horse, heeding not the plunging, crushing, and
+thrusting of the excited cattle. Down under the bulks of the herd, half
+hid in the whirl of dust, he would spy a little curly calf running,
+dodging, and twisting, always at the heels of its mother; and he would
+dart in after, following the two through the thick of surging and
+plunging beasts. The sharp-eyed pony would see almost as soon as his
+rider which cow was wanted and he needed small guidance from that time
+on. He would follow hard at her heels, edging her constantly toward the
+flank of the herd, at times nipping her hide as a reminder of his own
+superiority. In spite of herself the cow would gradually turn out
+toward the edge, and at last would be swept clear of the crush, the calf
+following close behind her. There was a whirl of the rope and the calf
+was laid by the heels and dragged to the fire where the branding irons
+were heated and ready.
+
+Meanwhile other cow-punchers are rushing calves to the branding.
+The hubbub and turmoil increase. Taut ropes cross the ground in many
+directions. The cutting ponies pant and sweat, rear and plunge. The
+garb of the cowboy is now one of white alkali which hangs gray in his
+eyebrows and moustache. Steers bellow as they surge to and fro. Cows
+charge on their persecutors. Fleet yearlings break and run for the open,
+pursued by men who care not how or where they ride.
+
+We have spoken in terms of the past. There is no calf round-up of the
+open range today. The last of the roundups was held in Routt County,
+Colorado, several years ago, so far as the writer knows, and it had only
+to do with shifting cattle from the summer to the winter range.
+
+After the calf round-up came the beef round-up, the cowman's final
+harvest. This began in July or August. Only the mature or fatted animals
+were cut out from the herd. This "beef cut" was held apart and driven on
+ahead from place to place as the round-up progressed. It was then driven
+in by easy stages to the shipping point on the railroad, whence the long
+trainloads of cattle went to the great markets.
+
+In the heyday of the cowboy it was natural that his chief amusements
+should be those of the outdoor air and those more or less in line with
+his employment. He was accustomed to the sight of big game, and so had
+the edge of his appetite for its pursuit worn off. Yet he was a hunter,
+just as every Western man was a hunter in the times of the Western game.
+His weapons were the rifle, revolver, and rope; the latter two were
+always with him. With the rope at times he captured the coyote, and
+under special conditions he has taken deer and even antelope in this
+way, though this was of course most unusual and only possible under
+chance conditions of ground and cover. Elk have been roped by cowboys
+many times, and it is known that even the mountain sheep has been so
+taken, almost incredible as that may seem. The young buffalo were easy
+prey for the cowboy and these he often roped and made captive. In fact
+the beginnings of all the herds of buffalo now in captivity in this
+country were the calves roped and secured by cowboys; and these few
+scattered individuals of a grand race of animals remain as melancholy
+reminders alike of a national shiftlessness and an individual skill and
+daring.
+
+The grizzly was at times seen by the cowboys on the range, and if it
+chanced that several cowboys were together it was not unusual to give
+him chase. They did not always rope him, for it was rarely that the
+nature of the country made this possible. Sometimes they roped him and
+wished they could let him go, for a grizzly bear is uncommonly active
+and straightforward in his habits at close quarters. The extreme
+difficulty of such a combat, however, gave it its chief fascination for
+the cowboy. Of course, no one horse could hold the bear after it was
+roped, but, as one after another came up, the bear was caught by neck
+and foot and body, until at last he was tangled and tripped and hauled
+about till he was helpless, strangled, and nearly dead. It is said that
+cowboys have so brought into camp a grizzly bear, forcing him to half
+walk and half slide at the end of the ropes. No feat better than this
+could show the courage of the plainsman and of the horse which he so
+perfectly controlled.
+
+Of such wild and dangerous exploits were the cowboy's amusements on the
+range. It may be imagined what were his amusements when he visited the
+"settlements." The cow-punchers, reared in the free life of the open
+air, under circumstances of the utmost freedom of individual action,
+perhaps came off the drive or round-up after weeks or months of unusual
+restraint or hardship, and felt that the time had arrived for them
+to "celebrate." Merely great rude children, as wild and untamed and
+untaught as the herds they led, they regarded their first look at the
+"settlements" of the railroads as a glimpse of a wider world. They
+pursued to the uttermost such avenues of new experience as lay before
+them, almost without exception avenues of vice. It is strange that the
+records of those days should be chosen by the public to be held as the
+measure of the American cowboy. Those days were brief, and they are
+long since gone. The American cowboy atoned for them by a quarter of a
+century of faithful labor.
+
+The amusements of the cowboy were like the features of his daily
+surroundings and occupation--they were intense, large, Homeric. Yet,
+judged at his work, no higher type of employee ever existed, nor
+one more dependable. He was the soul of honor in all the ways of his
+calling. The very blue of the sky, bending evenly over all men alike,
+seemed to symbolize his instinct for justice. Faithfulness and manliness
+were his chief traits; his standard--to be a "square man."
+
+Not all the open range will ever be farmed, but very much that was long
+thought to be irreclaimable has gone under irrigation or is being more
+or less successfully "dry-farmed." The man who brought water upon the
+arid lands of the West changed the entire complexion of a vast country
+and with it the industries of that country. Acres redeemed from the
+desert and added to the realm of the American farmer were taken from the
+realm of the American cowboy.
+
+The West has changed. The curtain has dropped between us and its wild
+and stirring scenes. The old days are gone. The house dog sits on the
+hill where yesterday the coyote sang. There are fenced fields and in
+them stand sleek round beasts, deep in crops such as their ancestors
+never saw. In a little town nearby is the hurry and bustle of modern
+life. This town is far out upon what was called the frontier, long after
+the frontier has really gone. Guarding its ghost here stood a little
+army post, once one of the pillars, now one of the monuments of the
+West.
+
+Out from the tiny settlement in the dusk of evening, always facing
+toward where the sun is sinking, might be seen riding, not so long
+ago, a figure we should know. He would thread the little lane among the
+fences, following the guidance of hands other than his own, a thing he
+would once have scorned to do. He would ride as lightly and as easily
+as ever, sitting erect and jaunty in the saddle, his reins held high and
+loose in the hand whose fingers turn up gracefully, his whole body free
+yet firm in the saddle with the seat of the perfect horseman. At the
+boom of the cannon, when the flag dropped fluttering down to sleep, he
+would rise in his stirrups and wave his hat to the flag. Then, toward
+the edge, out into the evening, he would ride on. The dust of his riding
+would mingle with the dusk of night. We could not see which was the
+one or the other. We could only hear the hoofbeats passing, boldly and
+steadily still, but growing fainter, fainter, and more faint. *
+
+
+    * For permission to use in this chapter material from the
+author's "The Story of the Cowboy," acknowledgment is made to D.
+Appleton & Co.
+
+
+
+
+
+Chapter V. The Mines
+
+If the influence of the cattle industry was paramount in the development
+of the frontier region found by the first railways, it should not be
+concluded that this upthrust of the southern cattle constituted the
+only contribution to the West of that day. There were indeed earlier
+influences, the chief of which was the advent of the wild population of
+the placer mines. The riches of the gold-fields hastened the building of
+the first transcontinental railroads and the men of the mines set their
+mark also indelibly upon the range.
+
+It is no part of our business here to follow the great discoveries of
+1849 in California. * Neither shall we chronicle the once-famous rushes
+from California north into the Fraser River Valley of British Columbia;
+neither is it necessary to mention in much detail the great camps of
+Nevada; nor yet the short-lived stampede of 1859 to the Pike's Peak
+country in Colorado. The rich placer fields of Idaho and Montana, from
+which enormous amounts were taken, offer typical examples of the mining
+communities of the Rockies.
+
+
+    * See Stewart Edward White: "The Forty-Niners" ("Chronicles of
+America").
+
+We may never know how much history remains forever unwritten. Of the
+beginnings of the Idaho camps there have trickled back into record only
+brief, inconsequent, and partial stories. The miners who surged this
+way and that all through the Sierras, the upper Cascades, north into the
+Selkirks, and thence back again into the Rockies were a turbulent mob.
+Having overrun all our mountain ranges, following the earlier trails of
+the traders and trappers, they now recoiled upon themselves and rolled
+back eastward to meet the advancing civilization of the westbound rails,
+caring nothing for history and less for the civilized society in which
+they formerly had lived. This story of bedlam broken loose, of men gone
+crazed, by the sudden subversion of all known values and all standards
+of life, was at first something which had no historian and can be
+recorded only by way of hearsay stories which do not always tally as to
+the truth.
+
+The mad treasure-hunters of the California mines, restless,
+insubordinate, incapable of restraint, possessed of the belief that
+there might be gold elsewhere than in California, and having heard
+reports of strikes to the north, went hurrying out into the mountains of
+Oregon and Washington, in a wild stampede, all eager again to engage in
+the glorious gamble where by one lucky stroke of the pick a man might be
+set free of the old limitations of human existence.
+
+So the flood of gold-seekers--passing north into the Fraser River
+country, south again into Oregon and Washington, and across the great
+desert plains into Nevada and Idaho--made new centers of lurid activity,
+such as Oro Fino, Florence, and Carson. Then it was that Walla Walla
+and Lewiston, outfitting points on the western side of the range, found
+place upon the maps of the land, such as they were.
+
+Before these adventurers, now eastbound and no longer facing west, there
+arose the vast and formidable mountain ranges which in their time had
+daunted even the calm minds of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. But
+the prospectors and the pack-trains alike penetrated the Salmon River
+Range. Oro Fino, in Idaho, was old in 1861. The next great strikes were
+to be made around Florence. Here the indomitable packer from the West,
+conquering unheard-of difficulties, brought in whiskey, women, pianos,
+food, mining-tools. Naturally all these commanded fabulous prices.
+The price for each and all lay underfoot. Man, grown superman, could
+overleap time itself by a stroke of the pick! What wonder delirium
+reigned!
+
+These events became known in the Mississippi Valley and farther
+eastward. And now there came hurrying out from the older regions
+many more hundreds and thousands eager to reach a land not so far
+as California, but reputed to be quite as rich. It was then, as the
+bull-trains came in from the East, from the head of navigation on the
+Missouri River, that the western outfitting points of Walla Walla and
+Lewiston lost their importance.
+
+Southward of the Idaho camps the same sort of story was repeating
+itself. Nevada had drawn to herself a portion of the wild men of the
+stampedes. Carson for its day (1859-60) was a capital not unlike the
+others. Some of its men had come down from the upper fields, some had
+arrived from the East over the old Santa Fe Trail, and yet others had
+drifted in from California.
+
+All the camps were very much alike. A straggling row of log cabins or
+huts of motley construction; a few stores so-called, sometimes of logs,
+or, if a saw-mill was at hand, of rude sawn boards; a number of saloons,
+each of which customarily also supported a dance-hall; a series of
+cabins or huts where dwelt individual men, each doing his own cooking
+and washing; and outside these huts the uptorn earth--such were the
+camps which dotted the trails of the stampedes across inhospitable
+deserts and mountain ranges. Church and school were unknown. Law there
+was none, for of organized society there was none. The women who lived
+there were unworthy of the name of woman. The men strode about in
+the loose dress of the camp, sometimes without waistcoat, sometimes
+coatless, shod with heavy boots, always armed.
+
+If we look for causes contributory to the history of the mining-camp, we
+shall find one which ordinarily is overlooked--the invention of Colt's
+revolving pistol. At the time of the Civil War, though this weapon was
+not old, yet it had attained very general use throughout the frontier.
+That was before the day of modern ammunition. The six-shooter of the
+placer days was of the old cap-and-ball type, heavy, long-barreled, and
+usually wooden-handled. It was the general ownership of these deadly
+weapons which caused so much bloodshed in the camps. The revolver in
+the hands of a tyro is not especially serviceable, but it attained great
+deadliness in the hands of an expert user. Such a man, naturally of
+quick nerve reflexes, skillful and accurate in the use of the
+weapon through long practice, became a dangerous, and for a time an
+unconquerable, antagonist.
+
+It is a curious fact that the great Montana fields were doubly
+discovered, in part by men coming east from California, and in part by
+men passing west in search of new gold-fields. The first discovery of
+gold in Montana was made on Gold Creek by a half-breed trapper named
+Francois, better known as Be-net-see. This was in 1852, but the news
+seems to have lain dormant for a time--naturally enough, for there was
+small ingress or egress for that wild and unknown country. In 1857,
+however, a party of miners who had wandered down the Big Hole River on
+their way back east from California decided to look into the Gold Creek
+discovery, of which they had heard. This party was led by James and
+Granville Stuart, and among others in the party were Jake Meeks, Robert
+Hereford, Robert Dempsey, John W. Powell, John M. Jacobs, Thomas Adams,
+and some others. These men did some work on Gold Creek in 1858, but seem
+not to have struck it very rich, and to have withdrawn to Fort Bridger
+in Utah until the autumn of 1860. Then a prospector by the name of Tom
+Golddigger turned up at Bridger with additional stories of creeks to the
+north, so that there was a gradual straggling back toward Gold Creek and
+other gulches. This prospector had been all over the Alder Gulch, which
+was ere long to prove fabulously rich.
+
+It was not, however, until 1863 that the Montana camps sprang into
+fame. It was not Gold Creek or Alder Gulch, but Florence and other
+Idaho camps, that, in the summer and autumn of 1862, brought into the
+mountains no less than five parties of gold-seekers, who remained in
+Montana because they could not penetrate the mountain barrier which lay
+between them and the Salmon River camps in Idaho.
+
+The first of these parties arrived at Gold Creek by wagon-train from
+Fort Benton and the second hailed from Salt Lake. An election was held
+for the purpose of forming a sort of community organization, the first
+election ever known in Montana. The men from the East had brought with
+them some idea of law and organization. There were now in the Montana
+fields many good men such as the Stuart Brothers, Samuel T. Hauser,
+Walter Dance, and others later well known in the State. These men were
+prominent in the organization of the first miners' court, which had
+occasion to try--and promptly to hang--Stillman and Jernigan, two
+ruffians who had been in from the Salmon River mines only about four
+days when they thus met retribution for their early crimes. An
+associate of theirs, Arnett, had been killed while resisting arrest.
+The reputation of Florence for lawlessness and bloodshed was well known;
+and, as the outrages of the well-organized band of desperadoes operating
+in Idaho might be expected to begin at any time in Montana, a certain
+uneasiness existed among the newcomers from the States.
+
+Two more parties, likewise bound for Idaho and likewise baffled by the
+Salmon River range, arrived at the Montana camps in the same summer.
+Both these were from the Pike's Peak country in Colorado. And in the
+autumn came a fifth--this one under military protection, Captain James
+L. Fisk commanding, and having in the party a number of settlers bound
+for Oregon as well as miners for Idaho. This expedition arrived in the
+Prickly Pear Valley in Montana on September 21, 1862, having left St.
+Paul on the 16th of June, traveling by steamboat and wagon-train. While
+Captain Fisk and his expedition pushed on to Walla Walla, nearly half of
+the immigrants stayed to try their luck at placer-mining. But the
+yield was not great and the distant Salmon River mines, their original
+destination, still awaited them. Winter was approaching. It was now too
+late in the season to reach the Salmon River mines, five hundred miles
+across the mountains, and it was four hundred miles to Salt Lake, the
+nearest supply post; therefore, most of the men joined this little
+army of prospectors in Montana. Some of them drifted to the Grasshopper
+diggings, soon to be known under the name of Bannack--one of the wildest
+mining-camps of its day.
+
+These different origins of the population of the first Montana camps are
+interesting because of the fact that they indicate a difference in the
+two currents of population which now met here in the new placer fields.
+In general the wildest and most desperate of the old-time adventurers,
+those coming from the West, had located in the Idaho camps, and might
+be expected in Montana at any time. In contrast to these, the men lately
+out from the States were of a different type, many of them sober, most
+of them law-abiding, men who had come out to better their fortunes and
+not merely to drop into the wild and licentious life of a placercamp.
+Law and order always did prevail eventually in any mining community.
+In the case of Montana, law and order arrived almost synchronously with
+lawlessness and desperadoism.
+
+Law and order had not long to wait before the arrival of the notorious
+Henry Plummer and his band from Florence. Plummer was already known as
+a bad man, but was not yet recognized as the leader of that secret
+association of robbers and murderers which had terrorized the Idaho
+camps. He celebrated his arrival in Bannack by killing a man named
+Cleveland. He was acquitted in the miners' court that tried him, on
+the usual plea of self-defense. He was a man of considerable personal
+address.
+
+The same tribunal soon assembled once more to try three other murderers,
+Moore, Reeves, and Mitchell, with the agreement that the men should have
+a jury and should be provided with counsel. They were all practically
+freed; and after that the roughs grew bolder than ever. The Plummer band
+swore to kill every man who had served in that court, whether as juryman
+or officer. So well did they make good their threat that out of the
+twenty-seven men thus engaged all but seven were either killed or driven
+out of the country, nine being murdered outright. The man who had acted
+as sheriff of this miners' court, Hank Crawford, was unceasingly hounded
+by Plummer, who sought time and again to fix a quarrel on him. Plummer
+was the best shot in the mountains at that time, and he thought it
+would be easy for him to kill his man and enter the usual plea of
+self-defense. By good fortune, however, Crawford caught Plummer off his
+guard and fired upon him with a rifle, breaking his right arm. Plummer's
+friends called in Dr. Glick, the best physician in Bannack, to treat
+the wounded man, warning him that if he told anything about the visit
+he would be shot down. Glick held his peace, and later was obliged to
+attend many of the wounded outlaws, who were always engaged in affairs
+with firearms.
+
+Of all these wild affrays, of the savage life which they denoted, and
+of the stern ways in which retribution overtook the desperadoes of
+the mines, there is no better historian than Nathaniel P. Langford, a
+prominent citizen of the West, who accompanied the overland expedition
+of 1862 and took part in the earliest life of Montana. His work,
+"Vigilante Days and Ways," is an invaluable contemporary record.
+
+It is mentally difficult for us now fully to restore these scenes,
+although the events occurred no earlier than the Civil War. "Life in
+Bannack at this time," says Langford, "was perfect isolation from the
+rest of the world. Napoleon was not more of an exile on St. Helena than
+a newly arrived immigrant from the States in this region of lakes
+and mountains. All the great battles of the season of 1862--Antietam,
+Fredericksburg, Second Bull Run--all the exciting debates of Congress,
+and the more exciting combats at sea, first became known to us on the
+arrival of newspapers and letters in the spring of 1863."
+
+The Territory of Idaho, which included Montana and nearly all Wyoming,
+was organized March 3, 1863. Previous to that time western Montana and
+Idaho formed a part of Washington Territory, of which Olympia was the
+capital, and Montana, east of the mountains, belonged to the Territory
+of Dakota, of which the capital was Yankton, on the Missouri. Langford
+makes clear the political uncertainties of the time, the difficulty
+of enforcing the laws, and narrates the circumstances which led to the
+erection in 1864 of the new Territory of Montana, comprising the limits
+of the present State. *
+
+
+    * The Acts of Congress organizing Territories and admitting
+States are milestones in the occupation of this last West. On the eve of
+the Civil War, Kansas was admitted into the Union; during the war, the
+Territories of Colorado, Nevada, Dakota, Arizona, Idaho, and Montana
+were organized, and Nevada was admitted as a State. Immediately after
+the war, Nebraska was admitted and Wyoming was organized as a Territory.
+In the Centennial Year (1876) Colorado became a State. In 1889 and 1890
+North and South Dakota, Montana, Washington, Idaho, and Wyoming were
+admitted as States. In the latter year Oklahoma was carved out of the
+Indian Territory. Utah with its Mormon population was kept waiting at
+the doors of the Union until 1896. Oklahoma became a State in 1907;
+Arizona and New Mexico were admitted in 1912.
+
+In Montana as elsewhere in these days of great sectional bitterness,
+there was much political strife; and this no doubt accounts for an
+astonishing political event that now took place. Henry Plummer, the most
+active outlaw of his day, was elected sheriff and entrusted with the
+enforcement of the laws! He made indeed a great show of enforcing the
+laws. He married, settled down, and for a time was thought by some of
+the ill-advised to have reformed his ways, although in truth he could
+not have reformed.
+
+By June, 1863, the extraordinarily rich strike in Alder Gulch had been
+made. The news of this spread like wildfire to Bannack and to the Salmon
+River mines in Idaho as well, and the result was one of the fiercest
+of all the stampedes, and the rise, almost overnight, of Virginia City.
+Meanwhile some Indian fighting had taken place and in a pitched battle
+on the Bear River General Connor had beaten decisively the Bannack
+Indians, who for years had preyed on the emigrant trains. This made
+travel on the mountain trails safer than it had been; and the rich
+Last Chance Gulch on which the city of Helena now stands attracted a
+tremendous population almost at once. The historian above cited lived
+there. Let him tell of the life.
+
+"One long stream of active life filled the little creek on its
+auriferous course from Bald Mountain, through a canyon of wild and
+picturesque character, until it emerged into the large and fertile
+valley of the Pas-sam-a-ri... the mountain stream called by Lewis and
+Clark in their journal 'Philanthropy River.' Lateral streams of great
+beauty pour down the sides of the mountain chain bounding the valley....
+Gold placers were found upon these streams and occupied soon after the
+settlement at Virginia City was commenced.... This human hive, numbering
+at least ten thousand people, was the product of ninety days. Into
+it were crowded all the elements of a rough and active civilization.
+Thousands of cabins and tents and brush wakiups... were seen on every
+hand. Every foot of the gulch... was undergoing displacement, and it was
+already disfigured by huge heaps of gravel which had been passed
+through the sluices and rifled of their glittering contents.... Gold was
+abundant, and every possible device was employed by the gamblers, the
+traders, the vile men and women that had come in with the miners into
+the locality, to obtain it. Nearly every third cabin was a saloon where
+vile whiskey was peddled out for fifty cents a drink in gold dust.
+Many of these places were filled with gambling tables and gamblers....
+Hurdy-gurdy dance-houses were numerous.... Not a day or night passed
+which did not yield its full fruition of vice, quarrels, wounds, or
+murders. The crack of the revolver was often heard above the merry notes
+of the violin. Street fights were frequent, and as no one knew when
+or where they would occur, every one was on his guard against a random
+shot.
+
+"Sunday was always a gala day.... The stores were all open.... Thousands
+of people crowded the thoroughfares ready to rush in the direction
+of any promised excitement. Horse-racing was among the most favored
+amusements. Prize rings were formed, and brawny men engaged in
+fisticuffs until their sight was lost and their bodies pommelled to
+a jelly, while hundreds of onlookers cheered the victor.... Pistols
+flashed, bowie knives flourished, and braggart oaths filled the air, as
+often as men's passions triumphed over their reason. This was indeed
+the reign of unbridled license, and men who at first regarded it with
+disgust and terror, by constant exposure soon learned to become a part
+of it and forget that they had ever been aught else. All classes of
+society were represented at this general exhibition. Judges, lawyers,
+doctors, even clergymen, could not claim exemption. Culture and religion
+afforded feeble protection, where allurement and indulgence ruled the
+hour."
+
+Imagine, therefore, a fabulously rich mountain valley twelve miles in
+extent, occupied by more than ten thousand men and producing more than
+ten millions of dollars before the close of the first year! It is a
+stupendous demand on any imagination. How might all this gold be sent
+out in safe-keeping? We are told that the only stage route extended from
+Virginia City no farther than Bannack. Between Virginia City and Salt
+Lake City there was an absolute wilderness, wholly unsettled, four
+hundred and seventy-five miles in width. "There was no post office in
+the Territory. Letters were brought from Salt Lake first at a cost of
+two dollars and a half each, and later in the season at one dollar each.
+All money at infinite risk was sent to the nearest express office at
+Salt Lake City by private hands."
+
+Practically every man in the new gold-fields was aware of the existence
+of a secret band of well-organized ruffians and robbers. The general
+feeling was one of extreme uneasiness. There were plenty of men who had
+taken out of the ground considerable quantities of gold, and who would
+have been glad to get back to the East with their little fortunes, but
+they dared not start. Time after time the express coach, the solitary
+rider, the unguarded wagon-train, were held up and robbed, usually with
+the concomitant of murder. When the miners did start out from one camp
+to another they took all manner of precautions to conceal their gold
+dust. We are told that on one occasion one party bored a hole in the end
+of the wagon tongue with an auger and filled it full of gold dust, thus
+escaping observation! The robbers learned to know the express agents,
+and always had advice of every large shipment of gold. It was almost
+useless to undertake to conceal anything from them; and resistance was
+met with death. Such a reign of terror, such an organized system of
+highway robbery, such a light valuing of human life, has been seldom
+found in any other time or place.
+
+There were, as we have seen, good men in these camps--although the best
+of them probably let down the standards of living somewhat after their
+arrival there; but the trouble was that the good men did not know one
+another, had no organization, and scarcely dared at first to attempt
+one. On the other hand, the robbers' organization was complete and kept
+its secrets as the grave; indeed, many and many a lonesome grave held
+secrets none ever was to know. How many men went out from Eastern States
+and disappeared, their fate always to remain a mystery, is a part of the
+untold story of the mining frontier.
+
+There are known to have been a hundred and two men killed by Plummer
+and his gang; how many were murdered without their fate ever being
+discovered can not be told. Plummer was the leader of the band, but,
+arch-hypocrite that he was, he managed to keep his own connection with
+it a secret. His position as sheriff gave him many advantages. He posed
+as being a silver-mine expert, among other things, and often would be
+called out to "expert" some new mine. That usually meant that he left
+town in order to commit some desperate robbery. The boldest outrages
+always required Plummer as the leader. Sometimes he would go away on
+the pretense of following some fugitive from justice. His horse, the
+fleetest in the country, often was found, laboring and sweating, at the
+rear of his house. That meant that Plummer had been away on some secret
+errand of his own. He was suspected many times, but nothing could be
+fastened upon him; or there lacked sufficient boldness and sufficient
+organization on the part of the law-and-order men to undertake his
+punishment.
+
+We are not concerned with repeating thrilling tales, bloody almost
+beyond belief, and indicative of an incomprehensible depravity in human
+nature, so much as we are with the causes and effects of this wild
+civilization which raged here quite alone in the midst of one of the
+wildest of the western mountain regions. It will best serve our purpose
+to retain in mind the twofold character of this population, and to
+remember that the frontier caught to itself not only ruffians and
+desperadoes, men undaunted by any risk, but also men possessed of a yet
+steadier personal courage and hardihood. There were men rough, coarse,
+brutal, murderous; but against them were other men self-reliant, stern,
+just, and resolved upon fair play.
+
+That was indeed the touchstone of the entire civilization which followed
+upon the heels of these scenes of violence. It was fair play which
+really animated the great Montana Vigilante movement and which
+eventually cleaned up the merciless gang of Henry Plummer and his
+associates. The centers of civilization were far removed. The courts
+were powerless. In some cases even the machinery of the law was in the
+hands of these ruffians. But so violent were their deeds, so brutal, so
+murderous, so unfair, that slowly the indignation of the good men arose
+to the white-hot point of open resentment and of swift retribution. What
+the good men of the frontier loved most of all was justice. They now
+enforced justice in the only way left open to them. They did this as
+California earlier had done; and they did it so well that there was
+small need to repeat the lesson.
+
+The actual extermination of the Henry Plummer band occurred rather
+promptly when the Vigilantes once got under way. One of the band by the
+name of Red Yager, in company with yet another by the name of Brown,
+had been concerned in the murder of Lloyd Magruder, a merchant of the
+Territory. The capture of these two followed closely upon the hanging of
+George Ives, also accused of more than one murder. Ives was an example
+of the degrading influence of the mines. He was a decent young man until
+he left his home in Wisconsin. He was in California from 1857 to 1858.
+When he appeared in Idaho he seemed to have thrown off all restraint and
+to have become a common rowdy and desperado. It is said of him that "few
+men of his age ever had been guilty of so many fiendish crimes."
+
+Yager and Brown, knowing the fate which Ives had met, gave up hope when
+they fell into the hands of the newly organized Vigilantes. Brown
+was hanged; so was Yager; but Yager, before his death, made a full
+confession which put the Vigilantes in possession of information they
+had never yet been able to secure. *
+
+
+    * Langford gives these names disclosed by Yager as follows:
+"Henry Plummer was chief of the band; Bill Bunton, stool pigeon and
+second in command; George Brown, secretary; Sam Bunton, roadster;
+Cyrus Skinner, fence, spy, and roadster; George Shears, horse thief and
+roadster; Frank Parish, horse thief and roadster; Hayes Lyons, telegraph
+man and roadster; Bill Hunter, telegraph man and roadster; Ned Ray,
+council-room keeper at Bannack City; George Ives, Stephen Marshland,
+Dutch John (Wagner), Alex Carter, Whiskey Bill (Graves), Johnny Cooper,
+Buck Stinson, Mexican Frank, Bob Zachary, Boone Helm, Clubfoot George
+(Lane), Billy Terwiliger, Gad Moore were roadsters." Practically all
+these were executed by the Vigilantes, with many others, and eventually
+the band of outlaws was entirely broken up.
+
+Much has been written and much romanced about the conduct of these
+desperadoes when they met their fate. Some of them were brave and some
+proved cowards at the last. For a time, Plummer begged abjectly, his
+eyes streaming with tears. Suddenly he was smitten with remorse as
+the whole picture of his past life appeared before him. He promised
+everything, begged everything, if only life might be spared him--asked
+his captors to cut off his ears, to cut out his tongue, then strip him
+naked and banish him. At the very last, however, he seems to have become
+composed. Stinson and Ray went to their fate alternately swearing and
+whining. Some of the ruffians faced death boldly. More than one himself
+jumped from the ladder or kicked from under him the box which was the
+only foothold between him and eternity. Boone Helm was as hardened as
+any of them. This man was a cannibal and murderer. He seems to have had
+no better nature whatever. His last words as he sprang off were "Hurrah
+for Jeff Davis! Let her rip!" Another man remarked calmly that he cared
+no more for hanging than for drinking a glass of water. But each after
+his own fashion met the end foreordained for him by his own lack of
+compassion; and of compassion he received none at the hands of the men
+who had resolved that the law should be established and should remain
+forever.
+
+There was an instant improvement in the social life of Virginia City,
+Bannack, and the adjoining camps as soon as it was understood that the
+Vigilantes were afoot. Langford, who undoubtedly knew intimately of the
+activities of this organization, makes no apology for the acts of the
+Vigilantes, although they did not have back of them the color of the
+actual law. He says:
+
+"The retribution dispensed to these daring freebooters in no respect
+exceeded the demands of absolute justice.... There was no other remedy.
+Practically the citizens had no law, but if law had existed it could
+not have afforded adequate redress. This was proven by the feeling of
+security consequent upon the destruction of the band. When the robbers
+were dead the people felt safe, not for themselves alone but for their
+pursuits and their property. They could travel without fear. They had
+reasonable assurance of safety in the transmission of money to the
+States and in the arrival of property over the unguarded route from Salt
+Lake. The crack of pistols had ceased, and they could walk the streets
+without constant exposure to danger. There was an omnipresent spirit of
+protection, akin to that omnipresent spirit of law which pervaded older
+and more civilized communities.... Young men who had learned to believe
+that the roughs were destined to rule and who, under the influence of
+that faith, were fast drifting into crime shrunk appalled before the
+thorough work of the Vigilantes. Fear, more potent than conscience,
+forced even the worst of men to observe the requirements of society, and
+a feeling of comparative security among all classes was the result."
+
+Naturally it was not the case that all the bad men were thus
+exterminated. From time to time there appeared vividly in the midst of
+these surroundings additional figures of solitary desperadoes, each to
+have his list of victims, and each himself to fall before the weapons of
+his enemies or to meet the justice of the law or the sterner meed of the
+Vigilantes. It would not be wholly pleasant to read even the names of
+a long list of these; perhaps it will be sufficient to select one, the
+notorious Joseph Slade, one of the "picturesque" characters of whom a
+great deal of inaccurate and puerile history has been written. The
+truth about Slade is that he was a good man at first, faithful in the
+discharge of his duties as an agent of the stage company. Needing at
+times to use violence lawfully, he then began to use it unlawfully. He
+drank and soon went from bad to worse. At length his outrages became so
+numerous that the men of the community took him out and hanged him. His
+fate taught many others the risk of going too far in defiance of law and
+decency.
+
+What has been true regarding the camps of Florence, Bannack, and
+Virginia City, had been true in part in earlier camps and was to be
+repeated perhaps a trifle less vividly in other camps yet to come. The
+Black Hills gold rush, for instance, which came after the railroad
+but before the Indians were entirely cleared away, made a certain
+wild history of its own. We had our Deadwood stage line then, and
+our Deadwood City with all its wild life of drinking, gambling, and
+shooting--the place where more than one notorious bad man lost his life,
+and some capable officers of the peace shared their fate. To describe in
+detail the life of this stampede and the wild scenes ensuing upon it is
+perhaps not needful here. The main thing is that the great quartz lodes
+of the Black Hills support in the end a steady, thrifty, and law-abiding
+population.
+
+All over that West, once so unspeakably wild and reckless, there now
+rise great cities where recently were scattered only mining-camps scarce
+fit to be called units of any social compact. It was but yesterday
+that these men fought and drank and dug their own graves in their own
+sluices. At the city of Helena, on the site of Last Chance Gulch,
+one recalls that not so long ago citizens could show with a certain
+contemporary pride the old dead tree once known as "Hangman's Tree." It
+marked a spot which might be called a focus of the old frontier. Around
+it, and in the country immediately adjoining, was fought out the great
+battle whose issue could not be doubted--that between the new and the
+old days; between law and order and individual lawlessness; between
+the school and the saloon; between the home and the dance-hall; between
+society united and resolved and the individual reverted to worse than
+savagery.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Chapter VI. The Pathways Of The West
+
+Since we have declared ourselves to be less interested in bald
+chronology than in the naturally connected causes of events which make
+chronology worth while, we may now, perhaps, double back upon the path
+of chronology, and take up the great early highways of the West--what we
+might call the points of attack against the frontier.
+
+The story of the Santa Fe Trail, now passing into oblivion, once was on
+the tongue of every man. This old highroad in its heyday presented the
+most romantic and appealing features of the earlier frontier life. The
+Santa Fe Trail was the great path of commerce between our frontier and
+the Spanish towns trading through Santa Fe. This commerce began in 1822,
+when about threescore men shipped certain goods across the lower Plains
+by pack-animals. By 1826 it was employing a hundred men and was using
+wagons and mules. In 1830, when oxen first were used on the trail, the
+trade amounted to $120,000 annually; and by 1843, when the Spanish ports
+were closed, it had reached the value of $450,000, involving the use
+of 230 wagons and 350 men. It was this great wagon trail which first
+brought us into touch with the Spanish civilization of the Southwest.
+Its commercial totals do not bulk large today, but the old trail itself
+was a thing titanic in its historic value.
+
+This was the day not of water but of land transport; yet the wheeled
+vehicles which passed out into the West as common carriers of
+civilization clung to the river valleys--natural highways and natural
+resting places of home-building man. This has been the story of the
+advance of civilization from the first movements of the world's peoples.
+The valleys are the cleats of civilization's golden sluices.
+
+There lay the great valley of the Arkansas, offering food and water, an
+easy grade and a direct course reaching out into the West, even to the
+edge of the lands of Spain; and here stood wheeled vehicles able to
+traverse it and to carry drygoods and hardware, and especially
+domestic cotton fabrics, which formed the great staple of a "Santa Fe
+assortment." The people of the Middle West were now, in short, able
+to feed and clothe themselves and to offer a little of their surplus
+merchandise to some one else in sale. They had begun to export! Out
+yonder, in a strange and unknown land, lay one of the original markets
+of America!
+
+On the heels of Lewis and Clark, who had just explored the Missouri
+River route to the Northwest, Captain Zebulon Pike of the Army, long
+before the first wheeled traffic started West, had employed this valley
+of the Arkansas in his search for the southwestern delimitations of the
+United States. Pike thought he had found the head of the Red River when
+after a toilsome and dangerous march he reached the headwaters of
+the Rio Grande. But it was not our river. It belonged to Spain, as he
+learned to his sorrow, when he marched all the way to Chihuahua in old
+Mexico and lay there during certain weary months.
+
+It was Pike's story of the far Southwest that first started the idea of
+the commerce of the Santa Fe Trail. In that day geography was a human
+thing, a thing of vital importance to all men. Men did not read the
+stock markets; they read stories of adventure, tales of men returned
+from lands out yonder in the West. Heretofore the swarthy Mexicans, folk
+of the dry plains and hills around the head of the Rio Grande and the
+Red, had carried their cotton goods and many other small and needful
+things all the way from Vera Cruz on the seacoast, over trails that were
+long, tedious, uncertain, and expensive. A far shorter and more natural
+trade route went west along the Arkansas, which would bring the American
+goods to the doors of the Spanish settlements. After Pike and one or two
+others had returned with reports of the country, the possibilities of
+this trade were clear to any one with the merchant's imagination.
+
+There is rivalry for the title of "Father of the Santa Fe Trail." As
+early as 1812, when the United States was at war with England, a party
+of men on horseback trading into the West, commonly called the McKnight,
+Baird, and Chambers party, made their way west to Santa Fe. There,
+however, they met with disaster. All their goods were confiscated and
+they themselves lay in Mexican jails for nine years. Eventually the
+returning survivors of this party told their stories, and those stories,
+far from chilling, only inflamed the ardor of other adventurous traders.
+In 1821 more than one American trader reached Santa Fe; and, now that
+the Spanish yoke had been thrown off by the Mexicans, the goods, instead
+of being confiscated, were purchased eagerly.
+
+It is to be remembered, of course, that trading of this sort to Mexico
+was not altogether a new thing. Sutlers of the old fur traders and
+trappers already had found the way to New Spain from the valley of the
+Platte, south along the eastern edge of the Rockies, through Wyoming
+and Colorado. By some such route as that at least one trader, a French
+creole, agent of the firm of Bryant & Morrison at Kaskaskia, had
+penetrated to the Spanish lands as early as 1804, while Lewis and Clark
+were still absent in the upper wilderness. Each year the great mountain
+rendezvous of the trappers--now at Bent's Fort on the Arkansas, now
+at Horse Creek in Wyoming, now on Green River in Utah, or even farther
+beyond the mountains--demanded supplies of food and traps and ammunition
+to enable the hunters to continue their work for another year. Perhaps
+many of the pack-trains which regularly supplied this shifting mountain
+market already had traded in the Spanish country.
+
+It is not necessary to go into further details regarding this primitive
+commerce of the prairies. It yielded a certain profit; it shaped the
+character of the men who carried it on. But what is yet more important,
+it greatly influenced the country which lay back of the border on the
+Missouri River. It called yet more men from the eastern settlements
+to those portions which lay upon the edge of the Great Plains. There
+crowded yet more thickly, up to the line between the certain and the
+uncertain, the restless westbound population of all the country.
+
+If on the south the valley of the Arkansas led outward to New Spain,
+yet other pathways made out from the Mississippi River into the unknown
+lands. The Missouri was the first and last of our great natural frontier
+roads. Its lower course swept along the eastern edge of the Plains, far
+to the south, down to the very doors of the most adventurous settlements
+in the Mississippi Valley. Those who dared its stained and turbulent
+current had to push up, onward, northward, past the mouth of the Platte,
+far to the north across degrees of latitude, steadily forward through
+a vast virgin land. Then the river bent boldly and strongly off to the
+west, across another empire. Its great falls indicated that it headed
+high; beyond the great falls its steady sweep westward and at last
+southward, led into yet other kingdoms.
+
+When we travel by horse or by modern motor car in that now accessible
+region and look about us, we should not fail to reflect on the long
+trail of the upbound boats which Manuel Lisa and other traders sent out
+almost immediately upon the return of the Lewis and Clark expedition.
+We should see them struggling up against that tremendous current
+before steam was known, driven by their lust for new lands. We may
+then understand fully what we have read of the enterprises of the old
+American Fur Company, and bring to mind the forgotten names of Campbell
+and Sublette, of General Ashley and of Wyeth--names to be followed by
+others really of less importance, as those of Bonneville and Fremont.
+That there could be farms, that there ever might be homes, in this
+strange wild country, was, to these early adventurers, unthinkable.
+
+Then we should picture the millions of buffalo which once covered these
+plains and think of the waste and folly of their slaughtering. We should
+see the long streams of the Mackinaw boats swimming down the Missouri,
+bound for St. Louis, laden with bales of buffalo and beaver peltry,
+every pound of which would be worth ten dollars at the capital of the
+fur trade; and we should restore to our minds the old pictures of savage
+tribesmen, decked in fur-trimmed war-shirts and plumed bonnets, armed
+with lance and sinewed bow and bull-neck shield, not forgetting whence
+they got their horses and how they got their food.
+
+The great early mid-continental highway, known as the Oregon Trail or
+the Overland Trail, was by way of the Missouri up the Platte Valley,
+thence across the mountains. We know more of this route because it was
+not discontinued, but came steadily more and more into use, for one
+reason after another. The fur traders used it, the Forty-Niners used it,
+the cattlemen used it in part, the railroads used it; and, lastly, the
+settlers and farmers used it most of all.
+
+In physical features the Platte River route was similar to that of the
+Arkansas Valley. Each at its eastern extremity, for a few days' travel,
+passed over the rolling grass-covered and flower-besprinkled prairies
+ere it broke into the high and dry lands of the Plains, with their green
+or grey or brown covering of practically flowerless short grasses. But
+between the two trails of the Arkansas and the Platte there existed
+certain wide differences. At the middle of the nineteenth century the
+two trails were quite distinct in personnel, if that word may be used.
+The Santa Fe Trail showed Spanish influences; that of the Platte Valley
+remained far more nearly American.
+
+Thus far the frontier had always been altering the man who came to it;
+and, indirectly, always altering those who dwelt back of the frontier,
+nearer to the Appalachians or the Atlantic. A new people now was in
+process of formation--a people born of a new environment. America and
+the American were conceiving. There was soon to be born, soon swiftly to
+grow, a new and lasting type of man. Man changes an environment only by
+bringing into it new or better transportation. Environment changes man.
+Here in the midcontinent, at the mid-century, the frontier and the ways
+of the frontier were writing their imprint on the human product of our
+land.
+
+The first great caravans of the Platte Valley, when the wagon-trains
+went out hundreds strong, were not the same as the scattering cavalcade
+of the fur hunters, not the same as the ox-trains and mule-trains of the
+Santa Fe traffic. The men who wore deepest the wheel marks of the Oregon
+Trail were neither trading nor trapping men, but homebuilding men--the
+first real emigrants to go West with the intent of making homes beyond
+the Rockies.
+
+The Oregon Trail had been laid out by the explorers of the fur trade.
+Zealous missionaries had made their way over the trail in the thirties.
+The Argonauts of '49 passed over it and left it only after crossing the
+Rockies. But, before gold in California was dreamed of, there had come
+back to the States reports of lands rich in resources other than gold,
+lying in the far Northwest, beyond the great mountain ranges and, before
+the Forty-Niners were heard of, farmers, home-builders, emigrants,
+men with their families, men with their household goods, were steadily
+passing out for the far-off and unknown country of Oregon.
+
+The Oregon Trail was the pathway for Fremont in 1842, perhaps the most
+overvalued explorer of all the West; albeit this comment may to some
+seem harsh. Kit Carson and Bill Williams led Fremont across the Rockies
+almost by the hand. Carson and Williams themselves had been taken across
+by the Indian tribes. But Fremont could write; and the story which he
+set down of his first expedition inflamed the zeal of all. Men began
+to head out for that far-away country beyond the Rockies. Not a few
+scattered bands, but very many, passed up the valley of the Platte.
+There began a tremendous trek of thousands of men who wanted homes
+somewhere out beyond the frontier. And that was more than ten years
+before the Civil War. The cow trade was not dreamed of; the coming cow
+country was overleaped and ignored.
+
+Our national horizon extended immeasurably along that dusty way. In the
+use of the Oregon Trail we first began to be great. The chief figure
+of the American West, the figure of the ages, is not the long-haired,
+fringed-legging man riding a raw-boned pony, but the gaunt and sad-faced
+woman sitting on the front seat of the wagon, following her lord where
+he might lead, her face hidden in the same ragged sunbonnet which had
+crossed the Appalachians and the Missouri long before. That was America,
+my brethren! There was the seed of America's wealth. There was the great
+romance of all America--the woman in the sunbonnet; and not, after all,
+the hero with the rifle across his saddle horn. Who has written her
+story? Who has painted her picture?
+
+They were large days, those of the great Oregon Trail, not always
+pleasingly dramatic, but oftentimes tragic and terrible. We speak of
+the Oregon Trail, but it means little to us today; nor will any mere
+generalities ever make it mean much to us. But what did it mean to the
+men and women of that day? What and who were those men and women?
+What did it mean to take the Overland Trail in the great adventure of
+abandoning forever the known and the safe and setting out for Oregon
+or California at a time when everything in the far West was new and
+unknown? How did those good folk travel? Why and whither did they
+travel?
+
+There is a book done by C. F. McGlashan, a resident of Truckee,
+California, known as "The History of the Donner Party," holding a great
+deal of actual history. McGlashan, living close to Donner Lake, wrote
+in 1879, describing scenes with which he was perfectly familiar, and
+recounting facts which he had from direct association with participants
+in the ill-fated Donner Party. He chronicles events which happened in
+1846--a date before the discovery of gold in California. The Donner
+Party was one of the typical American caravans of homeseekers who
+started for the Pacific Slope with no other purpose than that of
+founding homes there, and with no expectation of sudden wealth to be
+gained in the mines. I desire therefore to quote largely from the
+pages of this book, believing that, in this fashion, we shall come upon
+history of a fundamental sort, which shall make us acquainted with the
+men and women of that day, with the purposes and the ambitions which
+animated them, and with the hardships which they encountered.
+
+"The States along the Mississippi were but sparsely settled in 1846, yet
+the fame of the fruitfulness, the healthfulness, and the almost tropical
+beauty of the land bordering the Pacific, tempted the members of
+the Donner Party to leave their homes. These homes were situated in
+Illinois, Iowa, Tennessee, Missouri, and Ohio. Families from each of
+these States joined the train and participated in its terrible fate; yet
+the party proper was organized in Sangamon County, Illinois, by George
+and Jacob Donner and James F. Reed. Early in April, 1846, the party set
+out from Springfield, Illinois, and by the first week in May reached
+Independence, Missouri. Here the party was increased by additional
+members, and the train comprised about one hundred persons....
+
+In the party were aged fathers with their trusting families about them,
+mothers whose very lives were wrapped up in their children, men in the
+prime and vigor of manhood, maidens in all the sweetness and freshness
+of budding womanhood, children full of glee and mirthfulness, and babes
+nestling on maternal breasts. Lovers there were, to whom the journey was
+tinged with rainbow hues of joy and happiness, and strong, manly hearts
+whose constant support and encouragement was the memory of dear ones
+left behind in homeland.
+
+"The wonderment which all experience in viewing the scenery along the
+line of the old emigrant road was peculiarly vivid to these people.
+Few descriptions had been given of the route, and all was novel and
+unexpected. In later years the road was broadly and deeply marked, and
+good camping grounds were distinctly indicated. The bleaching bones of
+cattle that had perished, or the broken fragments of wagons or castaway
+articles, were thickly strewn on either side of the highway. But in 1846
+the way was through almost trackless valleys waving with grass, along
+rivers where few paths were visible, save those made by the feet of
+buffalo and antelope, and over mountains and plains where little more
+than the westward course of the sun guided the travelers. Trading-posts
+were stationed at only a few widely distant points, and rarely did the
+party meet with any human beings, save wandering bands of Indians. Yet
+these first days are spoken of by all of the survivors as being crowned
+with peaceful enjoyment and pleasant anticipations. There were beautiful
+flowers by the roadside, an abundance of game in the meadows and
+mountains, and at night there were singing, dancing, and innocent plays.
+Several musical instruments, and many excellent voices, were in the
+party, and the kindliest feeling and goodfellowship prevailed among the
+members.
+
+"The formation of the company known as the Donner Party was purely
+accidental. The union of so many emigrants into one train was not
+occasioned by any preconcerted arrangement. Many composing the Donner
+Party were not aware, at the outset, that such a tide of emigration was
+sweeping to California. In many instances small parties would hear
+of the mammoth train just ahead of them or just behind them, and by
+hastening their pace, or halting for a few days, joined themselves to
+the party. Many were with the train during a portion of the journey, but
+from some cause or other became parted from the Donner company before
+reaching Donner Lake. Soon after the train left Independence it
+contained between two and three hundred wagons, and when in motion was
+two miles in length. The members of the party proper numbered ninety."
+
+This caravan, like many others of the great assemblage westbound at that
+time, had great extremes in personnel. Some were out for mere adventure;
+some were single men looking for a location. Most of them were fathers
+of families, among them several persons of considerable means and of
+good standing in the community which they were leaving. While we may
+suppose that most of them were folk of no extraordinary sort, certainly
+some were persons of education and intelligence. Among these was the
+wife of George Donner--Tamsen Donner, a woman of education, a musician,
+a linguist, a botanist, and of the most sublime heroism.
+
+Tamsen Donner sent back now and then along the route some story of the
+daily doings of the caravan; and such letters as these are of the utmost
+interest to any who desire precise information of that time. It would
+seem that the emigrants themselves for a great part of their route met
+with no great adventures, nor indeed, appeared to be undertaking any
+unusual affair. They followed a route up the Platte Valley already long
+known to those of the eastern settlements.
+
+"Near the Junction of the North and South Platte, June 16, 1846.
+
+"My Old Friend: We are now on the Platte, two hundred miles from Fort
+Laramie. Our journey so far has been pleasant, the roads have been good,
+and food plentiful. The water for part of the way has been indifferent,
+but at no time have our cattle suffered for it. Wood is now very scarce,
+but 'buffalo chips' are excellent; they kindle quickly and retain heat
+surprisingly. We had this morning buffalo steaks broiled upon them that
+had the same flavor they would have had upon hickory coals.
+
+"We feel no fear of Indians; our cattle graze quietly around our
+encampment unmolested. Two or three men will go hunting twenty miles
+from camp; and last night two of our men lay out in the wilderness
+rather than ride their horses after a hard chase.
+
+"Indeed, if I do not experience something far worse than I have yet
+done, I shall say the trouble is all in getting started. Our wagons have
+not needed much repair, and I can not yet tell in what respects they
+could be improved. Certain it is, they can not be too strong. Our
+preparations for the journey might have been in some respects bettered.
+
+"Bread has been the principal article of food in our camp. We laid in
+one hundred and fifty pounds of flour and seventy-five pounds of meat
+for each individual, and I fear bread will be scarce. Meat is abundant.
+Rice and beans are good articles on the road; cornmeal too, is
+acceptable. Linsey dresses are the most suitable for children. Indeed,
+if I had one, it would be acceptable. There is so cool a breeze at
+all times on the Plains that the sun does not feel so hot as one would
+suppose.
+
+"We are now four hundred and fifty miles from Independence. Our route
+at first was rough, and through a timbered country, which appeared to be
+fertile. After striking the prairie, we found a firstrate road, and the
+only difficulty we have had, has been in crossing the creeks. In that,
+however, there has been no danger.
+
+"I never could have believed we could have traveled so far with so
+little difficulty. The prairie between the Blue and the Platte Rivers is
+beautiful beyond description. Never have I seen so varied a country, so
+suitable for cultivation. Everything is new and pleasing; the Indians
+frequently come to see us, and the chiefs of a tribe breakfasted at
+our tent this morning. All are so friendly that I can not help feeling
+sympathy and friendship for them. But on one sheet what can I say?
+
+"Since we have been on the Platte, we have had the river on one side
+and the ever varying mounds on the other, and have traveled through the
+bottom lands from one to two miles wide, with little or no timber.
+The soil is sandy, and last year, on account of the dry season, the
+emigrants found grass here scarce. Our cattle are in good order, and
+when proper care has been taken, none have been lost. Our milch cows
+have been of great service, indeed. They have been of more advantage
+than our meat. We have plenty of butter and milk.
+
+"We are commanded by Captain Russell, an amiable man. George Donner
+is himself yet. He crows in the morning and shouts out, 'Chain up,
+boys--chain up,' with as much authority as though he was 'something in
+particular.' John Denton is still with us. We find him useful in the
+camp. Hiram Miller and Noah James are in good health and doing well. We
+have of the best people in our company, and some, too, that are not so
+good.
+
+"Buffalo show themselves frequently. We have found the wild tulip, the
+primrose, the lupine, the eardrop, the larkspur, and creeping hollyhock,
+and a beautiful flower resembling the bloom of the beech tree, but in
+bunches as large as a small sugarloaf, and of every variety of shade, to
+red and green.
+
+"I botanize, and read some, but cook 'heaps' more. There are four
+hundred and twenty wagons, as far as we have heard, on the road between
+here and Oregon and California.
+
+"Give our love to all inquiring friends. God bless them.
+
+"Yours truly, Mrs. George Donner."
+
+By the Fourth of July the Donner Party had reached Fort Laramie. They
+pushed on west over the old trail up the Sweetwater River and across the
+South Pass, the easiest of all the mountain passes known to the early
+travelers. Without much adventure they reached Fort Bridger, then only a
+trading-post. Here occurred the fatal mistake of the Donner Party.
+
+Some one at the fort strongly advised them to take a new route, a
+cut-off said to shorten the distance by about three hundred miles. This
+cut-off passed along the south shore of Great Salt Lake and caught up
+the old California Trail from Fort Hall--then well established and well
+known-along the Humboldt River. The great Donner caravan delayed for
+some days at Fort Bridger, hesitating over the decision of which route
+to follow. The party divided. All those who took the old road north of
+Salt Lake by way of Fort Hall reached California in complete safety. Of
+the original Donner Party there remained eighty-seven persons. All of
+these took the cut-off, being eager to save time in their travel. They
+reached Salt Lake after unspeakable difficulties. Farther west, in the
+deserts of Nevada, they lost many of their cattle.
+
+Now began among the party dissensions and grumblings. The story is a
+long one. It reached its tragic denouement just below the summit of the
+Sierras, on the shores of Donner Lake. The words of McGlashan may now
+best serve our purpose.
+
+"Generally, the ascent of the Sierra brought joy and gladness to weary
+overland emigrants. To the Donner Party it brought terror and dismay.
+The company had hardly obtained a glimpse of the mountains, ere the
+winter storm clouds began to assemble their hosts around the loftier
+crests. Every day the weather appeared more ominous and threatening. The
+delay at the Truckee Meadows had been brief, but every day ultimately
+cost a dozen lives. On the twenty-third of October, they became
+thoroughly alarmed at the angry heralds of the gathering storm, and with
+all haste resumed the journey. It was too late! At Prosser Creek, three
+miles below Truckee, they found themselves encompassed with six inches
+of snow. On the summits, the snow was from two to five feet in depth.
+This was October 28, 1846. Almost a month earlier than usual, the Sierra
+had donned its mantle of ice and snow. The party were prisoners!
+
+"All was consternation. The wildest confusion prevailed. In their
+eagerness, many went far in advance of the main train. There was little
+concert of action or harmony of plan. All did not arrive at Donner Lake
+the same day. Some wagons and families did not reach the lake until the
+thirty-first day of October, some never went farther than Prosser Creek,
+while others, on the evening of the twenty-ninth, struggled through the
+snow, and reached the foot of the precipitous cliffs between the summit
+and the upper end of the lake. Here, baffled, wearied, disheartened,
+they turned back to the foot of the lake."
+
+These emigrants did not lack in health, strength, or resolution, but
+here they were in surroundings absolutely new to them. A sort of panic
+seized them now. They scattered; their organization disintegrated.
+All thought of conjoint action, of a social compact, a community of
+interests, seems to have left them. It was a history of every man for
+himself, or at least every family for itself. All track of the road
+was now lost under the snow. At the last pitch up to the summit of the
+Sierras precipitous cliffs abounded. No one knew the way. And now the
+snows came once again.
+
+"The emigrants suffered a thousand deaths. The pitiless snow came down
+in large, steady masses. All understood that the storm meant death. One
+of the Indians silently wrapped his blanket about him and in deepest
+dejection seated himself beside a tall pine. In this position he passed
+the entire night, only moving occasionally to keep from being
+covered with snow. Mrs. Reed spread down a shawl, placed her four
+children--Virginia, Patty, James, and Thomas--thereon, and putting
+another shawl over them, sat by the side of her babies during all the
+long hours of darkness. Every little while she was compelled to lift the
+upper shawl and shake off the rapidly accumulating snow.
+
+"With slight interruptions, the storm continued several days. The mules
+and oxen that had always hovered about camp were blinded and bewildered
+by the storm, and straying away were literally buried alive in the
+drifts. What pen can describe the horror of the position in which the
+emigrants found themselves? It was impossible to move through the deep,
+soft snow without the greatest effort. The mules were gone, and were
+never found. Most of the cattle had perished, and were wholly hidden
+from sight. The few oxen which were found were slaughtered for beef."
+
+The travelers knew that the supplies they had could not last long. On
+the 12th of November a relief party essayed to go forward, but after
+struggling a short distance toward the summit, came back wearied and
+broken-hearted, unable to make way through the deep, soft snow. Then
+some one--said to have been F. W. Graves of Vermont--bethought himself
+of making snowshoes out of the oxbows and the hides of the slaughtered
+oxen. With these they did better.
+
+Volunteers were called for yet another party to cross the mountains into
+California. Fifteen persons volunteered. Not all of them were men--some
+were mothers, and one was a young woman. Their mental condition was
+little short of desperation. Only, in the midst of their intense
+hardships it seemed to all, somewhere to the westward was California,
+and that there alone lay any hope. The party traveled four miles the
+first day; and their camp fires were visible below the summit. The next
+day they traveled six miles and crossed the divide.
+
+They were starving, cold, worn out, their feet frozen to bursting, their
+blood chilled. At times they were caught in some of the furious storms
+of the Sierras. They did not know their way. On the 27th of December
+certain of the party resolved themselves to that last recourse which
+alone might mean life. Surrounded by horrors as they were, it seemed
+they could endure the thought of yet an additional horror.... There were
+the dead, the victims who already had perished!...
+
+Seven of the fifteen got through to the Sacramento Valley, among these
+the young girl, Mary Graves, described as "a very beautiful girl, of
+tall and slender build, and, exceptionally graceful character." The
+story brought out by these survivors of the first party to cross the
+Sierras from the starving camp set all California aflame. There were
+no less than three relief expeditions formed, which at varying dates
+crossed the mountains to the east. Some men crossed the snow belt five
+times in all. The rescuers were often in as much danger as the victims
+they sought to save.
+
+And they could not save them. Back there in their tents and hovels
+around Donner Lake starvation was doing its work steadily. There is
+contemporary history also covering the details of this. Tamsen Donner,
+heroine that she was, kept a diary which would have been valuable
+for us, but this was lost along with her paintings and her botanical
+collections. The best preserved diary is that of Patrick Breen, done
+in simple and matter-of-fact fashion throughout most of the starving
+winter. Thus:
+
+"Dec. 17. Pleasant; William Murphy returned from the mountain party last
+evening; Baylis Williams died night before last; Milton and Noah started
+for Donner's eight days ago; not returned yet; think they are lost in
+the snow.
+
+"Dec. 21. Milton got back last night from Donner's camp. Sad news; Jacob
+Donner, Samuel Shoemaker, Rhineheart, and Smith are dead; the rest of
+them in a low situation; snowed all night, with a strong southwest wind.
+
+"Dec. 23. Clear to-day; Milton took some of his meat away; all well at
+their camp. Began this day to read the 'Thirty Days' Prayers'; Almighty
+God, grant the requests of unworthy sinners!
+
+"Jan. 13. Snowing fast; snow higher than the shanty; it must be thirteen
+feet deep. Can not get wood this morning; it is a dreadful sight for us
+to look upon.
+
+"Jan. 27. Commenced snowing yesterday; still continues today. Lewis
+Keseberg, Jr., died three days ago; food growing scarce; don't have fire
+enough to cook our hides.
+
+"Jan. 31. The sun does not shine out brilliant this morning; froze hard
+last night; wind northwest. Landrum Murphy died last night about ten
+o'clock; Mrs. Reed went to Graves's this morning to look after goods.
+
+"Feb. 4. Snowed hard until twelve o'clock last night; many uneasy for
+fear we shall all perish with hunger; we have but little meat left, and
+only three hides; Mrs. Reed has nothing but one hide, and that is on
+Graves's house; Milton lives there, and likely will keep that. Eddy's
+child died last night.
+
+"Feb. 7. Ceased to snow at last; today it is quite pleasant. McCutchen's
+child died on the second of this month.
+
+"[This child died and was buried in the Graves's cabin. Mr. W. C. Graves
+helped dig the grave near one side of the cabin, and laid the little one
+to rest. One of the most heart-rending features of this Donner tragedy
+is the number of infants that perished. Mrs. Breen, Mrs. Pike, Mrs.
+Foster, Mrs. McCutchen, Mrs. Eddy, and Mrs. Graves each had nursing
+babes when the fatal camp was pitched at Donner Lake.]
+
+"Feb. 8. Fine, clear morning. Spitzer died last night, and we will bury
+him in the snow; Mrs. Eddy died on the night of the seventh.
+
+"Feb. 9. Mrs. Pike's child all but dead; Milton is at Murphy's, not able
+to get out of bed; Mrs. Eddy and child buried today; wind southeast.
+
+"Feb. 10. Beautiful morning; thawing in the sun; Milton Elliott died
+last night at Murphy's cabin, and Mrs. Reed went there this morning to
+see about his effects. John Denton trying to borrow meat for Graves; had
+none to give; they had nothing but hides; all are entirely out of meat,
+but a little we have; our hides are nearly all eat up, but with God's
+help spring will soon smile upon us."
+
+There was one survivor of the camp at Donner Lake, a man named Lewis
+Keseberg, of German descent. That he was guilty of repeated cannibalism
+cannot be doubted. It was in his cabin that, after losing all her loved
+ones, the heroic Tamsen Donner met her end. Many thought he killed her
+for the one horrid purpose. *
+
+
+    * Many years later (1879) Keseberg declared under oath to C. F.
+McGlashan that he did not take her life. See "History of the Donner"
+Party, pp. 212, 213.
+
+Such then is the story of one of the great emigrant parties who started
+West on a hazard of new fortunes in the early days of the Oregon
+Trail. Happily there has been no parallel to the misadventures of this
+ill-fated caravan. It is difficult--without reading these bald and awful
+details--to realize the vast difference between that day and this. Today
+we may by the gentle stages of a pleasant railway journey arrive at
+Donner Lake. Little trace remains, nor does any kindly soul wish for
+more definite traces, of those awful scenes. Only a cross here and
+there with a legend, faint and becoming fainter every year, may be seen,
+marking the more prominent spots of the historic starving camp.
+
+Up on the high mountain side, for the most part hid in the forest, lie
+the snowsheds and tunnels of the railway, now encountering its stiffest
+climb up the steep slopes to the summit of the Sierras. The
+author visited this spot of melancholy history in company with the
+vice-president of the great railway line which here swings up so
+steadily and easily over the Sierras. Bit by bit we checked out as best
+we might the fateful spots mentioned in the story of the Donner Party. A
+splendid motor highway runs by the lakeside now. While we halted our
+own car there, a motor car drove up from the westward--following
+that practical automobile highway which now exists from the plains of
+California across the Sierras and east over precisely that trail
+where once the weary feet of the oxen dragged the wagons of the early
+emigrants. It was a small car of no expensive type. It was loaded down
+with camping equipment until the wheels scarcely could be seen. It
+carried five human occupants--an Iowa farmer and his family. They had
+been out to California for a season. Casually they had left Los Angeles,
+had traveled north up the valleys of California, east across the summit
+of the Sierras, and were here now bound for Iowa over the old emigrant
+trail!
+
+We hailed this new traveler on the old trail. I do not know whether or
+not he had any idea of the early days of that great highway; I suspect
+that he could tell only of its present motoring possibilities. But his
+wheels were passing over the marks left more than half a century ago
+by the cracked felloes of the emigrant wagons going west in search
+of homes. If we seek history, let us ponder that chance pause of the
+eastbound family, traveling by motor for pleasure, here by the side of
+the graves of the travelers of another day, itself so briefly gone. What
+an epoch was spanned in the passing of that frontier!
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Chapter VII. The Indian Wars
+
+It might well be urged against the method employed in these pages that,
+although we undertook to speak of the last American frontier, all that
+we really thus far have done has been to describe a series of frontiers
+from the Missouri westward. In part this is true. But it was precisely
+in this large, loose, and irregular fashion that we actually arrived at
+our last frontier. Certainly our westbound civilization never advanced
+by any steady or regular process. It would be a singularly illuminating
+map--and one which I wish we might show--which would depict in different
+colors the great occupied areas of the West, with the earliest dates of
+their final and permanent occupation. Such a map as this would show us
+that the last frontier of America was overleaped and left behind not
+once but a score of times.
+
+The land between the Missouri and the Rockies, along the Great Plains
+and the high foothills, was crossed over and forgotten by the men who
+were forging on into farther countries in search of lands where fortune
+was swift and easy. California, Oregon, all the early farming and
+timbering lands of the distant Northwest--these lay far beyond the
+Plains; and as we have noted, they were sought for, even before gold was
+dreamed of upon the Pacific Slope.
+
+So here, somewhere between the Missouri and the Rockies, lay our last
+frontier, wavering, receding, advancing, gaining and losing, changing
+a little more every decade--and at last so rapidly changed as to be
+outworn and abolished in one swift decade all its own.
+
+This unsettled land so long held in small repute by the early Americans,
+was, as we have pointed out, the buffalo-range and the country of the
+Horse Indians--the Plains tribes who lived upon the buffalo. For a long
+time it was this Indian population which held back the white settlements
+of Kansas, Nebraska, the Dakotas, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado. But as men
+began to work farther and farther westward in search of homes in Oregon,
+or in quest of gold in California or Idaho or Montana, the Indian
+question came to be a serious one.
+
+To the Army, soon after the Civil War, fell the task of exterminating,
+or at least evicting, the savage tribes over all this unvalued and
+unknown Middle West. This was a process not altogether simple. For
+a considerable time the Indians themselves were able to offer very
+effective resistance to the enterprise. They were accustomed to living
+upon that country, and did not need to bring in their own supplies;
+hence the Army fought them at a certain disadvantage. In sooth, the Army
+had to learn to become half Indian before it could fight the Indians on
+anything like even terms. We seem not so much to have coveted the lands
+in the first Indian-fighting days; we fought rather for the trails than
+for the soil. The Indians themselves had lived there all their lives,
+had conquered their environment, and were happy in it. They made a
+bitter fight; nor are they to be blamed for doing so.
+
+The greatest of our Indian wars have taken place since our own Civil
+War; and perhaps the most notable of all the battles are those which
+were fought on the old cow range--in the land of our last frontier. We
+do not lack abundant records of this time of our history. Soon after the
+Civil War the railroads began edging out into the plains. They brought,
+besides many new settlers, an abundance of chroniclers and historians
+and writers of hectic fiction or supposed fact. A multitude of books
+came out at this time of our history, most of which were accepted
+as truth. That was the time when we set up as Wild West heroes rough
+skin-clad hunters and so-called scouts, each of whom was allowed to tell
+his own story and to have it accepted at par. As a matter of fact, at
+about the time the Army had succeeded in subduing the last of the Indian
+tribes on the buffalo-range, the most of our Wild West history, at least
+so far as concerned the boldest adventure, was a thing of the past.
+It was easy to write of a past which every one now was too new, too
+ignorant, or too busy critically to remember.
+
+Even as early as 1866, Colonel Marcy, an experienced army officer and
+Indian-fighter, took the attitude of writing about a vanishing phase of
+American life. In his "Army Life on the Border," he says:
+
+"I have been persuaded by many friends that the contents of the book
+which is herewith presented to the public are not without value as
+records of a fast-vanishing age, and as truthful sketches of men of
+various races whose memory will shortly depend only on romance, unless
+some one who knew them shall undertake to leave outlines of their
+peculiar characteristics.... I am persuaded that excuse may be found
+in the simple fact that all these peoples of my description--men,
+conditions of life, races of aboriginal inhabitants and adventurous
+hunters and pioneers--are passing away. A few years more and the prairie
+will be transformed into farms. The mountain ravines will be the abodes
+of busy manufacturers, and the gigantic power of American civilization
+will have taken possession of the land from the great river of the West
+to the very shores of the Pacific.... The world is fast filling up.
+I trust I am not in error when I venture to place some value, however
+small, on everything which goes to form the truthful history of a
+condition of men incident to the advances of civilization over the
+continent--a condition which forms peculiar types of character, breeds
+remarkable developments of human nature--a condition also which can
+hardly again exist on this or any other continent, and which has,
+therefore, a special value in the sum of human history."
+
+Such words as the foregoing bespeak a large and dignified point of
+view. No one who follows Marcy's pages can close them with anything but
+respect and admiration. It is in books such as this, then, that we may
+find something about the last stages of the clearing of the frontier.
+
+Even in Marcy's times the question of our Government's Indian policy
+was a mooted one. He himself as an Army officer looked at the matter
+philosophically, but his estimate of conditions was exact. Long ago as
+he wrote, his conclusions were such as might have been given forty years
+later.
+
+"The limits of their accustomed range are rapidly contracting, and their
+means of subsistence undergoing a corresponding diminution. The white
+man is advancing with rapid strides upon all sides of them, and they
+are forced to give way to his encroachments. The time is not far distant
+when the buffalo will become extinct, and they will then be compelled
+to adopt some other mode of life than the chase for a subsistence.... No
+man will quietly submit to starvation when food is within his reach, and
+if he cannot obtain it honestly he will steal it or take it by
+force. If, therefore, we do not induce them to engage in agricultural
+avocations we shall in a few years have before us the alternative of
+exterminating them or fighting them perpetually. That they are destined
+ultimately to extinction does not in my mind admit of a doubt. For the
+reasons above mentioned it may at first be necessary for our government
+to assert its authority over them by a prompt and vigorous exercise of
+the military arm.... The tendency of the policy I have indicated will be
+to assemble these people in communities where they will be more readily
+controlled; and I predict from it the most gratifying results."
+
+Another well-informed army officer, Colonel Richard Dodge, himself a
+hunter, a trailer, and a rider able to compete with the savages in their
+own fields, penetrated to the heart of the Indian problem when he wrote:
+
+"The conception of Indian character is almost impossible to a man who
+has passed the greater portion of his life surrounded by the influences
+of a cultivated, refined, and moral society.... The truth is simply too
+shocking, and the revolted mind takes refuge in disbelief as the less
+painful horn of the dilemma. As a first step toward an understanding of
+his character we must get at his standpoint of morality. As a child he
+is not brought up.... From the dawn of intelligence his own will is his
+law. There is no right and no wrong to him.... No dread of punishment
+restrains him from any act that boyish fun or fury may prompt. No
+lessons inculcating the beauty and sure reward of goodness or the
+hideousness and certain punishment of vice are ever wasted on him. The
+men by whom he is surrounded, and to whom he looks as models for
+his future life, are great and renowned just in proportion to their
+ferocity, to the scalps they have taken, or the thefts they have
+committed. His earliest boyish memory is probably a dance of rejoicing
+over the scalps of strangers, all of whom he is taught to regard as
+enemies. The lessons of his mother awaken only a desire to take his
+place as soon as possible in fight and foray. The instruction of his
+father is only such as is calculated to fit him best to act a prominent
+part in the chase, in theft, and in murder.... Virtue, morality,
+generosity, honor, are words not only absolutely without significance to
+him, but are not accurately translatable into any Indian language on the
+Plains."
+
+These are sterner, less kindly, less philosophic words than Marcy's,
+but they keenly outline the duty of the Army on the frontier. We made
+treaties with the Indians and broke them. In turn men such as these
+ignorant savages might well be expected to break their treaties also;
+and they did. Unhappily our Indian policy at that time was one of
+mingled ferocity and wheedling. The Indians did not understand us any
+more than we did them. When we withdrew some of the old frontier posts
+from the old hunting-range, the action was construed by the tribesmen as
+an admission that we feared them, and they acted upon that idea. In one
+point of view they had right with them, for now we were moving out into
+the last of the great buffalo country. Their war was one of desperation,
+whereas ours was one of conquest, no better and no worse than all the
+wars of conquest by which the strong have taken the possessions of the
+weak.
+
+Our Army at the close of the Civil War and at the beginning of the wars
+with the Plains tribes was in better condition than it has ever been
+since that day. It was made up of the soundest and best-seasoned
+soldiers that ever fought under our flag; and at that time it
+represented a greater proportion of our fighting strength than it
+ever has before or since. In 1860 the Regular Army, not counting the
+volunteer forces, was 16,000. In 1870 it was 37,000--one soldier to each
+one thousand of our population.
+
+Against this force, pioneers of the vaster advancing army of peaceful
+settlers now surging West, there was arrayed practically all the
+population of fighting tribes such as the Sioux, the two bands of the
+Cheyennes, the Piegans, the Assiniboines, the Arapahoes, the Kiowas, the
+Comanches, and the Apaches. These were the leaders of many other tribes
+in savage campaigns which set the land aflame from the Rio Grande to our
+northern line. The Sioux and Cheyennes were more especially the leaders,
+and they always did what they could to enlist the aid of the less
+warlike tribes such as the Crows, the Snakes, the Bannacks, the
+Utes--indeed all of the savage or semi-civilized tribes which had hung
+on the flanks of the traffic of the westbound trail.
+
+The Sioux, then at the height of their power, were distinguished by many
+warlike qualities. They fought hard and were quick to seize upon any
+signs of weakness in their enemies. When we, in the course of our Civil
+War, had withdrawn some of the upper posts, the Sioux edged in at once
+and pressed back the whites quite to the eastern confines of the Plains.
+When we were locked in the death grip of internecine war in 1862, they
+rose in one savage wave of rebellion of their own and massacred with the
+most horrible ferocity not less than six hundred and forty-four whites
+in Minnesota and South Dakota. When General Sibley went out among them
+on his later punitive campaign he had his hands full for many a long and
+weary day.
+
+Events following the close of the Civil War did not mend matters in
+the Indian situation. The railroads had large land grants given to
+them along their lines, and they began to offer these lands for sale to
+settlers. Soldier scrip entitling the holder to locate on public lands
+now began to float about. Some of the engineers, even some of the
+laborers, upon the railroads, seeing how really feasible was the
+settlement of these Plains, began to edge out and to set up their homes,
+usually not far from the railway lines. All this increase in the numbers
+of the white population not only infuriated the Indians the more, but
+gave them the better chance to inflict damage upon our people. Our Army
+therefore became very little more than a vast body of police, and it was
+always afoot with the purpose of punishing these offending tribesmen,
+who knew nothing of the higher laws of war and who committed atrocities
+that have never been equalled in history; unless it be by one of the
+belligerents of the Great War in Europe, with whom we are at this
+writing engaged--once more in the interest of a sane and human
+civilization. The last great struggle for the occupation of the frontier
+was on. It involved the ownership of the last of our open lands; and
+hence may be called the war of our last frontier.
+
+The settler who pushed West continued to be the man who shared his time
+between his rifle and his plough. The numerous buffalo were butchered
+with an endless avidity by the men who now appeared upon the range. As
+the great herds regularly migrated southward with each winter's snows,
+they were met by the settlers along the lower railway lines and in a
+brutal commerce were killed in thousands and in millions. The Indians
+saw this sudden and appalling shrinkage of their means of livelihood.
+It meant death to them. To their minds, especially when they thought we
+feared them, there was but one answer to all this--the whites must all
+be killed.
+
+Red Cloud, Crazy Horse, Roman Nose, American Horse, Black Kettle--these
+were names of great Indian generals who proved their ability to fight.
+At times they brought into the open country, which as yet remained
+unoccupied by the great pastoral movement from the south, as many as
+five thousand mounted warriors in one body, and they were well armed
+and well supplied with ammunition. Those were the days when the Indian
+agents were carrying on their lists twice as many Indians as actually
+existed--and receiving twice as many supplies as really were issued to
+the tribes. The curse of politics was ours even at that time, and it
+cost us then, as now, unestimated millions of our nation's dearest
+treasures. As to the reservations which the Indians were urged to
+occupy, they left them when they liked. In the end, when they were
+beaten, all they were asked to do was to return to these reservations
+and be fed.
+
+There were fought in the West from 1869 to 1875 more than two hundred
+pitched actions between the Army and the Indians. In most cases the
+white men were heavily outnumbered. The account which the Army gave of
+itself on scores of unremembered minor fields--which meant life or death
+to all engaged--would make one of the best pages of our history, could
+it be written today. The enlisted men of the frontier Army were riding
+and shooting men, able to live as the Indians did and able to beat them
+at their own game. They were led by Army officers whose type has never
+been improved upon in any later stage of our Army itself, or of any army
+in the world.
+
+There are certain great battles which may at least receive notice,
+although it would be impossible to mention more than a few of the
+encounters of the great Indian wars on the buffalo-range at about the
+time of the buffalo's disappearance. The Fetterman Massacre in 1866,
+near Fort Phil Kearney, a post located at the edge of the Big Horn
+Mountains, was a blow which the Army never has forgotten. "In a place
+of fifty feet square lay the bodies of Colonel Fetterman, Captain Brown,
+and sixty-five enlisted men. Each man was stripped naked and hacked and
+scalped, the skulls beaten in with war clubs and the bodies gashed with
+knives almost beyond recognition, with other ghastly mutilations that
+the civilized pen hesitates to record."
+
+This tragedy brought the Indian problem before the country as never
+before. The hand of the Western rancher and trader was implacably
+against the tribesmen of the plains; the city-dweller of the East,
+with hazy notions of the Indian character, was disposed to urge lenient
+methods upon those responsible for governmental policy. While the Sioux
+and Cheyenne wars dragged on, Congress created, by act of July 20, 1867,
+a peace commission of four civilians and three army officers to deal
+with the hostile tribes. For more than a year, with scant sympathy from
+the military members, this commission endeavored to remove the causes of
+friction by amicable conference with the Indian chiefs. The attitude of
+the Army is reflected in a letter of General Sherman to his brother.
+"We have now selected and provided reservations for all, off the great
+roads. All who cling to their old hunting-grounds are hostile and will
+remain so till killed off. We will have a sort of predatory war for
+years--every now and then be shocked by the indiscriminate murder of
+travelers and settlers, but the country is so large, and the advantage
+of the Indians so great, that we cannot make a single war and end it.
+From the nature of things we must take chances and clean out Indians as
+we encounter them."
+
+Segregation of the Indian tribes upon reservations seemed to the
+commission the only solution of the vexing problem. Various treaties
+were made and others were projected looking toward the removal of
+the tribesmen from the highways of continental travel. The result was
+misgiving and increased unrest among the Indians.
+
+In midsummer of 1868 forays occurred at many points along the border of
+the Indian Territory. General Sheridan, who now commanded the Department
+of the Missouri, believed that a general war was imminent. He determined
+to teach the southern tribesmen a lesson they would not forget. In the
+dead of winter our troops marched against the Cheyennes, then in their
+encampments below the Kansas line. The Indians did not believe that
+white men could march in weather forty below zero, during which they
+themselves sat in their tepees around their fires; but our cavalrymen
+did march in such weather, and under conditions such as our cavalry
+perhaps could not endure today. Among these troops was the Seventh
+Cavalry, Custer's Regiment, formed after the Civil War, and it was led
+by Lieutenant-Colonel George A. Custer himself, that gallant officer
+whose name was to go into further and more melancholy history of the
+Plains.
+
+Custer marched until he got in touch with the trails of the Cheyennes,
+whom he knew to belong to Black Kettle's band. He did not at the time
+know that below them, in the same valley of the Washita, were also the
+winter encampments of the Kiowas, the Comanches, the Arapahoes, and even
+a few Apaches. He attacked at dawn of a bleak winter morning, November
+27, 1868, after taking the precaution of surrounding the camp, and
+killed Black Kettle, and another chief, Little Rock, and over a hundred
+of their warriors. Many women and children also were killed in this
+attack. The result was one which sank deep into the Indian mind. They
+began to respect the men who could outmarch them and outlive them on
+the range. Surely, they thought, these were not the same men who had
+abandoned Forts Phil Kearney, C. F. Smith, and Reno. There had been
+some mistake about this matter. The Indians began to think it over. The
+result was a pacifying of all the country south of the Platte. The lower
+Indians began to come in and give themselves up to the reservation life.
+
+One of the hardest of pitched battles ever fought with an Indian tribe
+occurred in September, 1868, on the Arickaree or South Fork of the
+Republican River, where General "Sandy" Forsyth, and his scouts, for
+nine days fought over six hundred Cheyennes and Arapahoes. These savages
+had been committing atrocities upon the settlers of the Saline, the
+Solomon, and the Republican valleys, and were known to have killed some
+sixty-four men and women at the time General Sheridan resolved to punish
+them. Forsyth had no chance to get a command of troops, but he
+was allowed to enlist fifty scouts, all "first-class, hardened
+frontiersmen," and with this body of fighting men he carried out the
+most dramatic battle perhaps ever waged on the Plains.
+
+Forsyth ran into the trail of two or three large Indian villages, but
+none the less he followed on until he came to the valley of the South
+Fork. Here the Cheyennes under the redoubtable Roman Nose surrounded
+him on the 17th of September. The small band of scouts took refuge on a
+brushy island some sixty yards from shore, and hastily dug themselves in
+under fire.
+
+They stood at bay outnumbered ten to one, with small prospect of escape,
+for the little island offered no protection of itself, and was in
+pointblank range from the banks of the river. All their horses soon were
+shot down, and the men lay in the rifle pits with no hope of escape.
+Roman Nose, enraged at the resistance put up by Forsyth's men, led a
+band of some four hundred of his warriors in the most desperate charge
+that has been recorded in all our Indian fighting annals. It was rarely
+that the Indian would charge at all; but these tribesmen, stripped naked
+for the encounter, and led at first by that giant warrior, who came
+on shouting his defiance, charged in full view not only once but three
+times in one day, and got within a hundred feet of the foot of the
+island where the scouts were lying.
+
+According to Forsyth's report, the Indians came on in regular ranks like
+the cavalry of the white men, more than four hundred strong. They were
+met by the fire of repeating carbines and revolvers, and they stood for
+the first, second, third, fourth, and fifth fire of repeating weapons,
+and still charged in! Roman Nose was killed at last within touch of the
+rifle pits against which he was leading his men. The second charge
+was less desperate, for the savages lost heart after the loss of their
+leader. The third one, delivered towards the evening of that same day,
+was desultory. By that time the bed of the shallow stream was well
+filled with fallen horses and dead warriors.
+
+Forsyth ordered meat cut from the bodies of his dead horses and buried
+in the wet sand so that it might keep as long as possible. Lieutenant
+Beecher, his chief of scouts, was killed, as also were Surgeon Mooers,
+and Scouts Smith, Chalmers, Wilson, Farley, and Day. Seventeen others
+of the party were wounded, some severely. Forsyth himself was shot three
+times, once in the head. His left leg was broken below the knee, and
+his right thigh was ripped up by a rifle ball, which caused him extreme
+pain. Later he cut the bullet out of his own leg, and was relieved from
+some part of the pain. After his rescue, when his broken leg was set it
+did not suit him, and he had the leg broken twice in the hospital and
+reset until it knitted properly.
+
+Forsyth's men lay under fire under a blazing sun in their holes on the
+sandbar for nine days. But the savages never dislodged them, and at last
+they made off, their women and children beating the death drums, and the
+entire village mourning the unreturning brave. On the second day of the
+fighting Forsyth had got out messengers at extreme risk, and at length
+the party was rescued by a detachment of the Tenth Cavalry. The Indians
+later said that they had in all over six hundred warriors in this fight.
+Their losses, though variously estimated, were undoubtedly heavy.
+
+It was encounters such as this which gradually were teaching the Indians
+that they could not beat the white men, so that after a time they began
+to yield to the inevitable.
+
+What is known as the Baker Massacre was the turning-point in the
+half-century of warfare with the Blackfeet, the savage tribe which
+had preyed upon the men of the fur trade in a long-continued series of
+robberies and murders. On January 22, 1870, Major E. M. Baker, led by
+half-breeds who knew the country, surprised the Piegans in their winter
+camp on the Marias River, just below the border. He, like Custer,
+attacked at dawn, opening the encounter with a general fire into the
+tepees. He killed a hundred and seventy-three of the Piegans, including
+very many women and children, as was unhappily the case so often in
+these surprise attacks. It was deplorable warfare. But it ended the
+resistance of the savage Blackfeet. They have been disposed for peace
+from that day to this.
+
+The terrible revenge which the Sioux and Cheyennes took in the battle
+which annihilated Custer and his men on the Little Big Horn in the
+summer of 1876; the Homeric running fight made by Chief Joseph of the
+Nez Perces--a flight which baffled our best generals and their men for
+a hundred and ten days over more than fourteen hundred miles of
+wilderness--these are events so well known that it seems needless to
+do more than to refer to them. The Nez Perces in turn went down forever
+when Joseph came out and surrendered, saying, "From where the sun now
+stands I fight against the white man no more forever." His surrender to
+fate did not lack its dignity. Indeed, a mournful interest attached
+to the inevitable destiny of all these savage leaders, who, no doubt,
+according to their standards, were doing what men should do and all that
+men could do.
+
+The main difficulty in administering full punishment to such bands was
+that after a defeat they scattered, so that they could not be overtaken
+in any detailed fashion. After the Custer fight many of the tribe went
+north of the Canadian line and remained there for some time. The writer
+himself has seen along the Qu'Appelle River in Saskatchewan some of the
+wheels taken out of the watches of Custer's men. The savages broke them
+up and used the wheels for jewelry. They even offered the Canadians for
+trade boots, hats, and clothing taken from the bodies of Custer's men.
+
+The Modoc war against the warriors of Captain Jack in 1873 was waged in
+the lava beds of Oregon, and it had the distinction of being one of
+the first Indian wars to be well reported in the newspapers. We heard a
+great deal of the long and trying campaigns waged by the Army in revenge
+for the murder of General Canby in his council tent. We got small glory
+out of that war, perhaps, but at last we hanged the ringleader of the
+murderers; and the extreme Northwest remained free from that time on.
+
+Far in the dry Southwest, where home-building man did not as yet essay
+a general occupation of the soil, the blood-thirsty Apache long waged
+a warfare which tried the mettle of our Army as perhaps no other tribes
+ever have done. The Spaniards had fought these Apaches for nearly three
+hundred years, and had not beaten them. They offered three hundred
+dollars each for Apache scalps, and took a certain number of them.
+But they left all the remaining braves sworn to an eternal enmity. The
+Apaches became mountain outlaws, whose blood-mad thirst for revenge
+never died. No tribe ever fought more bitterly. Hemmed in and
+surrounded, with no hope of escape, in some instances they perished
+literally to the last man. General George Crook finished the work of
+cleaning up the Apache outlaws only by use of the trailers of their own
+people who sided with the whites for pay. Without the Pima scouts he
+never could have run down the Apaches as he did. Perhaps these were
+the hardest of all the Plains Indians to find and to fight. But in 1872
+Crook subdued them and concentrated them in reservations in Arizona.
+Ten years later, under Geronimo, a tribe of the Apaches broke loose and
+yielded to General Crook only after a prolonged war. Once again they
+raided New Mexico and Arizona in 1885-6. This was the last raid of
+Geronimo. He was forced by General Miles to surrender and, together with
+his chief warriors, was deported to Fort Pickens in Florida.
+
+In all these savage pitched battles and bloody skirmishes, the surprises
+and murderous assaults all over the old range, there were hundreds of
+settlers killed, hundreds also of our army men, including some splendid
+officers. In the Custer fight alone, on the Little Big Horn, the Army
+lost Custer himself, thirteen commissioned officers, and two hundred
+and fifty-six enlisted men killed, with two officers and fifty-one men
+wounded; a total of three hundred and twenty-three killed and wounded in
+one battle. Custer had in his full column about seven hundred men. The
+number of the Indians has been variously estimated. They had perhaps
+five thousand men in their villages when they met Custer in this,
+the most historic and most ghastly battle of the Plains. It would be
+bootless to revive any of the old discussions regarding Custer and his
+rash courage. Whether in error or in wisdom, he died, and gallantly. He
+and his men helped clear the frontier for those who were to follow, and
+the task took its toll.
+
+Thus, slowly but steadily, even though handicapped by a vacillating
+governmental policy regarding the Indians, we muddled through these
+great Indian wars of the frontier, our soldiers doing their work
+splendidly and uncomplainingly, such work as no other body of civilized
+troops has ever been asked to do or could have done if asked. At the
+close of the Civil War we ourselves were a nation of fighting men. We
+were fit and we were prepared. The average of our warlike qualities
+never has been so high as then. The frontier produced its own
+pathfinders, its own saviors, its own fighting men.
+
+So now the frontier lay ready, waiting for the man with the plough. The
+dawn of that last day was at hand.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Chapter VIII. The Cattle Kings
+
+It is proper now to look back yet again over the scenes with which
+we hitherto have had to do. It is after the railways have come to the
+Plains. The Indians now are vanishing. The buffalo have not yet gone,
+but are soon to pass.
+
+Until the closing days of the Civil War the northern range was a wide,
+open domain, the greatest ever offered for the use of a people. None
+claimed it then in fee; none wanted it in fee. The grasses and the sweet
+waters offered accessible and profitable chemistry for all men who
+had cows to range. The land laws still were vague and inexact in
+application, and each man could construe them much as he liked. The
+excellent homestead law of 1862, one of the few really good land laws
+that have been put on our national statute books, worked well enough
+so long as we had good farming lands for homesteading--lands of which a
+quarter section would support a home and a family. This same homestead
+law was the only one available for use on the cattle-range. In practice
+it was violated thousands of times--in fact, of necessity violated
+by any cattle man who wished to acquire sufficient range to run a
+considerable herd. Our great timber kings, our great cattle kings, made
+their fortunes out of their open contempt for the homestead law, which
+was designed to give all the people an even chance for a home and a
+farm. It made, and lost, America.
+
+Swiftly enough, here and there along all the great waterways of the
+northern range, ranchers and their men filed claims on the water fronts.
+The dry land thus lay tributary to them. For the most part the open
+lands were held practically under squatter right; the first cowman in
+any valley usually had his rights respected, at least for a time. These
+were the days of the open range. Fences had not come, nor had farms been
+staked out.
+
+From the South now appeared that tremendous and elemental force--most
+revolutionary of all the great changes we have noted in the swiftly
+changing West--the bringing in of thousands of horned kine along the
+northbound trails. The trails were hurrying from the Rio Grande to the
+upper plains of Texas and northward, along the north and south line of
+the Frontier--that land which now we have been seeking less to define
+and to mark precisely than fundamentally to understand.
+
+The Indian wars had much to do with the cow trade. The Indians were
+crowded upon the reservations, and they had to be fed, and fed on beef.
+Corrupt Indian agents made fortunes, and the Beef Ring at Washington,
+one of the most despicable lobbies which ever fattened there, now wrote
+its brief and unworthy history. In a strange way corrupt politics and
+corrupt business affected the phases of the cattle industry as they had
+affected our relations with the Indians. More than once a herd of some
+thousand beeves driven up from Texas on contract, and arriving late in
+autumn, was not accepted on its arrival at the army post--some pet of
+Washington perhaps had his own herd to sell! All that could be done then
+would be to seek out a "holding range." In this way, more and more, the
+capacity of the northern Plains to nourish and improve cattle became
+established.
+
+Naturally, the price of cows began to rise; and naturally, also, the
+demand for open range steadily increased. There now began the whole
+complex story of leased lands and fenced lands. The frontier still was
+offering opportunity for the bold man to reap where he had not sown.
+Lands leased to the Indians of the civilized tribes began to cut large
+figure in the cow trade--as well as some figure in politics--until at
+length the thorny situation was handled by a firm hand at Washington.
+The methods of the East were swiftly overrunning those of the West.
+Politics and graft and pull, things hitherto unknown, soon wrote their
+hurrying story also over all this newly won region from which the
+rifle-smoke had scarcely yet cleared away.
+
+But every herd which passed north for delivery of one sort or the other
+advanced the education of the cowman, whether of the northern or the
+southern ranges. Some of the southern men began to start feeding ranges
+in the North, retaining their breeding ranges in the South. The demand
+of the great upper range for cattle seemed for the time insatiable.
+
+To the vision of the railroad builders a tremendous potential freightage
+now appeared. The railroad builders began to calculate that one day they
+would parallel the northbound cow trail with iron trails of their own
+and compete with nature for the carrying of this beef. The whole swift
+story of all that development, while the westbound rails were crossing
+and criss-crossing the newly won frontier, scarce lasted twenty years.
+Presently we began to hear in the East of the Chisholm Trail and of the
+Western Trail which lay beyond it, and of many smaller and intermingling
+branches. We heard of Ogallalla, in Nebraska, the "Gomorrah of the
+Range," the first great upper market-place for distribution of cattle to
+the swiftly forming northern ranches. The names of new rivers came
+upon our maps; and beyond the first railroads we began to hear of the
+Yellowstone, the Powder, the Musselshell, the Tongue, the Big Horn, the
+Little Missouri.
+
+The wild life, bold and carefree, coming up from the South now in a
+mighty surging wave, spread all over that new West which offered to the
+people of older lands a strange and fascinating interest. Every one on
+the range had money; every one was independent. Once more it seemed that
+man had been able to overleap the confining limitations of his life, and
+to attain independence, self-indulgence, ease and liberty. A chorus of
+Homeric, riotous mirth, as of a land in laughter, rose up all over the
+great range. After all, it seemed that we had a new world left, a land
+not yet used. We still were young! The cry arose that there was land
+enough for all out West. And at first the trains of white-topped wagons
+rivaled the crowded coaches westbound on the rails.
+
+In consequence there came an entire readjustment of values. This
+country, but yesterday barren and worthless, now was covered with
+gold, deeper than the gold of California or any of the old placers. New
+securities and new values appeared. Banks did not care much for the land
+as security--it was practically worthless without the cattle--but they
+would lend money on cattle at rates which did not then seem usurious. A
+new system of finance came into use. Side by side with the expansion of
+credits went the expansion of the cattle business. Literally in hundreds
+of thousands the cows came north from the exhaustless ranges of the
+lower country.
+
+It was a wild, strange day. But withal it was the kindliest and most
+generous time, alike the most contented and the boldest time, in all the
+history of our frontiers. There never was a better life than that of the
+cowman who had a good range on the Plains and cattle enough to stock his
+range. There never will be found a better man's country in all the world
+than that which ran from the Missouri up to the low foothills of the
+Rockies.
+
+The lower cities took their tribute of the northbound cattle for quite a
+time. Wichita, Coffeyville, and other towns of lower Kansas in turn made
+bids for prominence as cattle marts. Agents of the Chicago stockyards
+would come down along the trails into the Indian Nations to meet the
+northbound herds and to try to divert them to this or that market as
+a shipping-point. The Kiowas and Comanches, not yet wholly confined to
+their reservations, sometimes took tribute, whether in theft or in open
+extortion, of the herds laboring upward through the long slow season.
+Trail-cutters and herd-combers, licensed or unlicensed hangers-on to the
+northbound throngs of cattle, appeared along the lower trails--with some
+reason, occasionally; for in a great northbound herd there might be
+many cows included under brands other than those of the road brands
+registered for the drovers of that particular herd. Cattle thieving
+became an industry of certain value, rivaling in some localities the
+operations of the bandits of the placer camps. There was great wealth
+suddenly to be seen. The weak and the lawless, as well as the strong and
+the unscrupulous, set out to reap after their own fashion where they had
+not sown. If a grave here or there appeared along the trail or at the
+edge of the straggling town, it mattered little. If the gamblers and the
+desperadoes of the cow towns such as Newton, Ellsworth, Abilene, Dodge,
+furnished a man for breakfast day after day, it mattered little, for
+plenty of men remained, as good or better. The life was large and
+careless, and bloodshed was but an incident.
+
+During the early and unregulated days of the cattle industry, the
+frontier insisted on its own creed, its own standards. But all the time,
+coming out from the East, were scores and hundreds of men of exacter
+notions of trade and business. The enormous waste of the cattle range
+could not long endure. The toll taken by the thievery of the men who
+came to be called range-rustlers made an element of loss which could not
+long be sustained by thinking men. As the Vigilantes regulated things in
+the mining camps, so now in slightly different fashion the new property
+owners on the upper range established their own ideas, their own sense
+of proportion as to law and order. The cattle associations, the banding
+together of many owners of vast herds, for mutual protection and mutual
+gain were a natural and logical development. Outside of these there was
+for a time a highly efficient corps of cattle-range Vigilantes, who shot
+and hanged some scores of rustlers.
+
+It was a frenzied life while it lasted--this lurid outburst, the
+last flare of the frontier. Such towns as Dodge and Ogallalla offered
+extraordinary phenomena of unrestraint. But fortunately into the worst
+of these capitals of license came the best men of the new regime,
+and the new officers of the law, the agents of the Vigilantes, the
+advance-guard of civilization now crowding on the heels of the wild men
+of the West. In time the lights of the dance-halls and the saloons and
+the gambling parlors went out one by one all along the frontier. By 1885
+Dodge City, a famed capital of the cow trade, which will live as long
+as the history of that industry is known, resigned its eminence and
+declared that from where the sun then stood it would be a cow camp no
+more! The men of Dodge knew that another day had dawned. But this was
+after the homesteaders had arrived and put up their wire fences, cutting
+off from the town the holding grounds of the northbound herds.
+
+This innovation of barb-wire fences in the seventies had caused a
+tremendous alteration of conditions over all the country. It had enabled
+men to fence in their own water-fronts, their own homesteads. Casually,
+and at first without any objection filed by any one, they had included
+in their fences many hundreds of thousands of acres of range land to
+which they had no title whatever. These men--like the large-handed cow
+barons of the Indian Nations, who had things much as they willed in a
+little unnoted realm all their own--had money and political influence.
+And there seemed still range enough for all. If a man wished to throw a
+drift fence here or there, what mattered it?
+
+Up to this time not much attention had been paid to the Little Fellow,
+the man of small capital who registered a brand of his own, and who
+with a Maverick * here and there and the natural increase, and perhaps
+a trifle of unnatural increase here and there--had proved able to
+accumulate with more or less rapidity a herd of his own. Now the cattle
+associations passed rules that no foreman should be allowed to have
+or register a brand of his own. Not that any foreman could be
+suspected--not at all!--but the foreman who insisted on his old right to
+own a running iron and a registered brand was politely asked to find his
+employment somewhere else.
+
+
+  * In the early days a rancher by the name of Maverick, a Texas
+man, had made himself rich simply by riding out on the open range and
+branding loose and unmarked occupants of the free lands. Hence the term
+"Maverick" was applied to any unbranded animal running loose on
+the range. No one cared to interfere with these early activities in
+collecting unclaimed cattle. Many a foundation for a great fortune was
+laid in precisely that way. It was not until the more canny days in the
+North that Mavericks were regarded with jealous eyes.
+
+The large-handed and once generous methods of the old range now began to
+narrow themselves. Even if the Little Fellow were able to throw a fence
+around his own land, very often he did not have land enough to support
+his herd with profit. A certain antipathy now began to arise between the
+great cattle owners and the small ones, especially on the upper range,
+where some rather bitter wars were fought--the cow kings accusing their
+smaller rivals of rustling cows; the small man accusing the larger
+operators of having for years done the same thing, and of having grown
+rich at it.
+
+The cattle associations, thrifty and shifty, sending their brand
+inspectors as far east as the stockyards of Kansas City and Chicago,
+naturally had the whip hand of the smaller men. They employed detectives
+who regularly combed out the country in search of men who had loose
+ideas of mine and thine. All the time the cow game was becoming stricter
+and harder. Easterners brought on the East's idea of property, of low
+interest, sure returns, and good security. In short, there was set on
+once more--as there had been in every great movement across the entire
+West--the old contest between property rights and human independence in
+action. It was now once more the Frontier against the States, and the
+States were foredoomed to win.
+
+The barb-wire fence, which was at first used extensively by the great
+operators, came at last to be the greatest friend of the Little Fellow
+on the range. The Little Fellow, who under the provisions of the
+homestead act began to push West and to depart farther and farther from
+the protecting lines of the railways, could locate land and water for
+himself and fence in both. "I've got the law back of me," was what he
+said; and what he said was true. Around the old cow camps of the trails,
+and around the young settlements which did not aspire to be called cow
+camps, the homesteaders fenced in land--so much land that there came to
+be no place near any of the shipping-points where a big herd from the
+South could be held. Along the southern range artificial barriers to the
+long drive began to be raised. It would be hard to say whether fear of
+Texas competition or of Texas cattle fever was the more powerful
+motive in the minds of ranchers in Colorado and Kansas. But the cattle
+quarantine laws of 1885 nearly broke up the long drive of that year.
+Men began to talk of fencing off the trails, and keeping the northbound
+herds within the fences--a thing obviously impossible.
+
+The railroads soon rendered this discussion needless. Their agents went
+down to Texas and convinced the shippers that it would be cheaper and
+safer to put their cows on cattle trains and ship them directly to the
+ranges where they were to be delivered. And in time the rails running
+north and south across the Staked Plains into the heart of the lower
+range began to carry most of the cattle. So ended the old cattle trails.
+
+What date shall we fix for the setting of the sun of that last frontier?
+Perhaps the year 1885 is as accurate as any--the time when the cattle
+trails practically ceased to bring north their vast tribute. But,
+in fact, there is no exact date for the passing of the frontier. Its
+decline set in on what day the first lank "nester" from the States
+outspanned his sun-burned team as he pulled up beside some sweet water
+on the rolling lands, somewhere in the West, and looked about him, and
+looked again at the land map held in his hand.
+
+"I reckon this is our land, Mother," said he.
+
+When he said that, he pronounced the doom of the old frontier.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Chapter IX. The Homesteader
+
+His name was usually Nester or Little Fellow. It was the old story of
+the tortoise and the hare. The Little Fellow was from the first destined
+to win. His steady advance, now on this flank, now on that, just back
+of the vanguard pushing westward, had marked the end of all our earlier
+frontiers. The same story now was being written on the frontier of the
+Plains.
+
+But in the passing of this last frontier the type of the land-seeking
+man, the type of the American, began to alter distinctly. The million
+dead of our cruel Civil War left a great gap in the American population
+which otherwise would have occupied the West and Northwest after the
+clearing 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
+Northwest became largely foreign. Each German or Scandinavian who found
+himself prospering in this rich new country was himself an immigration
+agency. He sent back word to his friends and relatives in the Old World
+and these came to swell the steadily thickening population of the New.
+
+We have seen that the enterprising cattlemen had not been slow to reach
+out for such resources as they might. Perhaps at one time between 1885
+and 1890 there were over ten million acres of land illegally fenced in
+on the upper range by 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 first." For the Nester who wanted
+a way through these fences out into the open public lands, he cherished
+a bitter resentment. And yet the Nester must in time win through, must
+eventually find the little piece of land which he was seeking.
+
+The government at Washington was finally obliged to take action. In
+the summer of 1885, acting under authorization of Congress, President
+Cleveland ordered the removal of all illegal enclosures and forbade any
+person or association to prevent the peaceful occupation 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 Dawes Act of 1887 allotted the
+tribal lands to the Indians in severalty and threw open the remainder
+to the impatient homeseekers. Waiting thousands were ready at the Kansas
+line, eager for the starting gun which was to let loose a mad stampede
+of crazed human beings.
+
+It always was contended by the cowman that these settlers coming in on
+the semi-arid range could not make a living there, that all they could
+do was legally to starve 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 of that time. The
+western Canadian farmer of today is a cherished, almost a petted being.
+But no one ever showed any mercy to the American farmer who moved out
+West.
+
+As always has been the case, a certain number of wagons might be seen
+passing back East, as well as the somewhat larger number steadily moving
+westward. There were lean years and dry years, hot years, yellow years
+here and there upon the range. The phrase written on one disheartened
+farmer's wagon top, "Going back to my wife's folks," became historic.
+
+The railways were finding profit in carrying human beings out to the
+cow-range just as once they had in transporting cattle. Indeed, it did
+not take the wiser railroad men long to see that they could afford to
+set down a farmer, at almost no cost for transportation, in any part
+of the new West. He would after that be dependent upon the railroad in
+every way. The railroads deliberately devised the 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-stock free on request. The same road, and others
+also, preached steadily the doctrine of diversified farming. In short,
+the railroads, in their own interests, did all they could to make
+prosperous the farms or ranches of the West. The usual Western homestead
+now was part ranch and part farm, although the term "ranch" continued
+for many years to cover all the meanings of the farm of whatever sort.
+
+There appeared now in the new country yet another figure of the Western
+civilization, the land-boomer, with his irresponsible and unregulated
+statements in regard to the values of these Western lands. These men
+were not always desirable citizens, although of course no industry 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 world. In any one
+of these towns the main industry was that of selling lands or "real
+estate." During the Kansas boom of 1886 the land-boomers had their desks
+in the lobbies of banks, the windows of hardware stores--any place and
+every place offering room for a desk and chair.
+
+Now also flourished apace the industry of mortgage loans. Eastern
+money began to flood the western Plains, attracted by the high rates of
+interest. In 1886 the customary 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 town lots far out
+in the cornfields, and of buying unimproved subdivision property with
+borrowed money at usurious rates of interest, was one riding for its own
+fall.
+
+None the less the Little Fellow kept on going out into the West. We
+did not change our land laws for his sake, and for a time he needed no
+sympathy. 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 of land. The foundations of many comfortable fortunes were laid in
+precisely this way by thrifty men who were willing to work and willing
+to wait.
+
+It was not until 1917 that the old homestead law limiting the settler
+to a hundred and sixty acres of land was modified for the benefit of the
+stock-raiser. The stock-raising homestead law, as it is called, permits
+a man to make entry for not more than six hundred and forty acres of
+unappropriated land which shall have been designated by the Secretary
+of the Interior as "stock-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 stroll down to the land
+office and swear solemnly that he had lived the legal length of time on
+his homestead, whereas perhaps he had never seen it or had no more than
+ridden across it. Today matters perhaps will be administered somewhat
+more strictly; for of all those millions of acres of open land once in
+the West there is almost none left worth the holding for farm purposes.
+
+Such dishonest practices were, however, indignantly denied by those who
+fostered the irrigation and dry-farming booms which made the last phase
+of exploitation of the old range. A vast amount of disaster was worked
+by the failure of numberless irrigation companies, each of them offering
+lands to the settlers through the medium of most alluring advertising.
+In almost every case the engineers underestimated 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, purporting to assure sudden wealth in apples,
+pears, celery, garden truck, cherries, small fruits, alfalfa, pecans,
+eucalyptus or catalpa trees-anything you liked--went to the wall.
+Sometimes whole communities became straitened by the collapse of these
+overblown enterprises. The recovery was slow, though usually the result
+of that recovery was a far healthier and more stable condition of
+society.
+
+This whole question of irrigation and dry farming, this or that phase
+of the last scrambling, feverish settling on the last lands, was sorely
+wasteful of human enterprise and human happiness. It was much like the
+spawning rush of the salmon 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 went out to
+the dry country to farm under the ditch, or to take up that still more
+hazardous occupation--successful sometimes, though always hard and
+always risky--dry farming on the benches which cannot be reached with
+irrigating waters.
+
+Strangely changed was all the face of the cattle range by these
+successive and startling innovations. The smoke of many little homes
+rose now, scattered over all that tremendous country from the Rockies
+to the edge of the short grass country, from Texas to the Canadian line.
+The cattle 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
+Westerner who knew the inside and out of local politics to pick up
+permanently considerable tracts of land. Some of these ranches held
+together as late as 1916; indeed, there are some such oldtime holdings
+still existent in the West, although far more rare than formerly was the
+case.
+
+Under all these conditions the price of land went up steadily. Land
+was taken eagerly which would have been refused with contempt a decade
+earlier. The parings and scraps and crumbs of the Old West now were
+fought for avidly.
+
+The need of capital became more and more important in many of the great
+land operations. Even the government reclamation enterprises could not
+open lands to the settler on anything like the old homestead basis. The
+water right cost money--sometimes twenty-five or thirty dollars an acre;
+in some of the private reclamation enterprises, fifty dollars an acre,
+or even more. Very frequently when 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.
+Naturally, when the new farmers were starved out and in one way or
+another had made other plans, the country itself went to pieces. That
+part of it was wisest which did not kill the goose of the golden
+egg. But be these things as they may be and as they were, the whole
+readjustment in agricultural values over the once measureless and
+valueless cow country was a stupendous and staggering thing.
+
+Now appeared yet another agency of change. The high dry lands of many
+of the Rocky Mountain States had long been regarded covetously by an
+industry even more cordially disliked by the cattleman than the industry
+of farming. The sheepman began to raise his head and to plan certain
+things for himself in turn. 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 the feud between the
+sheepmen and the cowmen was bitter and implacable. The issues in those
+quarrels rarely got into the courts but were fought out on the ground.
+The old Wyoming dead-line of the cowmen against intruding bands of
+Green River sheep made a considerable amount of history which was never
+recorded.
+
+The sheepmen at length began to succeed in their plans. Themselves not
+paying many taxes, not supporting the civilization of the country, not
+building the schools or roads or bridges, they none the less claimed the
+earth and the fullness thereof.
+
+After the establishment of the great forest reserves, the sheepmen
+coveted the range thus included. It has been the governmental policy to
+sell range privileges in the forest reserves for sheep, on 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 course the issue even in this
+ancient contest is foregone--as the cowman has had to raise his cows
+under fence, so ultimately must the sheepman also buy his range in fee
+and raise his product under fence.
+
+The wandering bands of sheep belong nowhere. They ruin a country. It
+is a pathetic spectacle to see parts of the Old West in which sheep
+steadily 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 surface of the earth. The denuded soil crumbles under their
+countless hoofs, becomes dust, and blows away. They leave a waste, a
+desert, an abomination.
+
+There were yet other phases of change which followed hard upon the heels
+of our soldiers after they had completed their task of subjugating the
+tribes of the buffalo Indians. After the homesteads had been proved up
+in some of the Northwestern States, such as Montana and the Dakotas,
+large bodies of land were acquired by certain capitalistic farmers. All
+this new land had been proved to be exceedingly 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 their innumerable stacks of wheat--the
+figures of the vast mileage of their fencing--the yet more stupendous
+figures of the outlay required to operate these farms, and the splendid
+totals of the receipts from such operations--these at one time were
+familiar and proudly presented features of boom advertising in the upper
+portions of our black land belt, which day just at the eastern edge of
+the old Plains.
+
+There was to be repeated in this country something of the history of
+California. In the great valleys, such as the San Joaquin, the first
+interests were pastoral, and the cowmen found a vast realm which seemed
+to be theirs forever. There came to them, however, the bonanza wheat
+farmers, who flourished there about 1875 and through the next decade.
+Their highly specialized industry boasted that it could bake a loaf of
+bread out of a wheat field between the hours of sunrise and sunset. The
+outlay 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 turned over to the bank owning the mortgages on his lands
+and plant. He turned in also all his mules and horses, and retired worse
+than broke from an industry in which he had once made his hundreds of
+thousands. Something of this same story was to follow in the Dakotas.
+Presently we heard no more of the bonanza wheat farms; and a little
+later they were not. The one-crop country is never one of sound
+investing values; and a land boom is something of which to
+beware--always and always to beware.
+
+The prairie had passed; the range had passed; the illegal fences had
+passed; and presently the cattle themselves were to pass--that is to
+say, the great herds. As recently as five years ago (1912) it was my
+fortune to be in the town of Belle Fourche, near the Black Hills--a
+region long accustomed to vivid history, whether of Indians, mines, or
+cows--at the time when the last of the great herds of the old industry
+thereabouts were breaking up; and to see, coming down to the cattle
+chutes to be shipped to the Eastern stockyards, the last hundreds of
+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, men grown gray in
+range work. Alongside the herds, after the ancient fashion of trailing
+cattle, rode cowboys who handled their charges with the same old skill.
+But even the cowboys had changed. These were without exception men from
+the East who had learned their trade here in the West. Here indeed
+was one of the last acts of the great drama of the Plains. To many an
+observer there it was a tragic thing. I saw many a cowman there the
+gravity on whose face had nothing to do with commercial loss. It was the
+Old West he mourned. I mourned with him.
+
+Naturally the growth of the great stockyards of the Middle West had an
+effect upon all the cattle-producing country of the West, whether
+those cattle were bred in large or in small numbers. The dealers of the
+stockyards, let us say, gradually evolved a perfect understanding among
+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;
+and their industry, since the invention of refrigerator cars and the
+shipment of dressed beef in tins, has been one which has extended to
+all the corners of the world. The great packers would rather talk of
+"by-products" than of these things. Always they have been poor, so very
+poor!
+
+For a time the railroads east of the stockyard cities of Kansas City and
+Chicago divided up _pro rata_ the dressed beef traffic. Investigation
+after investigation has been made of the methods of the stockyard firms,
+but thus far the law has not laid its hands successfully upon them.
+Naturally 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 range. Where once a half ton of hay might have been
+sufficient to tide a cow over the bad part of the winter, the Little
+Fellow who fences his own range of a few hundred acres is obliged to
+figure on two or three tons, for he must feed his herd on hay through
+the long months of the winter.
+
+The ultimate consumer, of course, is the one who pays the freight and
+stands the cost of all this. Hence we have the swift growth of American
+discontent 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 man's country. We have arrived all too swiftly upon the
+ways of the Old World. And today, in spite of our love of peace, we are
+in an Old World's war!
+
+The insatiable demand of Americans for cheap lands assumed a certain
+international phase at the period lying between 1900 and 1913 or
+later--the years of the last great boom in Canadian lands. The Dominion
+Government, represented by shrewd and enterprising men able to handle
+large undertakings, saw with a certain satisfaction of 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 industry in Alberta and Saskatchewan.
+The Canadian Government went into the publicity business on its own
+part. To a certain extent European immigration was encouraged, but the
+United States really was the country most combed out for settlers for
+these Canadian lands. As by magic, millions of acres in western Canada
+were settled.
+
+The young American farmers of our near Northwest were especially coveted
+as settlers, because they knew how to farm these upper lands far better
+than any Europeans, and because each of them was able 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 farmers, resolved to live under
+another flag. In one year the State of Iowa lost over fifteen million
+dollars of money withdrawn from bank deposits by farmers moving across
+the line into Canada.
+
+The story of these land rushes was much the same there as it had been
+with us. Not all succeeded. The climatic conditions were far more
+severe than any which we had endured, and if the soil for 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. But the great Canadian
+land booms, carefully fostered and well developed, offered a curious
+illustration of the tremendous pressure of all the populations of the
+world for land and yet more land.
+
+In the year 1911 the writer saw, all through the Peace River Valley and
+even in the neighborhood of the Little Slave Lake, the advance-guard
+of wheat farmers crowding out even beyond the Canadian frontier in the
+covetous search for yet more cheap 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 homestead land under the regulations of the Dominion Government!
+In the year 1913 I saw an active business done in town lots at Fort
+McMurray, five hundred miles north of the last railroad of Alberta, on
+the ancient Athabasca waterway of the fur trade!
+
+Who shall state the limit of all this expansion? The farmer has ever
+found more and more land on which he could make a living; he is always
+taking land which his predecessor has scornfully refused. If presently
+there shall come the news that the land boomer has reached the mouth
+of the Mackenzie River--as long ago he reached certain 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 may take us easily where I have stood,
+somewhat wearied, at that spot on the Little Bell tributary of
+the Porcupine, where a slab on a post said, "Portage Road to Ft.
+McPherson"--a "road" which is not even a trail, but which crosses the
+most northerly of all the passes of the Rockies, within a hundred miles
+of the Arctic Ocean.
+
+Land, land, more land! It is the cry of the ages, more imperative and
+clamorous now than ever in the history of the world and only arrested
+for the time by the cataclysm of the Great War. The earth is well-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 land
+left in Europe; but, unbelievably soon, the Great War will have been
+forgotten; and then the march of the people will be resumed toward such
+frontiers of the world as yet may remain. Land, land, more land!
+
+Always in America we have occupied the land as fast as it was feasible
+to do so. We have survived incredible hardships on the mining frontier,
+have lived through desperate social conditions in the cow country, have
+fought many of 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 failing, hoping and despairing--but
+steadily advancing in the net result--has come that portion of the
+population which builds homes and lives in them, and which is not
+content with a blanket for a bed and the sky for a roof above.
+
+We had a frontier once. It was our most priceless possession. It has not
+been possible to eliminate from the blood of the American West, diluted
+though it has 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 the United States. It was there we showed our
+fighting edge, our unconquerable resolution, our undying faith. There,
+for a time at least, we were Americans.
+
+We had our frontier. We shall do ill indeed if we forget and abandon its
+strong lessons, its great hopes, its splendid human dreams.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
+
+ANDY ADAMS, "The Log of a Cowboy," 1903. "The Outlet," 1905. Homely but
+excellently informing books done by a man rarely qualified for his task
+by long experience in the cattle business and on the trail. Nothing
+better exists than Adams's several books for the man who wishes
+trustworthy information on the early American cattle business.
+
+GEORGE A. FORSYTH, "The Story of the Soldier," 1900.
+
+GEORGE BIRD GRINNELL, "The Story of the Indian," 1895.
+
+EMERSON HOUGH, "The Story of the Cowboy," 1897.
+
+CHARLES HOWARD SHINN, "The Story of the Mine," 1901.
+
+CY WARMAN, "The Story of the Railroad," 1898. The foregoing books of
+Appleton's interesting series known as "The Story of the West" are
+valuable as containing much detailed information, done by contemporaries
+of wide experience.
+
+FRANCIS PARKMAN, "The Oregon Trail," 1901, with preface by the author to
+the edition of 18991. This is a reprint of the edition published in 1857
+under the title "Prairie and Rocky Mountain 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 the middle of the last century. The
+original title is more accurate than the more usual one "The Oregon
+Trail," as the book itself is in no sense an exclusive study of that
+historic highway.
+
+COLONEL R. B. MARCY, U. S. A., "Thirty Years of Army Life on the
+Border," 1866. An admirable and very informing book done by an Army
+officer who was also a sportsman and a close observer of the conditions
+of the life about him. One of the standard books for any library of
+early Western literature.
+
+EMERSON HOUGH, "The Story of the Outlaw," 1907. A study of the Western
+desperado, with historical narratives of famous outlaws, stories of
+noted border movements, Vigilante activities, and armed conflicts on the
+border.
+
+NATHANIEL PITT LANGFORD, "Vigilante Days and Ways," 1893. A storehouse
+of information done in graphic anecdotal fashion of the scenes in the
+early mining camps of Idaho and Montana. Valuable as the work of a
+contemporary writer who took part in the scenes he describes.
+
+JOHN C. VAN TRAMP, "Prairie and Rocky Mountain Adventures or Life in
+the West," 1870. A study of the States and territorial regions of our
+Western empire, embracing history, statistics, and geography,
+with descriptions of the chief cities of the West. In large part a
+compilation of earlier Western literature.
+
+SAMUEL BOWLES, "Our New West," 1869. Records of travel between the
+Mississippi River and the Pacific Ocean, with details regarding scenery,
+agriculture, mines, business, social life, etc., including a full
+description of the Pacific States and studies of the "Mormons, Indians,
+and Chinese" at that time.
+
+HIRAM MARTIN CHITTENDEN, "The American Fur Trade of the Far West," 1902.
+The work of a distinguished Army officer. Done with the exact care of an
+Army engineer. An extraordinary collection of facts and a general view
+of the picturesque early industry of the fur trade, which did so much
+toward developing the American West. See also his "History of Steamboat
+Navigation on the Missouri River" (1903).
+
+A. J. SOWELL, "Early Settlers and Indian Fighters of Southwest Texas,"
+1900. A local book, but done with contemporary accuracy by a man who
+also studied the Texas Rangers and who was familiar with some of the
+earlier frontier characters of the Southwest.
+
+The foregoing volumes are of course but a few among the many scores or
+hundreds which will have been read avidly by every man concerned with
+frontier life or with the expansion of the American people to the West.
+Space lacks for a fuller list, but the foregoing readings will serve to
+put upon the trail of wider information any one interested in these and
+kindred themes.
+
+Let especial stress again be laid upon the preeminent value of books
+done by contemporaries, men who wrote, upon the ground, of things which
+they actually saw and actually understood. It is not always, or perhaps
+often, that these contemporary books achieve the place which they ought
+to have and hold.
+
+Among the many books dealing with the Indians and Indian Wars, the
+following may be mentioned: J. P. DUNN, "Massacres of the Mountains, A
+History of the Indian Wars of the Far West," 1886.
+
+L. E. TEXTOR, "Official Relations between the United States and the
+Sioux Indians," 1896.
+
+G. W. MANYPENNY, "Our Indian Wards," 1880.
+
+There is an extensive bibliography appended to Frederic L. Paxson's "The
+Last American Frontier" (1910), the first book to bring together the
+many aspects of the Far West.
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 3033 ***
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+    .mynote    {background-color: #DDE; color: #000; padding: .5em; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 95%;}
+    .toc       { margin-left: 10%; margin-bottom: .75em;}
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+    pre        { font-style: italic; font-size: 90%; margin-left: 10%;}
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+</style>
+</head>
+<body>
+<div>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 3033 ***</div>
+
+    <h1>
+      THE PASSING OF THE FRONTIER
+    </h1>
+    <h2>
+      A CHRONICLE OF THE OLD WEST
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      By Emerson Hough
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h5>
+      New Haven: Yale University Press <br /><br /> Toronto: Glasgow, Brook &amp;
+      Co. <br /><br /> London: Humphrey Milford <br /><br /> Oxford University Press
+      <br /><br /> 1918
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      Contents
+    </h2>
+    <h4>
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0001"> THE PASSING OF THE FRONTIER </a>
+    </h4>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <table summary="" style="margin-right: auto; margin-left: auto">
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#link2HCH0001"> Chapter I. </a>
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          The Frontier In History
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#link2HCH0002"> Chapter II. </a>
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          The Range
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#link2HCH0003"> Chapter III. </a>
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          The Cattle Trails
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#link2HCH0004"> Chapter IV. </a>
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          The Cowboy
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#link2HCH0005"> Chapter V. </a>
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          The Mines
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#link2HCH0006"> Chapter VI. </a>
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          The Pathways Of The West
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#link2HCH0007"> Chapter VII. </a>
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          The Indian Wars
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#link2HCH0008"> Chapter VIII. </a>
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          The Cattle Kings
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <a href="#link2HCH0009"> Chapter IX. </a>
+        </td>
+        <td>
+          The Homesteader
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+    </table>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <a name="link2H_4_0001" id="link2H_4_0001">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <h1>
+      THE PASSING OF THE FRONTIER
+    </h1>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0001" id="link2HCH0001">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter I. The Frontier In History
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The frontier! There is no word in the English language more stirring, more
+      intimate, or more beloved. It has in it all the elan of the old French
+      phrase, _En avant!_ It carries all of the old Saxon command, Forward!! It
+      means all that America ever meant. It means the old hope of a real
+      personal liberty, and yet a real human advance in character and
+      achievement. To a genuine American it is the dearest word in all the
+      world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What is, or was, the frontier? Where was it? Under what stars did it lie?
+      Because, as the vague Iliads of ancient heroes or the nebulous records of
+      the savage gentlemen of the Middle Ages make small specific impingement on
+      our consciousness today, so also even now begin the tales of our own old
+      frontier to assume a haziness, an unreality, which makes them seem less
+      history than folklore. Now the truth is that the American frontier of
+      history has many a local habitation and many a name. And this is why it
+      lies somewhat indefinite under the blue haze of the years, all the more
+      alluring for its lack of definition, like some old mountain range, the
+      softer and more beautiful for its own shadows.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The fascination of the frontier is and has ever been an undying thing.
+      Adventure is the meat of the strong men who have built the world for those
+      more timid. Adventure and the frontier are one and inseparable. They
+      suggest strength, courage, hardihood—qualities beloved in men since
+      the world began—qualities which are the very soul of the United
+      States, itself an experiment, an adventure, a risk accepted. Take away all
+      our history of political regimes, the story of the rise and fall of this
+      or that partisan aggregation in our government; take away our somewhat
+      inglorious military past; but leave us forever the tradition of the
+      American frontier! There lies our comfort and our pride. There we never
+      have failed. There, indeed, we always realized our ambitions. There,
+      indeed, we were efficient, before that hateful phrase was known. There we
+      were a melting-pot for character, before we came to know that odious
+      appellation which classifies us as the melting-pot of the nations.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The frontier was the place and the time of the strong man, of the
+      self-sufficient but restless individual. It was the home of the rebel, the
+      protestant, the unreconciled, the intolerant, the ardent—and the
+      resolute. It was not the conservative and tender man who made our history;
+      it was the man sometimes illiterate, oftentimes uncultured, the man of
+      coarse garb and rude weapons. But the frontiersmen were the true dreamers
+      of the nation. They really were the possessors of a national vision. Not
+      statesmen but riflemen and riders made America. The noblest conclusions of
+      American history still rest upon premises which they laid.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But, in its broadest significance, the frontier knows no country. It lies
+      also in other lands and in other times than our own. When and what was the
+      Great Frontier? We need go back only to the time of Drake and the
+      sea-dogs, the Elizabethan Age, when all North America was a frontier,
+      almost wholly unknown, compellingly alluring to all bold men. That was the
+      day of new stirrings in the human heart. Some strange impulse seemed to
+      act upon the soul of the braver and bolder Europeans; and they moved
+      westward, nor could have helped that had they tried. They lived largely
+      and blithely, and died handsomely, those old Elizabethan adventurers, and
+      they lie today in thousands of unrecorded graves upon two continents, each
+      having found out that any place is good enough for a man to die upon,
+      provided that he be a man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The American frontier was Elizabethan in its quality—childlike,
+      simple, and savage. It has not entirely passed; for both Elizabethan folk
+      and Elizabethan customs are yet to be found in the United States. While
+      the half-savage civilization of the farther West was roaring on its way
+      across the continent—while the day of the keelboatman and the
+      plainsman, of the Indian-fighter and the miner, even the day of the
+      cowboy, was dawning and setting—there still was a frontier left far
+      behind in the East, near the top of the mountain range which made the
+      first great barrier across our pathway to the West. That frontier, the
+      frontier of Boone and Kenton, of Robertson and Sevier, still exists and
+      may be seen in the Cumberland—the only remaining part of America
+      which is all American. There we may find trace of the Elizabethan Age—idioms
+      lost from English literature and American speech long ago. There we may
+      see the American home life as it went on more than a hundred years ago. We
+      may see hanging on the wall the long muzzle-loading rifle of an earlier
+      day. We may see the spinning-wheel and the loom. The women still make in
+      part the clothing for their families, and the men still make their own
+      household furniture, their own farming implements, their own boots.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This overhanging frontier of America is a true survival of the days of
+      Drake as well as of the days of Boone. The people are at once godly and
+      savage. They breed freely; they love their homes; they are ever ready for
+      adventure; they are frugal, abstemious, but violent and strong. They carry
+      on still the half-religious blood feuds of the old Scotch Highlands or the
+      North of Ireland, whence they came. They reverence good women. They care
+      little for material accumulations. They believe in personal ease and
+      personal independence. With them life goes on not in the slow monotony of
+      reiterated performance, but in ragged profile, with large exertions
+      followed by large repose. Now that has been the fashion of the frontier in
+      every age and every land of all the world. And so, by studying these
+      people, we may even yet arrive at a just and comprehensive notion of what
+      we might call the "feel" of the old frontier.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There exists, too, yet another Saxon frontier in a far-off portion of the
+      world. In that strange country, Australia, tremendous unknown regions
+      still remain, and the wild pastoral life of such regions bids fair to
+      exist yet for many years. A cattle king of Queensland held at one time
+      sixty thousand square miles of land. It is said that the average size of
+      pastoral holdings in the northern territory of Australia is two hundred
+      and seventy-five thousand acres. Does this not recall the old times of
+      free range in the American West?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This strange antipodal civilization also retains a curious flavor of
+      Elizabethan ideas. It does not plan for inordinate fortunes, the continual
+      amassing of money, but it does deliberately plan for the use by the
+      individual of his individual life. Australian business hours are shorter
+      than American. Routine is less general. The individual takes upon himself
+      a smaller load of effort. He is restive under monotony. He sets aside a
+      great part of his life for sport. He lives in a large and young day of the
+      world. Here we may see a remote picture of our own American West—better,
+      as it seems to me, than that reflected in the rapid and wholly
+      commercialized development of Western Canada, which is not flavored by any
+      age but this.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But much of the frontier of Australia is occupied by men of means who had
+      behind them government aid and a semi-paternal encouragement in their
+      adventures. The same is true in part of the government-fostered settlement
+      of Western Canada. It was not so with the American West. Here was not the
+      place of the rich man but of the poor man, and he had no one to aid him or
+      encourage him. Perhaps no man ever understood the American West who did
+      not himself go there and make his living in that country, as did the men
+      who found it and held it first. Each life on our old frontier was a
+      personal adventure. The individual had no government behind him and he
+      lacked even the protection of any law.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Our frontier crawled west from the first seaport settlements, afoot, on
+      horseback, in barges, or with slow wagon-trains. It crawled across the
+      Alleghanies, down the great river valleys and up them yet again; and at
+      last, in days of new transportation, it leaped across divides, from one
+      river valley to another. Its history, at first so halting, came to be very
+      swift—so swift that it worked great elisions in its own story.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In our own day, however, the Old West generally means the old cow country
+      of the West—the high plains and the lower foothills running from the
+      Rio Grande to the northern boundary. The still more ancient cattle-range
+      of the lower Pacific Slope will never come into acceptance as the Old
+      West. Always, when we use these words, we think of buffalo plains and of
+      Indians, and of their passing before the footmen and riders who carried
+      the phantom flag of Drake and the Virgin Queen from the Appalachians to
+      the Rockies—before the men who eventually made good that glorious
+      and vaunting vision of the Virginia cavaliers, whose party turned back
+      from the Rockfish Gap after laying claim in the name of King George on all
+      the country lying west of them, as far as the South Sea!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The American cow country may with very good logic arrogate to itself the
+      title of the real and typical frontier of all the world. We call the
+      spirit of the frontier Elizabethan, and so it was; but even as the
+      Elizabethan Age was marked by its contact with the Spanish civilization in
+      Europe, on the high seas, and in both the Americas, so the last frontier
+      of the American West also was affected, and largely, deeply, by Spanish
+      influence and Spanish customs. The very phraseology of range work bears
+      proof of this. Scores of Spanish words are written indelibly in the
+      language of the Plains. The frontier of the cow-range never was Saxon
+      alone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is a curious fact also, seldom if ever noted, that this Old West of the
+      Plains was very largely Southern and not Northern on its Saxon side. No
+      States so much as Kentucky and Tennessee and, later, Missouri—daughters
+      of Old Virginia in her glory—contributed to the forces of the
+      frontiersmen. Texas, farther to the south, put her stamp indelibly upon
+      the entire cattle industry of the West. Visionary, impractical, restless,
+      adventurous, these later Elizabethan heroes—bowing to no yoke,
+      insisting on their own rights and scorning often the laws of others, yet
+      careful to retain the best and most advantageous customs of any conquered
+      country—naturally came from those nearest Elizabethan countries
+      which lay abandoned behind them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If the atmosphere of the Elizabethan Age still may be found in the
+      forgotten Cumberlands, let us lay claim to kinship with yonder roystering
+      heroes of a gallant day; for this was ever the atmosphere of our own
+      frontier. To feel again the following breezes of the Golden Hind, or see
+      again, floating high in the cloudless skies, the sails of the Great
+      Armada, was the privilege of Americans for a double decade within the
+      memory of men yet living, in that country, so unfailingly beloved, which
+      we call the Old West of America.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0002" id="link2HCH0002">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter II. The Range
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      When, in 1803, those two immortal youths, Meriwether Lewis and William
+      Clark, were about to go forth on their great journey across the continent,
+      they were admonished by Thomas Jefferson that they would in all likelihood
+      encounter in their travels, living and stalking about, the mammoth or the
+      mastodon, whose bones had been found in the great salt-licks of Kentucky.
+      We smile now at such a supposition; yet it was not unreasonable then. No
+      man knew that tremendous country that lay beyond the mouth of the
+      Missouri.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The explorers crossed one portion of a vast land which was like to nothing
+      they had ever seen—the region later to become the great cattle-range
+      of America. It reached, although they could know nothing of that, from the
+      Spanish possessions on the south across a thousand miles of short grass
+      lands to the present Canadian boundary-line which certain obdurate
+      American souls still say ought to have been at 54 degrees 40 minutes, and
+      not where it is! From the Rio Grande to "Fifty-four forty," indeed, would
+      have made nice measurements for the Saxon cattle-range.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Little, however, was the value of this land understood by the explorers;
+      and, for more than half a century afterwards, it commonly was supposed to
+      be useless for the occupation of white men and suitable only as a
+      hunting-ground for savage tribes. Most of us can remember the school maps
+      of our own youth, showing a vast region marked, vaguely, "The Great
+      American Desert," which was considered hopeless for any human industry,
+      but much of which has since proved as rich as any land anywhere on the
+      globe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Perhaps it was the treeless nature of the vast Plains which carried the
+      first idea of their infertility. When the first settlers of Illinois and
+      Indiana came up from south of the Ohio River they had their choice of
+      timber and prairie lands. Thinking the prairies worthless—since land
+      which could not raise a tree certainly could not raise crops—these
+      first occupants of the Middle West spent a generation or more, axe in
+      hand, along the heavily timbered river-bottoms. The prairies were long in
+      settling. No one then could have predicted that farm lands in that region
+      would be worth three hundred dollars an acre or better, and that these
+      prairies of the Mississippi Valley would, in a few generations, be studded
+      with great towns and would form a part of the granary of the world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But, if our early explorers, passing beyond the valley of the Missouri,
+      found valueless the region of the Plains and the foothills, not so the
+      wild creatures or the savage men who had lived there longer than science
+      records. The buffalo then ranged from the Rio Grande to the Athabaska,
+      from the Missouri to the Rockies, and beyond. No one seems to have
+      concluded in those days that there was after all slight difference between
+      the buffalo and the domestic ox. The native cattle, however, in untold
+      thousands and millions, had even then proved beyond peradventure the
+      sustaining and strengthening nature of the grasses of the Plains.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now, each creature, even of human species, must adjust itself to its
+      environment. Having done so, commonly it is disposed to love that
+      environment. The Eskimo and the Zulu each thinks that he has the best land
+      in the world. So with the American Indian, who, supported by the vast
+      herds of buffalo, ranged all over that tremendous country which was later
+      to be given over to the white man with his domestic cattle. No freer life
+      ever was lived by any savages than by the Horse Indians of the Plains in
+      the buffalo days; and never has the world known a physically higher type
+      of savage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the buffalo-range—that is to say, on the cattle-range which was
+      to be—Lewis and Clark met several bands of the Sioux—the
+      Mandans and the Assiniboines, the Blackfeet, the Shoshones. Farther south
+      were the Pawnees, the Kaws, the Otoes, the Osages, most of whom depended
+      in part upon the buffalo for their living, though the Otoes, the Pawnees,
+      the Mandans, and certain others now and then raised a little corn or a few
+      squashes to help out their bill of fare. Still farther south dwelt the
+      Kiowas, the Comanches, and others. The Arapahoes, the Cheyennes, the
+      Crows, and the Utes, all hunters, were soon to come into the ken of the
+      white man. Of such of these tribes as they met, the youthful captains made
+      accounting, gravely and with extraordinary accuracy, but without
+      discovering in this region much future for Americans. They were explorers
+      and not industrial investigators.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was nearly half a century after the journey of Lewis and Clark that the
+      Forty-Niners were crossing the Plains, whither, meanwhile, the Mormons had
+      trekked in search of a country where they might live as they liked. Still
+      the wealth of the Plains remained untouched. California was in the eyes of
+      the world. The great cow-range was overleaped. But, in the early fifties,
+      when the placer fields of California began to be less numerous and less
+      rich, the half-savage population of the mines roared on northward, even
+      across our northern line. Soon it was to roll back. Next it worked east
+      and southeast and northeast over the great dry plains of Washington and
+      Oregon, so that, as readily may be seen, the cow-range proper was not
+      settled as most of the West was, by a directly westbound thrust of an
+      eastern population; but, on the contrary, it was approached from several
+      different angles—from the north, from the east, from the west and
+      northwest, and finally from the south.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The early, turbulent population of miners and adventurers was crude,
+      lawless, and aggressive. It cared nothing whatever for the Indian tribes.
+      War, instant and merciless, where it meant murder for the most part, was
+      set on foot as soon as white touched red in that far western region.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All these new white men who had crowded into the unknown country of the
+      Plains, the Rockies, the Sierras, and the Cascades, had to be fed. They
+      could not employ and remain content with the means by which the red man
+      there had always fed himself. Hence a new industry sprang up in the United
+      States, which of itself made certain history in that land. The business of
+      freighting supplies to the West, whether by bull-train or by pack-train,
+      was an industry sui generic, very highly specialized, and pursued by men
+      of great business ability as well as by men of great hardihood and daring.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Each of these freight trains which went West carried hanging on its flank
+      more and more of the white men. As the trains returned, more and more was
+      learned in the States of the new country which lay between the Missouri
+      and the Rockies, which ran no man knew how far north, and no man could
+      guess how far south. Now appears in history Fort Benton, on the Missouri,
+      the great northern supply post—just as at an earlier date there had
+      appeared Fort Hall, one of the old fur-trading posts beyond the Rockies,
+      Bent's Fort on the Arkansas, and many other outposts of the new Saxon
+      civilization in the West.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Later came the pony express and the stage coach which made history and
+      romance for a generation. Feverishly, boisterously, a strong, rugged,
+      womanless population crowded westward and formed the wavering, now
+      advancing, now receding line of the great frontier of American story.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But for long there was no sign of permanent settlement on the Plains, and
+      no one thought of this region as the frontier. The men there who were
+      prospecting and exploiting were classified as no more than adventurers. No
+      one seems to have taken a lesson from the Indian and the buffalo. The
+      reports of Fremont long since had called attention to the nourishing
+      quality of those grasses of the high country, but the day of the cowboy
+      had not yet dawned. There is a somewhat feeble story which runs to the
+      effect that in 1866 one of the great wagon-trains, caught by the early
+      snows of winter, was obliged to abandon its oxen on the range. It was
+      supposed that, of course, the oxen must perish during the winter. But next
+      spring the owners were surprised to find that the oxen, so far from
+      perishing, had flourished very much—indeed, were fat and in good
+      condition. So runs the story which is often repeated. It may be true, but
+      to accredit to this incident the beginnings of the cattle industry in the
+      Indian country would surely be going too far. The truth is that the cow
+      industry was not a Saxon discovery. It was a Latin enterprise, flourishing
+      in Mexico long before the first of these miners and adventurers came on
+      the range.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Something was known of the Spanish lands to the south through the
+      explorations of Pike, but more through the commerce of the prairies—the
+      old wagon trade from the Missouri River to the Spanish cities of Sante Fe
+      and Chihuahua. Now the cow business, south of the Rio Grande, was already
+      well differentiated and developed at the time the first adventurers from
+      the United States went into Texas and began to crowd their Latin neighbors
+      for more room. There it was that our Saxon frontiersmen first discovered
+      the cattle industry. But these southern and northern riflemen—ruthless
+      and savage, yet strangely statesmanlike—though they might betimes
+      drive away the owners of the herds, troubled little about the herds
+      themselves. There was a certain fascination to these rude strangers in the
+      slow and easeful civilization of Old Spain which they encountered in the
+      land below them. Little by little, and then largely and yet more largely,
+      the warriors of San Jacinto reached out and began to claim lands for
+      themselves—leagues and uncounted leagues of land, which had,
+      however, no market value. Well within the memory of the present generation
+      large tracts of good land were bought in Texas for six cents an acre; some
+      was bought for half that price in a time not much earlier. Today much of
+      that land is producing wealth; but land then was worthless—and so
+      were cows.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This civilization of the Southwest, of the new Republic of Texas, may be
+      regarded as the first enduring American result of contact with the Spanish
+      industry. The men who won Texas came mostly from Kentucky and Tennessee or
+      southern Ohio, and the first colonizer of Texas was a Virginian, Stephen
+      Fuller Austin. They came along the old Natchez Trace from Nashville to the
+      Mississippi River—that highway which has so much history of its own.
+      Down this old winding trail into the greatest valley of all the world, and
+      beyond that valley out into the Spanish country, moved steadily the
+      adventurers whose fathers had but recently crossed the Appalachians. One
+      of the strongest thrusts of the American civilization thus entered the
+      cattle-range at its lower end, between the Rio Grande and the Red River.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In all the several activities, mining, freighting, scouting, soldiering,
+      riding pony express, or even sheer adventuring for what might come, there
+      was ever a trading back and forth between home-staying men and adventuring
+      men. Thus there was an interchange of knowledge and of customs between
+      East and West, between our old country and our new. There was an
+      interchange, too, at the south, where our Saxon civilization came in touch
+      with that of Mexico.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We have now to note some fundamental facts and principles of the cattle
+      industry which our American cattlemen took over ready-made from the hands
+      of Mexico.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Mexicans in Texas had an abundance of small, hardy horses of African
+      and Spanish breed, which Spain had brought into the New World—the
+      same horses that the Moors had brought into Spain—a breed naturally
+      hardy and able to subsist upon dry food. Without such horses there could
+      have been no cattle industry. These horses, running wild in herds, had
+      crossed to the upper Plains. La Verendrye, and later Lewis and Clark, had
+      found the Indians using horses in the north. The Indians, as we have seen,
+      had learned to manage the horse. Formerly they had used dogs to drag the
+      travois, but now they used the "elk-dog," as they first called the horse.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the original cow country, that is, in Mexico and Texas, countless herds
+      of cattle were held in a loose sort of ownership over wide and unknown
+      plains. Like all wild animals in that warm country, they bred in
+      extraordinary numbers. The southern range, indeed, has always been called
+      the breeding range. The cattle had little value. He who wanted beef killed
+      beef. He who wanted leather killed cattle for their hides. But beyond
+      these scant and infrequent uses cattle had no definite value.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Mexican, however, knew how to handle cows. He could ride a horse, and
+      he could rope cattle and brand them. Most of the cattle of a wide range
+      would go to certain water-holes more or less regularly, where they might
+      be roughly collected or estimated. This coming of the cattle to the
+      watering-places made it unnecessary for owners of cattle to acquire ranch
+      land. It was enough to secure the water-front where the cows must go to
+      drink. That gave the owner all the title he needed. His right to the
+      increase he could prove by another phenomenon of nature, just as
+      inevitable and invariable as that of thirst. The maternal instinct of a
+      cow and the dependence of the calf upon its mother gave the old rancher of
+      immemorial times sufficient proof of ownership in the increase of his
+      herd. The calf would run with its own mother and with no other cow through
+      its first season. So that if an old Mexican _ranchero_ saw a certain number
+      of cows at his watering-places, and with them calves, he knew that all
+      before him were his property—or, at least, he claimed them as such
+      and used them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Still, this was loose-footed property. It might stray away after all, or
+      it might be driven away. Hence, in some forgotten time, our shrewd
+      Spaniard invented a system of proof of ownership which has always lain at
+      the very bottom of the organized cow industry; he invented the method of
+      branding. This meant his sign, his name, his trade-mark, his proof of
+      ownership. The animal could not shake it off. It would not burn off in the
+      sun or wash off in the rain. It went with the animal and could not be
+      eradicated from the animal's hide. Wherever the bearer was seen, the brand
+      upon its hide provided certain identification of the owner.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now, all these basic ideas of the cow industry were old on the lower range
+      in Texas when our white men first drifted thither. The cattle industry,
+      although in its infancy, and although supposed to have no great future,
+      was developed long before Texas became a republic. It never, indeed,
+      changed very much from that time until the end of its own career.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One great principle was accepted religiously even in those early and crude
+      days. A man's cow was _his_ cow. A man's brand was HIS brand. There must be
+      no interference with his ownership. Hence certain other phases of the
+      industry followed inevitably. These cattle, these calves, each branded by
+      the iron of the owner, in spite of all precautions, began to mingle as
+      settlers became more numerous; hence came the idea of the round-up. The
+      country was warm and lazy. If a hundred or a thousand cows were not
+      collected, very well. If a calf were separated from its mother, very well.
+      The old ranchers never quarreled among themselves. They never would have
+      made in the South anything like a cattle association; it was left for the
+      Yankees to do that at a time when cows had come to have far greater
+      values. There were few arguments in the first rodeos of the lower range.
+      One rancher would vie with his neighbor in generosity in the matter of
+      unbranded calves. Haggling would have been held contemptible. On the lower
+      range in the old times no one cared much about a cow. Why should one do
+      so? There was no market for cows—no one who wished to buy them. If
+      one tendered a Mexican cinquo pesos for a yearling or a two-year-old, the
+      owner might perhaps offer the animal as a gift, or he might smile and say
+      "_Con mucho gusto_" as he was handed a few pieces of silver. There were
+      plenty of cows everywhere in the world!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Let us, therefore, give the old Spaniard full credit alike in picturesque
+      romance and in the organized industry of the cow. The westbound thrust
+      which came upon the upper part of the range in the days of more shrewd and
+      exacting business methods was simply the best-known and most published
+      phase of frontier life in the cow country; hence we have usually accepted
+      it as typical. It would not be accurate to say that the cattle industry
+      was basically much influenced or governed by northern or eastern men. In
+      practically all of its great phenomena the frontier of the old cow-range
+      was southern by birth and growth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There lay, then, so long unused, that vast and splendid land so soon to
+      write romantic history of its own, so soon to come into the admiration or
+      the wonder of a great portion of the earth—a land of fascinating
+      interest to the youth of every country, and a region whose story holds a
+      charm for young and old alike even today. It was a region royal in its
+      dimensions. Far on the west it was hedged by the gray-sided and
+      white-topped mountains, the Rockies. Where the buffalo once lived, the
+      cattle were to live, high up in the foothills of this great mountain range
+      which ran from the Rio Grande to Canada. On the east, where lay the
+      Prairies rather than the Plains, it was a country waving with high native
+      grasses, with many brilliant flowers hiding among them, the sweet-william,
+      the wild rose, and often great masses of the yellow sunflower.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From the Rio Grande to the Athabaska, for the greater part, the frontier
+      sky was blue and cloudless during most of the year. The rainfall was not
+      great. The atmosphere was dry. It was a cheerful country, one of optimism
+      and not of gloom. In the extreme south, along the Rio Grande, the climate
+      was moister, warmer, more enervating; but on the high steppes of the
+      middle range in Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, western Nebraska, there lay
+      the finest out-of-doors country, man's country the finest of the earth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But for the time, busy with more accustomed things, mining and freighting
+      and fighting and hunting and trading and trapping, we Americans who had
+      arrived upon the range cared little for cows. The upper thrust of the
+      great herds from the south into the north had not begun. It was after the
+      Civil War that the first great drives of cattle from the south toward the
+      north began, and after men had learned in the State of Texas that cattle
+      moved from the Rio Grande to the upper portions of the State and fed on
+      the mesquite grass would attain greater stature than in the hot coast
+      country. Then swiftly, somewhat luridly, there leaped into our
+      comprehension and our interest that strange country long loosely held
+      under our flag, the region of the Plains, the region which we now call the
+      Old West.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In great bands, in long lines, slowly, towheaded, sore-footed, the vast
+      gatherings of the prolific lower range moved north, each cow with its
+      title indelibly marked upon its hide. These cattle were now going to take
+      the place of those on which the Indians had depended for their living
+      these many years. A new day in American history had dawned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0003" id="link2HCH0003">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter III. The Cattle Trails
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The customary method of studying history by means of a series of events
+      and dates is not the method which we have chosen to employ in this study
+      of the Old West. Speaking generally, our minds are unable to assimilate a
+      condensed mass of events and dates; and that is precisely what would be
+      required of us if we should attempt here to follow the ways of
+      conventional history. Dates are at best no more than milestones on the
+      pathway of time; and in the present instance it is not the milestones but
+      the road itself with which we are concerned. Where does the road begin?
+      Why comes it hither? Whither does it lead? These are the real questions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Under all the exuberance of the life of the range there lay a steady
+      business of tremendous size and enormous values. The "uproarious iniquity"
+      of the West, its picturesqueness, its vividness—these were but froth
+      on the stream. The stream itself was a steady and somber flood. Beyond
+      this picturesqueness of environment very few have cared to go, and
+      therefore sometimes have had little realization of the vastness of the
+      cowboy's kingdom, the "magnitude of the interests in his care, or the
+      fortitude, resolution, and instant readiness essential to his daily life."
+      The American cowboy is the most modern representative of a human industry
+      that is second to very few in antiquity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Julius Caesar struck the note of real history: _Quorum pars magna fui_—"Of
+      which I was a great part." If we are to seek the actual truth, we ought
+      most to value contemporary records, representations made by men who were
+      themselves a part of the scenes which they describe. In that way we shall
+      arrive not merely upon lurid events, not alone upon the stereotyped
+      characters of the "Wild West," but upon causes which are much more
+      interesting and immensely more valuable than any merely titillating
+      stories from the weirdly illustrated Apocrypha of the West. We must go
+      below such things if we would gain a just and lasting estimate of the
+      times. We ought to look on the old range neither as a playground of idle
+      men nor as a scene of hysterical and contorted human activities. We ought
+      to look upon it from the point of view of its uses to mankind. The
+      explorers found it a wilderness, the home of the red man and the buffalo.
+      What were the underlying causes of its settlement and development?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is in history no agency so wondrous in events, no working
+      instrumentality so great as transportation. The great seeking of all human
+      life is to find its level. Perhaps the first men traveled by hollowed logs
+      down stream. Then possibly the idea of a sail was conceived. Early in the
+      story of the United States men made commercial journeys from the head of
+      the Ohio to the mouth of the Mississippi by flatboats, and came back by
+      keelboats. The pole, the cordelle, the paddle, and the sail, in turn
+      helped them to navigate the great streams which led out into the West. And
+      presently there was to come that tremendous upheaval wrought by the advent
+      of the iron trails which, scorning alike waterways and mountain ranges,
+      flung themselves almost directly westward across the continent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The iron trails, crossing the northern range soon after the Civil War,
+      brought a market to the cattle country. Inevitably the men of the lower
+      range would seek to reach the railroads with what they had to sell—their
+      greatest natural product, cattle on the hoof. This was the primary cause
+      of the great northbound drives already mentioned, the greatest pastoral
+      phenomena in the story of the world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The southern herds at that time had no market at their doors. They had to
+      go to the market, and they had to go on foot. That meant that they must be
+      driven northward by cattle handlers who had passed their days in the wild
+      life of the lower range. These cowmen of course took their character and
+      their customs northward with them, and so they were discovered by those
+      enthusiastic observers, newly arrived by rail, whom the cowmen were wont
+      to call "pilgrims."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now the trail of the great cattle drives—the Long Trail-was a thing
+      of tremendous importance of itself and it is still full of interest. As it
+      may not easily be possible for the author to better a description of it
+      that was written some twenty years ago, that description is here again set
+      down. *
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    * "The Story of the Cowboy," by E. Hough. Appleton. 1897.
+Reprinted by permission.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      The braiding of a hundred minor pathways, the Long Trail lay like a vast
+      rope connecting the cattle country of the South with that of the North.
+      Lying loose or coiling, it ran for more than two thousand miles along the
+      eastern edge of the Rocky Mountains, sometimes close in at their feet,
+      again hundreds of miles away across the hard tablelands or the
+      well-flowered prairies. It traversed in a fair line the vast land of
+      Texas, curled over the Indian Nations, over Kansas, Colorado, Nebraska,
+      Wyoming, and Montana, and bent in wide overlapping circles as far west as
+      Utah and Nevada; as far east as Missouri, Iowa, even Illinois; and as far
+      north as the British possessions. Even today you may trace plainly its
+      former course, from its faint beginnings in the lazy land of Mexico, the
+      Ararat of the cattle-range. It is distinct across Texas, and multifold
+      still in the Indian lands. Its many intermingling paths still scar the
+      iron surface of the Neutral Strip, and the plows have not buried all the
+      old furrows in the plains of Kansas. Parts of the path still remain
+      visible in the mountain lands of the far North. You may see the ribbons
+      banding the hillsides today along the valley of the Stillwater, and along
+      the Yellowstone and toward the source of the Missouri. The hoof marks are
+      beyond the Musselshell, over the Bad Lands and the coulees and the flat
+      prairies; and far up into the land of the long cold you may see, even
+      today if you like, the shadow of that unparalleled pathway, the Long Trail
+      of the cattle-range. History has no other like it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Long Trail was surveyed and constructed in a century and a day. Over
+      the Red River of the South, a stream even today perhaps known but vaguely
+      in the minds of many inhabitants of the country, there appeared, almost
+      without warning, vast processions of strange horned kine—processions
+      of enormous wealth, owned by kings who paid no tribute, and guarded by men
+      who never knew a master. Whither these were bound, what had conjured them
+      forth, whence they came, were questions in the minds of the majority of
+      the population of the North and East to whom the phenomenon appeared as
+      the product of a day. The answer to these questions lay deep in the laws
+      of civilization, and extended far back into that civilization's history.
+      The Long Trail was finished in a day. It was begun more than a century
+      before that day, and came forward along the very appointed ways of
+      time.... Thus, far down in the vague Southwest, at some distant time, in
+      some distant portion of old, mysterious Mexico, there fell into line the
+      hoof prints which made the first faint beginnings of the Long Trail,
+      merely the path of a half nomadic movement along the line of the least
+      resistance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Long Trail began to deepen and extend. It received then, as it did
+      later, a baptism of human blood such as no other pathway of the continent
+      has known. The nomadic and the warlike days passed, and there ensued a
+      more quiet and pastoral time. It was the beginning of a feudalism of the
+      range, a barony rude enough, but a glorious one, albeit it began, like all
+      feudalism, in large-handed theft and generous murdering. The flocks of
+      these strong men, carelessly interlapping, increased and multiplied
+      amazingly. They were hardly looked upon as wealth. The people could not
+      eat a tithe of the beef; they could not use a hundredth of the leather.
+      Over hundreds and hundreds of miles of ownerless grass lands, by the rapid
+      waters of the mountains, by the slow streams of the plains or the long and
+      dark lagoons of the low coast country, the herds of tens grew into droves
+      of hundreds and thousands and hundreds of thousands. This was really the
+      dawning of the American cattle industry.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Chips and flakes of the great Southwestern herd began to be seen in the
+      Northern States. As early as 1857 Texas cattle were driven to Illinois. In
+      1861 Louisiana was, without success, tried as an outlet. In 1867 a
+      venturous drover took a herd across the Indian Nations, bound for
+      California, and only abandoned the project because the Plains Indians were
+      then very bad in the country to the north. In 1869 several herds were
+      driven from Texas to Nevada. These were side trails of the main cattle
+      road. It seemed clear that a great population in the North needed the
+      cheap beef of Texas, and the main question appeared to be one of
+      transportation. No proper means for this offered. The Civil War stopped
+      almost all plans to market the range cattle, and the close of that war
+      found the vast grazing lands of Texas covered fairly with millions of
+      cattle which had no actual or determinate value. They were sorted and
+      branded and herded after a fashion, but neither they nor their increase
+      could be converted into anything but more cattle. The cry for a market
+      became imperative.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Meantime the Anglo-Saxon civilization was rolling swiftly toward the upper
+      West. The Indians were being driven from the Plains. A solid army was
+      pressing behind the vanguard of soldier, scout, and plainsman. The
+      railroads were pushing out into a new and untracked empire. They carried
+      the market with them. The market halted, much nearer, though still some
+      hundred of miles to the north of the great herd. The Long Trail tapped no
+      more at the door of Illinois, Missouri, Arkansas, but leaped north again
+      definitely, this time springing across the Red River and up to the
+      railroads, along sharp and well-defined channels deepened in the year of
+      1866 alone by the hoofs of more than a quarter of a million cattle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In 1871, only five years later, over six hundred thousand cattle crossed
+      the Red River for the Northern markets. Abilene, Newton, Wichita,
+      Ellsworth, Great Bend, Dodge, flared out into a swift and sometime evil
+      blossoming. Thus the men of the North first came to hear of the Long Trail
+      and the men who made it, although really it had begun long ago and had
+      been foreordained to grow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      By this time, 1867 and 1868, the northern portions of the region
+      immediately to the east of the Rocky Mountains had been sufficiently
+      cleared of their wild inhabitants to admit a gradual though precarious
+      settlement. It had been learned yet again that the buffalo grass and the
+      sweet waters of the far North would fatten a range broadhorn to a stature
+      far beyond any it could attain on the southern range. The Long Trail
+      pushed rapidly even farther to the north where there still remained "free
+      grass" and a new market. The territorial ranges needed many thousands of
+      cattle for their stocking, and this demand took a large part of the Texas
+      drive which came to Abilene, Great Bend, and Fort Dodge. Moreover, the
+      Government was now feeding thousands of its new red wards, and these
+      Indians needed thousands of beeves for rations, which were driven from the
+      southern range to the upper army posts and reservations. Between this
+      Government demand and that of the territorial stock ranges there was
+      occupation for the men who made the saddle their home.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Long Trail, which had previously found the black corn lands of
+      Illinois and Missouri, now crowded to the West, until it had reached Utah
+      and Nevada, and penetrated every open park and mesa and valley of
+      Colorado, and found all the high plains of Wyoming. Cheyenne and Laramie
+      became common words now, and drovers spoke as wisely of the dangers of the
+      Platte as a year before they had mentioned those of the Red River or the
+      Arkansas. Nor did the Trail pause in its irresistible push to the north
+      until it had found the last of the five great transcontinental lines, far
+      in the British provinces. Here in spite of a long season of ice and snow
+      the uttermost edges of the great herd might survive, in a certain
+      percentage at least, each year in an almost unassisted struggle for
+      existence, under conditions different enough, it would seem, from those
+      obtaining at the opposite extreme of the wild roadway over which they
+      came.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Long Trail of the cattle-range was done! By magic the cattle industry
+      had spread over the entire West. Today many men think of that industry as
+      belonging only to the Southwest, and many would consider that it was
+      transferred to the North. Really it was not transferred but extended, and
+      the trail of the old drive marks the line of that extension.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Today the Long Trail is replaced by other trails, product of the swift
+      development of the West, and it remains as the connection, now for the
+      most part historical only, between two phases of an industry which, in
+      spite of differences of climate and condition, retain a similarity in all
+      essential features. When the last steer of the first herd was driven into
+      the corral at the Ultima Thule of the range, it was the pony of the
+      American cowboy which squatted and wheeled under the spur and burst down
+      the straggling street of the little frontier town. Before that time, and
+      since that time, it was and has been the same pony and the same man who
+      have traveled the range, guarding and guiding the wild herds, from the
+      romantic to the commonplace days of the West.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0004" id="link2HCH0004">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter IV. The Cowboy
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The Great West, vast and rude, brought forth men also vast and rude. We
+      pass today over parts of that matchless region, and we see the red hills
+      and ragged mountain-fronts cut and crushed into huge indefinite shapes, to
+      which even a small imagination may give a human or more than human form.
+      It would almost seem that the same great hand which chiseled out these
+      monumental forms had also laid its fingers upon the people of this region
+      and fashioned them rude and ironlike, in harmony with the stern faces set
+      about them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of all the babes of that primeval mother, the West, the cowboy was perhaps
+      her dearest because he was her last. Some of her children lived for
+      centuries; this one for not a triple decade before he began to be old.
+      What was really the life of this child of the wild region of America, and
+      what were the conditions of the experience that bore him, can never be
+      fully known by those who have not seen the West with wide eyes—for
+      the cowboy was simply a part of the West. He who does not understand the
+      one can never understand the other.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If we care truly to see the cowboy as he was and seek to give our wish the
+      dignity of a real purpose, we should study him in connection with his
+      surroundings and in relation to his work. Then we shall see him not as a
+      curiosity but as a product—not as an eccentric driver of horned
+      cattle but as a man suited to his times.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Large tracts of that domain where once the cowboy reigned supreme have
+      been turned into farms by the irrigator's ditch or by the dry-farmer's
+      plan. The farmer in overalls is in many instances his own stockman today.
+      On the ranges of Arizona, Wyoming, and Texas and parts of Nevada we may
+      find the cowboy, it is true, even today: but he is no longer the Homeric
+      figure that once dominated the plains. In what we say as to his trade,
+      therefore, or his fashion in the practice of it, we speak in terms of
+      thirty or forty years ago, when wire was unknown, when the round-up still
+      was necessary, and the cowboy's life was indeed that of the open.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      By the costume we may often know the man. The cowboy's costume was
+      harmonious with its surroundings. It was planned upon lines of such stern
+      utility as to leave no possible thing which we may call dispensable. The
+      typical cowboy costume could hardly be said to contain a coat and
+      waistcoat. The heavy woolen shirt, loose and open at the neck, was the
+      common wear at all seasons of the year excepting winter, and one has often
+      seen cowboys in the winter-time engaged in work about the yard or corral
+      of the ranch wearing no other cover for the upper part of the body but one
+      or more of these heavy shirts. If the cowboy wore a coat he would wear it
+      open and loose as much as possible. If he wore a "vest" he would wear it
+      slouchily, hanging open or partly unbuttoned most of the time. There was a
+      reason for this slouchy habit. The cowboy would say that the vest closely
+      buttoned about the body would cause perspiration, so that the wearer would
+      quickly chill upon ceasing exercise. If the wind were blowing keenly when
+      the cowboy dismounted to sit upon the ground for dinner, he would button
+      up his waistcoat and be warm. If it were very cold he would button up his
+      coat also.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The cowboy's boots were of fine leather and fitted tightly, with light
+      narrow soles, extremely small and high heels. Surely a more irrational
+      foot-covering never was invented; yet these tight, peaked cowboy boots had
+      a great significance and may indeed be called the insignia of a calling.
+      There was no prouder soul on earth than the cowboy. He was proud of being
+      a horseman and had a contempt for all human beings who walked. On foot in
+      his tight-toed boots he was lost; but he wished it to be understood that
+      he never was on foot. If we rode beside him and watched his seat in the
+      big cow saddle we found that his high and narrow heels prevented the
+      slipping forward of the foot in the stirrup, into which he jammed his feet
+      nearly full length. If there was a fall, the cowboy's foot never hung in
+      the stirrup. In the corral roping, afoot, his heels anchored him. So he
+      found his little boots not so unserviceable and retained them as a matter
+      of pride. Boots made for the cowboy trade sometimes had fancy tops of
+      bright-colored leather. The Lone Star of Texas was not infrequent in their
+      ornamentation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The curious pride of the horseman extended also to his gloves. The cowboy
+      was very careful in the selection of his gloves. They were made of the
+      finest buckskin, which could not be injured by wetting. Generally they
+      were tanned white and cut with a deep cuff or gauntlet from which hung a
+      little fringe to flutter in the wind when he rode at full speed on
+      horseback.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The cowboy's hat was one of the typical and striking features of his
+      costumes. It was a heavy, wide, white felt hat with a heavy leather band
+      buckled about it. There has been no other head covering devised so
+      suitable as the Stetson for the uses of the Plains, although high and
+      heavy black hats have in part supplanted it today among stockmen. The
+      boardlike felt was practically indestructible. The brim flapped a little
+      and, in time, was turned up and perhaps held fast to the crown by a thong.
+      The wearer might sometimes stiffen the brim by passing a thong through a
+      series of holes pierced through the outer edge. He could depend upon his
+      hat in all weathers. In the rain it was an umbrella; in the sun a shield;
+      in the winter he could tie it down about his ears with his handkerchief.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Loosely thrown about the cowboy's shirt collar was a silk kerchief. It was
+      tied in a hard knot in front, and though it could scarcely be said to be
+      devoted to the uses of a neck scarf, yet it was a great comfort to the
+      back of the neck when one was riding in a hot wind. It was sure to be of
+      some bright color, usually red. Modern would-be cowpunchers do not
+      willingly let this old kerchief die, and right often they over-play it.
+      For the cowboy of the "movies," however, let us register an unqualified
+      contempt. The real range would never have been safe for him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A peculiar and distinctive feature of the cowboy's costume was his "chaps"
+      (_chaparejos_). The chaps were two very wide and full-length trouser-legs
+      made of heavy calfskin and connected by a narrow belt or strap. They were
+      cut away entirely at front and back so that they covered only the thigh
+      and lower legs and did not heat the body as a complete leather garment
+      would. They were intended solely as a protection against branches, thorns,
+      briers, and the like, but they were prized in cold or wet weather.
+      Sometimes there was seen, more often on the southern range, a cowboy
+      wearing chaps made of skins tanned with the hair on; for the cowboy of the
+      Southwest early learned that goatskin left with the hair on would turn the
+      cactus thorns better than any other material. Later, the chaps became a
+      sort of affectation on the part of new men on the range; but the old-time
+      cowboy wore them for use, not as a uniform. In hot weather he laid them
+      off.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the times when some men needed guns and all men carried them, no pistol
+      of less than 44-caliber was tolerated on the range, the solid framed
+      45-caliber being the one almost universally used. The barrel was eight
+      inches long, and it shot a rifle cartridge of forty grains of powder and a
+      blunt-ended bullet that made a terrible missile. This weapon depended from
+      a belt worn loose resting upon the left hip and hanging low down on the
+      right hip so that none of the weight came upon the abdomen. This was
+      typical, for the cowboy was neither fancy gunman nor army officer. The
+      latter carries the revolver on the left, the butt pointing forward.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      An essential part of the cow-puncher's outfit was his "rope." This was
+      carried in a close coil at the side of the saddle-horn, fastened by one of
+      the many thongs scattered over the saddle. In the Spanish country it was
+      called _reata_ and even today is sometimes seen in the Southwest made of
+      rawhide. In the South it was called a _lariat_. The modern rope is a
+      well-made three-quarter-inch hemp rope about thirty feet in length, with a
+      leather or rawhide eye. The cowboy's quirt was a short heavy whip, the
+      stock being of wood or iron covered with braided leather and carrying a
+      lash made of two or three heavy loose thongs. The spur in the old days had
+      a very large rowel with blunt teeth an inch long. It was often ornamented
+      with little bells or oblongs of metal, the tinkling of which appealed to
+      the childlike nature of the Plains rider. Their use was to lock the rowel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His bridle—for, since the cowboy and his mount are inseparable, we
+      may as well speak of his horse's dress also—was noticeable for its
+      tremendously heavy and cruel curbed bit, known as the "Spanish bit." But
+      in the ordinary riding and even in the exciting work of the old round-up
+      and in "cutting out," the cowboy used the bit very little, nor exerted any
+      pressure on the reins. He laid the reins against the neck of the pony
+      opposite to the direction in which he wished it to go, merely turning his
+      hand in the direction and inclining his body in the same way. He rode with
+      the pressure of the knee and the inclination of the body and the light
+      side-shifting of both reins. The saddle was the most important part of the
+      outfit. It was a curious thing, this saddle developed by the cattle trade,
+      and the world has no other like it. Its great weight—from thirty to
+      forty pounds—was readily excusable when one remembers that it was
+      not only seat but workbench for the cowman. A light saddle would be torn
+      to pieces at the first rush of a maddened steer, but the sturdy frame of a
+      cow-saddle would throw the heaviest bull on the range. The high cantle
+      would give a firmness to the cowboy's seat when he snubbed a steer with a
+      sternness sufficient to send it rolling heels over head. The high pommel,
+      or "horn," steel-forged and covered with cross braids of leather, served
+      as anchor post for this same steer, a turn of the rope about it
+      accomplishing that purpose at once. The saddle-tree forked low down over
+      the pony's back so that the saddle sat firmly and could not readily be
+      pulled off. The great broad cinches bound the saddle fast till horse and
+      saddle were practically one fabric. The strong wooden house of the old
+      heavy stirrup protected the foot from being crushed by the impact of the
+      herd. The form of the cow-saddle has changed but little, although today
+      one sees a shorter seat and smaller horn, a "swell front" or roll, and a
+      stirrup of open "ox-bow" pattern.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The round-up was the harvest of the range. The time of the calf round-up
+      was in the spring after the grass had become good and after the calves had
+      grown large enough for the branding. The State Cattle Association divided
+      the entire State range into a number of round-up districts. Under an
+      elected round-up captain were all the bosses in charge of the different
+      ranch outfits sent by men having cattle in the round-up. Let us briefly
+      draw a picture of this scene as it was.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Each cowboy would have eight or ten horses for his own use, for he had now
+      before him the hardest riding of the year. When the cow-puncher went into
+      the herd to cut out calves he mounted a fresh horse, and every few hours
+      he again changed horses, for there was no horse which could long endure
+      the fatigue of the rapid and intense work of cutting. Before the rider
+      stretched a sea of interwoven horns, waving and whirling as the densely
+      packed ranks of cattle closed in or swayed apart. It was no prospect for a
+      weakling, but into it went the cow-puncher on his determined little horse,
+      heeding not the plunging, crushing, and thrusting of the excited cattle.
+      Down under the bulks of the herd, half hid in the whirl of dust, he would
+      spy a little curly calf running, dodging, and twisting, always at the
+      heels of its mother; and he would dart in after, following the two through
+      the thick of surging and plunging beasts. The sharp-eyed pony would see
+      almost as soon as his rider which cow was wanted and he needed small
+      guidance from that time on. He would follow hard at her heels, edging her
+      constantly toward the flank of the herd, at times nipping her hide as a
+      reminder of his own superiority. In spite of herself the cow would
+      gradually turn out toward the edge, and at last would be swept clear of
+      the crush, the calf following close behind her. There was a whirl of the
+      rope and the calf was laid by the heels and dragged to the fire where the
+      branding irons were heated and ready.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Meanwhile other cow-punchers are rushing calves to the branding. The
+      hubbub and turmoil increase. Taut ropes cross the ground in many
+      directions. The cutting ponies pant and sweat, rear and plunge. The garb
+      of the cowboy is now one of white alkali which hangs gray in his eyebrows
+      and moustache. Steers bellow as they surge to and fro. Cows charge on
+      their persecutors. Fleet yearlings break and run for the open, pursued by
+      men who care not how or where they ride.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We have spoken in terms of the past. There is no calf round-up of the open
+      range today. The last of the roundups was held in Routt County, Colorado,
+      several years ago, so far as the writer knows, and it had only to do with
+      shifting cattle from the summer to the winter range.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After the calf round-up came the beef round-up, the cowman's final
+      harvest. This began in July or August. Only the mature or fatted animals
+      were cut out from the herd. This "beef cut" was held apart and driven on
+      ahead from place to place as the round-up progressed. It was then driven
+      in by easy stages to the shipping point on the railroad, whence the long
+      trainloads of cattle went to the great markets.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the heyday of the cowboy it was natural that his chief amusements
+      should be those of the outdoor air and those more or less in line with his
+      employment. He was accustomed to the sight of big game, and so had the
+      edge of his appetite for its pursuit worn off. Yet he was a hunter, just
+      as every Western man was a hunter in the times of the Western game. His
+      weapons were the rifle, revolver, and rope; the latter two were always
+      with him. With the rope at times he captured the coyote, and under special
+      conditions he has taken deer and even antelope in this way, though this
+      was of course most unusual and only possible under chance conditions of
+      ground and cover. Elk have been roped by cowboys many times, and it is
+      known that even the mountain sheep has been so taken, almost incredible as
+      that may seem. The young buffalo were easy prey for the cowboy and these
+      he often roped and made captive. In fact the beginnings of all the herds
+      of buffalo now in captivity in this country were the calves roped and
+      secured by cowboys; and these few scattered individuals of a grand race of
+      animals remain as melancholy reminders alike of a national shiftlessness
+      and an individual skill and daring.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The grizzly was at times seen by the cowboys on the range, and if it
+      chanced that several cowboys were together it was not unusual to give him
+      chase. They did not always rope him, for it was rarely that the nature of
+      the country made this possible. Sometimes they roped him and wished they
+      could let him go, for a grizzly bear is uncommonly active and
+      straightforward in his habits at close quarters. The extreme difficulty of
+      such a combat, however, gave it its chief fascination for the cowboy. Of
+      course, no one horse could hold the bear after it was roped, but, as one
+      after another came up, the bear was caught by neck and foot and body,
+      until at last he was tangled and tripped and hauled about till he was
+      helpless, strangled, and nearly dead. It is said that cowboys have so
+      brought into camp a grizzly bear, forcing him to half walk and half slide
+      at the end of the ropes. No feat better than this could show the courage
+      of the plainsman and of the horse which he so perfectly controlled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of such wild and dangerous exploits were the cowboy's amusements on the
+      range. It may be imagined what were his amusements when he visited the
+      "settlements." The cow-punchers, reared in the free life of the open air,
+      under circumstances of the utmost freedom of individual action, perhaps
+      came off the drive or round-up after weeks or months of unusual restraint
+      or hardship, and felt that the time had arrived for them to "celebrate."
+      Merely great rude children, as wild and untamed and untaught as the herds
+      they led, they regarded their first look at the "settlements" of the
+      railroads as a glimpse of a wider world. They pursued to the uttermost
+      such avenues of new experience as lay before them, almost without
+      exception avenues of vice. It is strange that the records of those days
+      should be chosen by the public to be held as the measure of the American
+      cowboy. Those days were brief, and they are long since gone. The American
+      cowboy atoned for them by a quarter of a century of faithful labor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The amusements of the cowboy were like the features of his daily
+      surroundings and occupation—they were intense, large, Homeric. Yet,
+      judged at his work, no higher type of employee ever existed, nor one more
+      dependable. He was the soul of honor in all the ways of his calling. The
+      very blue of the sky, bending evenly over all men alike, seemed to
+      symbolize his instinct for justice. Faithfulness and manliness were his
+      chief traits; his standard—to be a "square man."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Not all the open range will ever be farmed, but very much that was long
+      thought to be irreclaimable has gone under irrigation or is being more or
+      less successfully "dry-farmed." The man who brought water upon the arid
+      lands of the West changed the entire complexion of a vast country and with
+      it the industries of that country. Acres redeemed from the desert and
+      added to the realm of the American farmer were taken from the realm of the
+      American cowboy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The West has changed. The curtain has dropped between us and its wild and
+      stirring scenes. The old days are gone. The house dog sits on the hill
+      where yesterday the coyote sang. There are fenced fields and in them stand
+      sleek round beasts, deep in crops such as their ancestors never saw. In a
+      little town nearby is the hurry and bustle of modern life. This town is
+      far out upon what was called the frontier, long after the frontier has
+      really gone. Guarding its ghost here stood a little army post, once one of
+      the pillars, now one of the monuments of the West.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Out from the tiny settlement in the dusk of evening, always facing toward
+      where the sun is sinking, might be seen riding, not so long ago, a figure
+      we should know. He would thread the little lane among the fences,
+      following the guidance of hands other than his own, a thing he would once
+      have scorned to do. He would ride as lightly and as easily as ever,
+      sitting erect and jaunty in the saddle, his reins held high and loose in
+      the hand whose fingers turn up gracefully, his whole body free yet firm in
+      the saddle with the seat of the perfect horseman. At the boom of the
+      cannon, when the flag dropped fluttering down to sleep, he would rise in
+      his stirrups and wave his hat to the flag. Then, toward the edge, out into
+      the evening, he would ride on. The dust of his riding would mingle with
+      the dusk of night. We could not see which was the one or the other. We
+      could only hear the hoofbeats passing, boldly and steadily still, but
+      growing fainter, fainter, and more faint. *
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    * For permission to use in this chapter material from the
+author's "The Story of the Cowboy," acknowledgment is made to D.
+Appleton &amp; Co.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0005" id="link2HCH0005">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter V. The Mines
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      If the influence of the cattle industry was paramount in the development
+      of the frontier region found by the first railways, it should not be
+      concluded that this upthrust of the southern cattle constituted the only
+      contribution to the West of that day. There were indeed earlier
+      influences, the chief of which was the advent of the wild population of
+      the placer mines. The riches of the gold-fields hastened the building of
+      the first transcontinental railroads and the men of the mines set their
+      mark also indelibly upon the range.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is no part of our business here to follow the great discoveries of 1849
+      in California. * Neither shall we chronicle the once-famous rushes from
+      California north into the Fraser River Valley of British Columbia; neither
+      is it necessary to mention in much detail the great camps of Nevada; nor
+      yet the short-lived stampede of 1859 to the Pike's Peak country in
+      Colorado. The rich placer fields of Idaho and Montana, from which enormous
+      amounts were taken, offer typical examples of the mining communities of
+      the Rockies.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    * See Stewart Edward White: "The Forty-Niners" ("Chronicles of
+America").
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      We may never know how much history remains forever unwritten. Of the
+      beginnings of the Idaho camps there have trickled back into record only
+      brief, inconsequent, and partial stories. The miners who surged this way
+      and that all through the Sierras, the upper Cascades, north into the
+      Selkirks, and thence back again into the Rockies were a turbulent mob.
+      Having overrun all our mountain ranges, following the earlier trails of
+      the traders and trappers, they now recoiled upon themselves and rolled
+      back eastward to meet the advancing civilization of the westbound rails,
+      caring nothing for history and less for the civilized society in which
+      they formerly had lived. This story of bedlam broken loose, of men gone
+      crazed, by the sudden subversion of all known values and all standards of
+      life, was at first something which had no historian and can be recorded
+      only by way of hearsay stories which do not always tally as to the truth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The mad treasure-hunters of the California mines, restless, insubordinate,
+      incapable of restraint, possessed of the belief that there might be gold
+      elsewhere than in California, and having heard reports of strikes to the
+      north, went hurrying out into the mountains of Oregon and Washington, in a
+      wild stampede, all eager again to engage in the glorious gamble where by
+      one lucky stroke of the pick a man might be set free of the old
+      limitations of human existence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So the flood of gold-seekers—passing north into the Fraser River
+      country, south again into Oregon and Washington, and across the great
+      desert plains into Nevada and Idaho—made new centers of lurid
+      activity, such as Oro Fino, Florence, and Carson. Then it was that Walla
+      Walla and Lewiston, outfitting points on the western side of the range,
+      found place upon the maps of the land, such as they were.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Before these adventurers, now eastbound and no longer facing west, there
+      arose the vast and formidable mountain ranges which in their time had
+      daunted even the calm minds of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. But the
+      prospectors and the pack-trains alike penetrated the Salmon River Range.
+      Oro Fino, in Idaho, was old in 1861. The next great strikes were to be
+      made around Florence. Here the indomitable packer from the West,
+      conquering unheard-of difficulties, brought in whiskey, women, pianos,
+      food, mining-tools. Naturally all these commanded fabulous prices. The
+      price for each and all lay underfoot. Man, grown superman, could overleap
+      time itself by a stroke of the pick! What wonder delirium reigned!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These events became known in the Mississippi Valley and farther eastward.
+      And now there came hurrying out from the older regions many more hundreds
+      and thousands eager to reach a land not so far as California, but reputed
+      to be quite as rich. It was then, as the bull-trains came in from the
+      East, from the head of navigation on the Missouri River, that the western
+      outfitting points of Walla Walla and Lewiston lost their importance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Southward of the Idaho camps the same sort of story was repeating itself.
+      Nevada had drawn to herself a portion of the wild men of the stampedes.
+      Carson for its day (1859-60) was a capital not unlike the others. Some of
+      its men had come down from the upper fields, some had arrived from the
+      East over the old Santa Fe Trail, and yet others had drifted in from
+      California.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All the camps were very much alike. A straggling row of log cabins or huts
+      of motley construction; a few stores so-called, sometimes of logs, or, if
+      a saw-mill was at hand, of rude sawn boards; a number of saloons, each of
+      which customarily also supported a dance-hall; a series of cabins or huts
+      where dwelt individual men, each doing his own cooking and washing; and
+      outside these huts the uptorn earth—such were the camps which dotted
+      the trails of the stampedes across inhospitable deserts and mountain
+      ranges. Church and school were unknown. Law there was none, for of
+      organized society there was none. The women who lived there were unworthy
+      of the name of woman. The men strode about in the loose dress of the camp,
+      sometimes without waistcoat, sometimes coatless, shod with heavy boots,
+      always armed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If we look for causes contributory to the history of the mining-camp, we
+      shall find one which ordinarily is overlooked—the invention of
+      Colt's revolving pistol. At the time of the Civil War, though this weapon
+      was not old, yet it had attained very general use throughout the frontier.
+      That was before the day of modern ammunition. The six-shooter of the
+      placer days was of the old cap-and-ball type, heavy, long-barreled, and
+      usually wooden-handled. It was the general ownership of these deadly
+      weapons which caused so much bloodshed in the camps. The revolver in the
+      hands of a tyro is not especially serviceable, but it attained great
+      deadliness in the hands of an expert user. Such a man, naturally of quick
+      nerve reflexes, skillful and accurate in the use of the weapon through
+      long practice, became a dangerous, and for a time an unconquerable,
+      antagonist.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is a curious fact that the great Montana fields were doubly discovered,
+      in part by men coming east from California, and in part by men passing
+      west in search of new gold-fields. The first discovery of gold in Montana
+      was made on Gold Creek by a half-breed trapper named Francois, better
+      known as Be-net-see. This was in 1852, but the news seems to have lain
+      dormant for a time—naturally enough, for there was small ingress or
+      egress for that wild and unknown country. In 1857, however, a party of
+      miners who had wandered down the Big Hole River on their way back east
+      from California decided to look into the Gold Creek discovery, of which
+      they had heard. This party was led by James and Granville Stuart, and
+      among others in the party were Jake Meeks, Robert Hereford, Robert
+      Dempsey, John W. Powell, John M. Jacobs, Thomas Adams, and some others.
+      These men did some work on Gold Creek in 1858, but seem not to have struck
+      it very rich, and to have withdrawn to Fort Bridger in Utah until the
+      autumn of 1860. Then a prospector by the name of Tom Golddigger turned up
+      at Bridger with additional stories of creeks to the north, so that there
+      was a gradual straggling back toward Gold Creek and other gulches. This
+      prospector had been all over the Alder Gulch, which was ere long to prove
+      fabulously rich.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was not, however, until 1863 that the Montana camps sprang into fame.
+      It was not Gold Creek or Alder Gulch, but Florence and other Idaho camps,
+      that, in the summer and autumn of 1862, brought into the mountains no less
+      than five parties of gold-seekers, who remained in Montana because they
+      could not penetrate the mountain barrier which lay between them and the
+      Salmon River camps in Idaho.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The first of these parties arrived at Gold Creek by wagon-train from Fort
+      Benton and the second hailed from Salt Lake. An election was held for the
+      purpose of forming a sort of community organization, the first election
+      ever known in Montana. The men from the East had brought with them some
+      idea of law and organization. There were now in the Montana fields many
+      good men such as the Stuart Brothers, Samuel T. Hauser, Walter Dance, and
+      others later well known in the State. These men were prominent in the
+      organization of the first miners' court, which had occasion to try—and
+      promptly to hang—Stillman and Jernigan, two ruffians who had been in
+      from the Salmon River mines only about four days when they thus met
+      retribution for their early crimes. An associate of theirs, Arnett, had
+      been killed while resisting arrest. The reputation of Florence for
+      lawlessness and bloodshed was well known; and, as the outrages of the
+      well-organized band of desperadoes operating in Idaho might be expected to
+      begin at any time in Montana, a certain uneasiness existed among the
+      newcomers from the States.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Two more parties, likewise bound for Idaho and likewise baffled by the
+      Salmon River range, arrived at the Montana camps in the same summer. Both
+      these were from the Pike's Peak country in Colorado. And in the autumn
+      came a fifth—this one under military protection, Captain James L.
+      Fisk commanding, and having in the party a number of settlers bound for
+      Oregon as well as miners for Idaho. This expedition arrived in the Prickly
+      Pear Valley in Montana on September 21, 1862, having left St. Paul on the
+      16th of June, traveling by steamboat and wagon-train. While Captain Fisk
+      and his expedition pushed on to Walla Walla, nearly half of the immigrants
+      stayed to try their luck at placer-mining. But the yield was not great and
+      the distant Salmon River mines, their original destination, still awaited
+      them. Winter was approaching. It was now too late in the season to reach
+      the Salmon River mines, five hundred miles across the mountains, and it
+      was four hundred miles to Salt Lake, the nearest supply post; therefore,
+      most of the men joined this little army of prospectors in Montana. Some of
+      them drifted to the Grasshopper diggings, soon to be known under the name
+      of Bannack—one of the wildest mining-camps of its day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These different origins of the population of the first Montana camps are
+      interesting because of the fact that they indicate a difference in the two
+      currents of population which now met here in the new placer fields. In
+      general the wildest and most desperate of the old-time adventurers, those
+      coming from the West, had located in the Idaho camps, and might be
+      expected in Montana at any time. In contrast to these, the men lately out
+      from the States were of a different type, many of them sober, most of them
+      law-abiding, men who had come out to better their fortunes and not merely
+      to drop into the wild and licentious life of a placercamp. Law and order
+      always did prevail eventually in any mining community. In the case of
+      Montana, law and order arrived almost synchronously with lawlessness and
+      desperadoism.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Law and order had not long to wait before the arrival of the notorious
+      Henry Plummer and his band from Florence. Plummer was already known as a
+      bad man, but was not yet recognized as the leader of that secret
+      association of robbers and murderers which had terrorized the Idaho camps.
+      He celebrated his arrival in Bannack by killing a man named Cleveland. He
+      was acquitted in the miners' court that tried him, on the usual plea of
+      self-defense. He was a man of considerable personal address.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The same tribunal soon assembled once more to try three other murderers,
+      Moore, Reeves, and Mitchell, with the agreement that the men should have a
+      jury and should be provided with counsel. They were all practically freed;
+      and after that the roughs grew bolder than ever. The Plummer band swore to
+      kill every man who had served in that court, whether as juryman or
+      officer. So well did they make good their threat that out of the
+      twenty-seven men thus engaged all but seven were either killed or driven
+      out of the country, nine being murdered outright. The man who had acted as
+      sheriff of this miners' court, Hank Crawford, was unceasingly hounded by
+      Plummer, who sought time and again to fix a quarrel on him. Plummer was
+      the best shot in the mountains at that time, and he thought it would be
+      easy for him to kill his man and enter the usual plea of self-defense. By
+      good fortune, however, Crawford caught Plummer off his guard and fired
+      upon him with a rifle, breaking his right arm. Plummer's friends called in
+      Dr. Glick, the best physician in Bannack, to treat the wounded man,
+      warning him that if he told anything about the visit he would be shot
+      down. Glick held his peace, and later was obliged to attend many of the
+      wounded outlaws, who were always engaged in affairs with firearms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of all these wild affrays, of the savage life which they denoted, and of
+      the stern ways in which retribution overtook the desperadoes of the mines,
+      there is no better historian than Nathaniel P. Langford, a prominent
+      citizen of the West, who accompanied the overland expedition of 1862 and
+      took part in the earliest life of Montana. His work, "Vigilante Days and
+      Ways," is an invaluable contemporary record.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is mentally difficult for us now fully to restore these scenes,
+      although the events occurred no earlier than the Civil War. "Life in
+      Bannack at this time," says Langford, "was perfect isolation from the rest
+      of the world. Napoleon was not more of an exile on St. Helena than a newly
+      arrived immigrant from the States in this region of lakes and mountains.
+      All the great battles of the season of 1862—Antietam,
+      Fredericksburg, Second Bull Run—all the exciting debates of
+      Congress, and the more exciting combats at sea, first became known to us
+      on the arrival of newspapers and letters in the spring of 1863."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Territory of Idaho, which included Montana and nearly all Wyoming, was
+      organized March 3, 1863. Previous to that time western Montana and Idaho
+      formed a part of Washington Territory, of which Olympia was the capital,
+      and Montana, east of the mountains, belonged to the Territory of Dakota,
+      of which the capital was Yankton, on the Missouri. Langford makes clear
+      the political uncertainties of the time, the difficulty of enforcing the
+      laws, and narrates the circumstances which led to the erection in 1864 of
+      the new Territory of Montana, comprising the limits of the present State.
+      *
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    * The Acts of Congress organizing Territories and admitting
+States are milestones in the occupation of this last West. On the eve of
+the Civil War, Kansas was admitted into the Union; during the war, the
+Territories of Colorado, Nevada, Dakota, Arizona, Idaho, and Montana
+were organized, and Nevada was admitted as a State. Immediately after
+the war, Nebraska was admitted and Wyoming was organized as a Territory.
+In the Centennial Year (1876) Colorado became a State. In 1889 and 1890
+North and South Dakota, Montana, Washington, Idaho, and Wyoming were
+admitted as States. In the latter year Oklahoma was carved out of the
+Indian Territory. Utah with its Mormon population was kept waiting at
+the doors of the Union until 1896. Oklahoma became a State in 1907;
+Arizona and New Mexico were admitted in 1912.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      In Montana as elsewhere in these days of great sectional bitterness, there
+      was much political strife; and this no doubt accounts for an astonishing
+      political event that now took place. Henry Plummer, the most active outlaw
+      of his day, was elected sheriff and entrusted with the enforcement of the
+      laws! He made indeed a great show of enforcing the laws. He married,
+      settled down, and for a time was thought by some of the ill-advised to
+      have reformed his ways, although in truth he could not have reformed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      By June, 1863, the extraordinarily rich strike in Alder Gulch had been
+      made. The news of this spread like wildfire to Bannack and to the Salmon
+      River mines in Idaho as well, and the result was one of the fiercest of
+      all the stampedes, and the rise, almost overnight, of Virginia City.
+      Meanwhile some Indian fighting had taken place and in a pitched battle on
+      the Bear River General Connor had beaten decisively the Bannack Indians,
+      who for years had preyed on the emigrant trains. This made travel on the
+      mountain trails safer than it had been; and the rich Last Chance Gulch on
+      which the city of Helena now stands attracted a tremendous population
+      almost at once. The historian above cited lived there. Let him tell of the
+      life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "One long stream of active life filled the little creek on its auriferous
+      course from Bald Mountain, through a canyon of wild and picturesque
+      character, until it emerged into the large and fertile valley of the
+      Pas-sam-a-ri... the mountain stream called by Lewis and Clark in their
+      journal 'Philanthropy River.' Lateral streams of great beauty pour down
+      the sides of the mountain chain bounding the valley.... Gold placers were
+      found upon these streams and occupied soon after the settlement at
+      Virginia City was commenced.... This human hive, numbering at least ten
+      thousand people, was the product of ninety days. Into it were crowded all
+      the elements of a rough and active civilization. Thousands of cabins and
+      tents and brush wakiups... were seen on every hand. Every foot of the
+      gulch... was undergoing displacement, and it was already disfigured by
+      huge heaps of gravel which had been passed through the sluices and rifled
+      of their glittering contents.... Gold was abundant, and every possible
+      device was employed by the gamblers, the traders, the vile men and women
+      that had come in with the miners into the locality, to obtain it. Nearly
+      every third cabin was a saloon where vile whiskey was peddled out for
+      fifty cents a drink in gold dust. Many of these places were filled with
+      gambling tables and gamblers.... Hurdy-gurdy dance-houses were
+      numerous.... Not a day or night passed which did not yield its full
+      fruition of vice, quarrels, wounds, or murders. The crack of the revolver
+      was often heard above the merry notes of the violin. Street fights were
+      frequent, and as no one knew when or where they would occur, every one was
+      on his guard against a random shot.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Sunday was always a gala day.... The stores were all open.... Thousands
+      of people crowded the thoroughfares ready to rush in the direction of any
+      promised excitement. Horse-racing was among the most favored amusements.
+      Prize rings were formed, and brawny men engaged in fisticuffs until their
+      sight was lost and their bodies pommelled to a jelly, while hundreds of
+      onlookers cheered the victor.... Pistols flashed, bowie knives flourished,
+      and braggart oaths filled the air, as often as men's passions triumphed
+      over their reason. This was indeed the reign of unbridled license, and men
+      who at first regarded it with disgust and terror, by constant exposure
+      soon learned to become a part of it and forget that they had ever been
+      aught else. All classes of society were represented at this general
+      exhibition. Judges, lawyers, doctors, even clergymen, could not claim
+      exemption. Culture and religion afforded feeble protection, where
+      allurement and indulgence ruled the hour."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Imagine, therefore, a fabulously rich mountain valley twelve miles in
+      extent, occupied by more than ten thousand men and producing more than ten
+      millions of dollars before the close of the first year! It is a stupendous
+      demand on any imagination. How might all this gold be sent out in
+      safe-keeping? We are told that the only stage route extended from Virginia
+      City no farther than Bannack. Between Virginia City and Salt Lake City
+      there was an absolute wilderness, wholly unsettled, four hundred and
+      seventy-five miles in width. "There was no post office in the Territory.
+      Letters were brought from Salt Lake first at a cost of two dollars and a
+      half each, and later in the season at one dollar each. All money at
+      infinite risk was sent to the nearest express office at Salt Lake City by
+      private hands."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Practically every man in the new gold-fields was aware of the existence of
+      a secret band of well-organized ruffians and robbers. The general feeling
+      was one of extreme uneasiness. There were plenty of men who had taken out
+      of the ground considerable quantities of gold, and who would have been
+      glad to get back to the East with their little fortunes, but they dared
+      not start. Time after time the express coach, the solitary rider, the
+      unguarded wagon-train, were held up and robbed, usually with the
+      concomitant of murder. When the miners did start out from one camp to
+      another they took all manner of precautions to conceal their gold dust. We
+      are told that on one occasion one party bored a hole in the end of the
+      wagon tongue with an auger and filled it full of gold dust, thus escaping
+      observation! The robbers learned to know the express agents, and always
+      had advice of every large shipment of gold. It was almost useless to
+      undertake to conceal anything from them; and resistance was met with
+      death. Such a reign of terror, such an organized system of highway
+      robbery, such a light valuing of human life, has been seldom found in any
+      other time or place.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There were, as we have seen, good men in these camps—although the
+      best of them probably let down the standards of living somewhat after
+      their arrival there; but the trouble was that the good men did not know
+      one another, had no organization, and scarcely dared at first to attempt
+      one. On the other hand, the robbers' organization was complete and kept
+      its secrets as the grave; indeed, many and many a lonesome grave held
+      secrets none ever was to know. How many men went out from Eastern States
+      and disappeared, their fate always to remain a mystery, is a part of the
+      untold story of the mining frontier.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There are known to have been a hundred and two men killed by Plummer and
+      his gang; how many were murdered without their fate ever being discovered
+      can not be told. Plummer was the leader of the band, but, arch-hypocrite
+      that he was, he managed to keep his own connection with it a secret. His
+      position as sheriff gave him many advantages. He posed as being a
+      silver-mine expert, among other things, and often would be called out to
+      "expert" some new mine. That usually meant that he left town in order to
+      commit some desperate robbery. The boldest outrages always required
+      Plummer as the leader. Sometimes he would go away on the pretense of
+      following some fugitive from justice. His horse, the fleetest in the
+      country, often was found, laboring and sweating, at the rear of his house.
+      That meant that Plummer had been away on some secret errand of his own. He
+      was suspected many times, but nothing could be fastened upon him; or there
+      lacked sufficient boldness and sufficient organization on the part of the
+      law-and-order men to undertake his punishment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We are not concerned with repeating thrilling tales, bloody almost beyond
+      belief, and indicative of an incomprehensible depravity in human nature,
+      so much as we are with the causes and effects of this wild civilization
+      which raged here quite alone in the midst of one of the wildest of the
+      western mountain regions. It will best serve our purpose to retain in mind
+      the twofold character of this population, and to remember that the
+      frontier caught to itself not only ruffians and desperadoes, men undaunted
+      by any risk, but also men possessed of a yet steadier personal courage and
+      hardihood. There were men rough, coarse, brutal, murderous; but against
+      them were other men self-reliant, stern, just, and resolved upon fair
+      play.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That was indeed the touchstone of the entire civilization which followed
+      upon the heels of these scenes of violence. It was fair play which really
+      animated the great Montana Vigilante movement and which eventually cleaned
+      up the merciless gang of Henry Plummer and his associates. The centers of
+      civilization were far removed. The courts were powerless. In some cases
+      even the machinery of the law was in the hands of these ruffians. But so
+      violent were their deeds, so brutal, so murderous, so unfair, that slowly
+      the indignation of the good men arose to the white-hot point of open
+      resentment and of swift retribution. What the good men of the frontier
+      loved most of all was justice. They now enforced justice in the only way
+      left open to them. They did this as California earlier had done; and they
+      did it so well that there was small need to repeat the lesson.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The actual extermination of the Henry Plummer band occurred rather
+      promptly when the Vigilantes once got under way. One of the band by the
+      name of Red Yager, in company with yet another by the name of Brown, had
+      been concerned in the murder of Lloyd Magruder, a merchant of the
+      Territory. The capture of these two followed closely upon the hanging of
+      George Ives, also accused of more than one murder. Ives was an example of
+      the degrading influence of the mines. He was a decent young man until he
+      left his home in Wisconsin. He was in California from 1857 to 1858. When
+      he appeared in Idaho he seemed to have thrown off all restraint and to
+      have become a common rowdy and desperado. It is said of him that "few men
+      of his age ever had been guilty of so many fiendish crimes."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yager and Brown, knowing the fate which Ives had met, gave up hope when
+      they fell into the hands of the newly organized Vigilantes. Brown was
+      hanged; so was Yager; but Yager, before his death, made a full confession
+      which put the Vigilantes in possession of information they had never yet
+      been able to secure. *
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    * Langford gives these names disclosed by Yager as follows:
+"Henry Plummer was chief of the band; Bill Bunton, stool pigeon and
+second in command; George Brown, secretary; Sam Bunton, roadster;
+Cyrus Skinner, fence, spy, and roadster; George Shears, horse thief and
+roadster; Frank Parish, horse thief and roadster; Hayes Lyons, telegraph
+man and roadster; Bill Hunter, telegraph man and roadster; Ned Ray,
+council-room keeper at Bannack City; George Ives, Stephen Marshland,
+Dutch John (Wagner), Alex Carter, Whiskey Bill (Graves), Johnny Cooper,
+Buck Stinson, Mexican Frank, Bob Zachary, Boone Helm, Clubfoot George
+(Lane), Billy Terwiliger, Gad Moore were roadsters." Practically all
+these were executed by the Vigilantes, with many others, and eventually
+the band of outlaws was entirely broken up.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Much has been written and much romanced about the conduct of these
+      desperadoes when they met their fate. Some of them were brave and some
+      proved cowards at the last. For a time, Plummer begged abjectly, his eyes
+      streaming with tears. Suddenly he was smitten with remorse as the whole
+      picture of his past life appeared before him. He promised everything,
+      begged everything, if only life might be spared him—asked his
+      captors to cut off his ears, to cut out his tongue, then strip him naked
+      and banish him. At the very last, however, he seems to have become
+      composed. Stinson and Ray went to their fate alternately swearing and
+      whining. Some of the ruffians faced death boldly. More than one himself
+      jumped from the ladder or kicked from under him the box which was the only
+      foothold between him and eternity. Boone Helm was as hardened as any of
+      them. This man was a cannibal and murderer. He seems to have had no better
+      nature whatever. His last words as he sprang off were "Hurrah for Jeff
+      Davis! Let her rip!" Another man remarked calmly that he cared no more for
+      hanging than for drinking a glass of water. But each after his own fashion
+      met the end foreordained for him by his own lack of compassion; and of
+      compassion he received none at the hands of the men who had resolved that
+      the law should be established and should remain forever.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was an instant improvement in the social life of Virginia City,
+      Bannack, and the adjoining camps as soon as it was understood that the
+      Vigilantes were afoot. Langford, who undoubtedly knew intimately of the
+      activities of this organization, makes no apology for the acts of the
+      Vigilantes, although they did not have back of them the color of the
+      actual law. He says:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "The retribution dispensed to these daring freebooters in no respect
+      exceeded the demands of absolute justice.... There was no other remedy.
+      Practically the citizens had no law, but if law had existed it could not
+      have afforded adequate redress. This was proven by the feeling of security
+      consequent upon the destruction of the band. When the robbers were dead
+      the people felt safe, not for themselves alone but for their pursuits and
+      their property. They could travel without fear. They had reasonable
+      assurance of safety in the transmission of money to the States and in the
+      arrival of property over the unguarded route from Salt Lake. The crack of
+      pistols had ceased, and they could walk the streets without constant
+      exposure to danger. There was an omnipresent spirit of protection, akin to
+      that omnipresent spirit of law which pervaded older and more civilized
+      communities.... Young men who had learned to believe that the roughs were
+      destined to rule and who, under the influence of that faith, were fast
+      drifting into crime shrunk appalled before the thorough work of the
+      Vigilantes. Fear, more potent than conscience, forced even the worst of
+      men to observe the requirements of society, and a feeling of comparative
+      security among all classes was the result."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Naturally it was not the case that all the bad men were thus exterminated.
+      From time to time there appeared vividly in the midst of these
+      surroundings additional figures of solitary desperadoes, each to have his
+      list of victims, and each himself to fall before the weapons of his
+      enemies or to meet the justice of the law or the sterner meed of the
+      Vigilantes. It would not be wholly pleasant to read even the names of a
+      long list of these; perhaps it will be sufficient to select one, the
+      notorious Joseph Slade, one of the "picturesque" characters of whom a
+      great deal of inaccurate and puerile history has been written. The truth
+      about Slade is that he was a good man at first, faithful in the discharge
+      of his duties as an agent of the stage company. Needing at times to use
+      violence lawfully, he then began to use it unlawfully. He drank and soon
+      went from bad to worse. At length his outrages became so numerous that the
+      men of the community took him out and hanged him. His fate taught many
+      others the risk of going too far in defiance of law and decency.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What has been true regarding the camps of Florence, Bannack, and Virginia
+      City, had been true in part in earlier camps and was to be repeated
+      perhaps a trifle less vividly in other camps yet to come. The Black Hills
+      gold rush, for instance, which came after the railroad but before the
+      Indians were entirely cleared away, made a certain wild history of its
+      own. We had our Deadwood stage line then, and our Deadwood City with all
+      its wild life of drinking, gambling, and shooting—the place where
+      more than one notorious bad man lost his life, and some capable officers
+      of the peace shared their fate. To describe in detail the life of this
+      stampede and the wild scenes ensuing upon it is perhaps not needful here.
+      The main thing is that the great quartz lodes of the Black Hills support
+      in the end a steady, thrifty, and law-abiding population.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All over that West, once so unspeakably wild and reckless, there now rise
+      great cities where recently were scattered only mining-camps scarce fit to
+      be called units of any social compact. It was but yesterday that these men
+      fought and drank and dug their own graves in their own sluices. At the
+      city of Helena, on the site of Last Chance Gulch, one recalls that not so
+      long ago citizens could show with a certain contemporary pride the old
+      dead tree once known as "Hangman's Tree." It marked a spot which might be
+      called a focus of the old frontier. Around it, and in the country
+      immediately adjoining, was fought out the great battle whose issue could
+      not be doubted—that between the new and the old days; between law
+      and order and individual lawlessness; between the school and the saloon;
+      between the home and the dance-hall; between society united and resolved
+      and the individual reverted to worse than savagery.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0006" id="link2HCH0006">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter VI. The Pathways Of The West
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Since we have declared ourselves to be less interested in bald chronology
+      than in the naturally connected causes of events which make chronology
+      worth while, we may now, perhaps, double back upon the path of chronology,
+      and take up the great early highways of the West—what we might call
+      the points of attack against the frontier.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The story of the Santa Fe Trail, now passing into oblivion, once was on
+      the tongue of every man. This old highroad in its heyday presented the
+      most romantic and appealing features of the earlier frontier life. The
+      Santa Fe Trail was the great path of commerce between our frontier and the
+      Spanish towns trading through Santa Fe. This commerce began in 1822, when
+      about threescore men shipped certain goods across the lower Plains by
+      pack-animals. By 1826 it was employing a hundred men and was using wagons
+      and mules. In 1830, when oxen first were used on the trail, the trade
+      amounted to $120,000 annually; and by 1843, when the Spanish ports were
+      closed, it had reached the value of $450,000, involving the use of 230
+      wagons and 350 men. It was this great wagon trail which first brought us
+      into touch with the Spanish civilization of the Southwest. Its commercial
+      totals do not bulk large today, but the old trail itself was a thing
+      titanic in its historic value.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This was the day not of water but of land transport; yet the wheeled
+      vehicles which passed out into the West as common carriers of civilization
+      clung to the river valleys—natural highways and natural resting
+      places of home-building man. This has been the story of the advance of
+      civilization from the first movements of the world's peoples. The valleys
+      are the cleats of civilization's golden sluices.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There lay the great valley of the Arkansas, offering food and water, an
+      easy grade and a direct course reaching out into the West, even to the
+      edge of the lands of Spain; and here stood wheeled vehicles able to
+      traverse it and to carry drygoods and hardware, and especially domestic
+      cotton fabrics, which formed the great staple of a "Santa Fe assortment."
+      The people of the Middle West were now, in short, able to feed and clothe
+      themselves and to offer a little of their surplus merchandise to some one
+      else in sale. They had begun to export! Out yonder, in a strange and
+      unknown land, lay one of the original markets of America!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the heels of Lewis and Clark, who had just explored the Missouri River
+      route to the Northwest, Captain Zebulon Pike of the Army, long before the
+      first wheeled traffic started West, had employed this valley of the
+      Arkansas in his search for the southwestern delimitations of the United
+      States. Pike thought he had found the head of the Red River when after a
+      toilsome and dangerous march he reached the headwaters of the Rio Grande.
+      But it was not our river. It belonged to Spain, as he learned to his
+      sorrow, when he marched all the way to Chihuahua in old Mexico and lay
+      there during certain weary months.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was Pike's story of the far Southwest that first started the idea of
+      the commerce of the Santa Fe Trail. In that day geography was a human
+      thing, a thing of vital importance to all men. Men did not read the stock
+      markets; they read stories of adventure, tales of men returned from lands
+      out yonder in the West. Heretofore the swarthy Mexicans, folk of the dry
+      plains and hills around the head of the Rio Grande and the Red, had
+      carried their cotton goods and many other small and needful things all the
+      way from Vera Cruz on the seacoast, over trails that were long, tedious,
+      uncertain, and expensive. A far shorter and more natural trade route went
+      west along the Arkansas, which would bring the American goods to the doors
+      of the Spanish settlements. After Pike and one or two others had returned
+      with reports of the country, the possibilities of this trade were clear to
+      any one with the merchant's imagination.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is rivalry for the title of "Father of the Santa Fe Trail." As early
+      as 1812, when the United States was at war with England, a party of men on
+      horseback trading into the West, commonly called the McKnight, Baird, and
+      Chambers party, made their way west to Santa Fe. There, however, they met
+      with disaster. All their goods were confiscated and they themselves lay in
+      Mexican jails for nine years. Eventually the returning survivors of this
+      party told their stories, and those stories, far from chilling, only
+      inflamed the ardor of other adventurous traders. In 1821 more than one
+      American trader reached Santa Fe; and, now that the Spanish yoke had been
+      thrown off by the Mexicans, the goods, instead of being confiscated, were
+      purchased eagerly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is to be remembered, of course, that trading of this sort to Mexico was
+      not altogether a new thing. Sutlers of the old fur traders and trappers
+      already had found the way to New Spain from the valley of the Platte,
+      south along the eastern edge of the Rockies, through Wyoming and Colorado.
+      By some such route as that at least one trader, a French creole, agent of
+      the firm of Bryant &amp; Morrison at Kaskaskia, had penetrated to the
+      Spanish lands as early as 1804, while Lewis and Clark were still absent in
+      the upper wilderness. Each year the great mountain rendezvous of the
+      trappers—now at Bent's Fort on the Arkansas, now at Horse Creek in
+      Wyoming, now on Green River in Utah, or even farther beyond the mountains—demanded
+      supplies of food and traps and ammunition to enable the hunters to
+      continue their work for another year. Perhaps many of the pack-trains
+      which regularly supplied this shifting mountain market already had traded
+      in the Spanish country.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is not necessary to go into further details regarding this primitive
+      commerce of the prairies. It yielded a certain profit; it shaped the
+      character of the men who carried it on. But what is yet more important, it
+      greatly influenced the country which lay back of the border on the
+      Missouri River. It called yet more men from the eastern settlements to
+      those portions which lay upon the edge of the Great Plains. There crowded
+      yet more thickly, up to the line between the certain and the uncertain,
+      the restless westbound population of all the country.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If on the south the valley of the Arkansas led outward to New Spain, yet
+      other pathways made out from the Mississippi River into the unknown lands.
+      The Missouri was the first and last of our great natural frontier roads.
+      Its lower course swept along the eastern edge of the Plains, far to the
+      south, down to the very doors of the most adventurous settlements in the
+      Mississippi Valley. Those who dared its stained and turbulent current had
+      to push up, onward, northward, past the mouth of the Platte, far to the
+      north across degrees of latitude, steadily forward through a vast virgin
+      land. Then the river bent boldly and strongly off to the west, across
+      another empire. Its great falls indicated that it headed high; beyond the
+      great falls its steady sweep westward and at last southward, led into yet
+      other kingdoms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When we travel by horse or by modern motor car in that now accessible
+      region and look about us, we should not fail to reflect on the long trail
+      of the upbound boats which Manuel Lisa and other traders sent out almost
+      immediately upon the return of the Lewis and Clark expedition. We should
+      see them struggling up against that tremendous current before steam was
+      known, driven by their lust for new lands. We may then understand fully
+      what we have read of the enterprises of the old American Fur Company, and
+      bring to mind the forgotten names of Campbell and Sublette, of General
+      Ashley and of Wyeth—names to be followed by others really of less
+      importance, as those of Bonneville and Fremont. That there could be farms,
+      that there ever might be homes, in this strange wild country, was, to
+      these early adventurers, unthinkable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then we should picture the millions of buffalo which once covered these
+      plains and think of the waste and folly of their slaughtering. We should
+      see the long streams of the Mackinaw boats swimming down the Missouri,
+      bound for St. Louis, laden with bales of buffalo and beaver peltry, every
+      pound of which would be worth ten dollars at the capital of the fur trade;
+      and we should restore to our minds the old pictures of savage tribesmen,
+      decked in fur-trimmed war-shirts and plumed bonnets, armed with lance and
+      sinewed bow and bull-neck shield, not forgetting whence they got their
+      horses and how they got their food.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The great early mid-continental highway, known as the Oregon Trail or the
+      Overland Trail, was by way of the Missouri up the Platte Valley, thence
+      across the mountains. We know more of this route because it was not
+      discontinued, but came steadily more and more into use, for one reason
+      after another. The fur traders used it, the Forty-Niners used it, the
+      cattlemen used it in part, the railroads used it; and, lastly, the
+      settlers and farmers used it most of all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In physical features the Platte River route was similar to that of the
+      Arkansas Valley. Each at its eastern extremity, for a few days' travel,
+      passed over the rolling grass-covered and flower-besprinkled prairies ere
+      it broke into the high and dry lands of the Plains, with their green or
+      grey or brown covering of practically flowerless short grasses. But
+      between the two trails of the Arkansas and the Platte there existed
+      certain wide differences. At the middle of the nineteenth century the two
+      trails were quite distinct in personnel, if that word may be used. The
+      Santa Fe Trail showed Spanish influences; that of the Platte Valley
+      remained far more nearly American.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thus far the frontier had always been altering the man who came to it;
+      and, indirectly, always altering those who dwelt back of the frontier,
+      nearer to the Appalachians or the Atlantic. A new people now was in
+      process of formation—a people born of a new environment. America and
+      the American were conceiving. There was soon to be born, soon swiftly to
+      grow, a new and lasting type of man. Man changes an environment only by
+      bringing into it new or better transportation. Environment changes man.
+      Here in the midcontinent, at the mid-century, the frontier and the ways of
+      the frontier were writing their imprint on the human product of our land.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The first great caravans of the Platte Valley, when the wagon-trains went
+      out hundreds strong, were not the same as the scattering cavalcade of the
+      fur hunters, not the same as the ox-trains and mule-trains of the Santa Fe
+      traffic. The men who wore deepest the wheel marks of the Oregon Trail were
+      neither trading nor trapping men, but homebuilding men—the first
+      real emigrants to go West with the intent of making homes beyond the
+      Rockies.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Oregon Trail had been laid out by the explorers of the fur trade.
+      Zealous missionaries had made their way over the trail in the thirties.
+      The Argonauts of '49 passed over it and left it only after crossing the
+      Rockies. But, before gold in California was dreamed of, there had come
+      back to the States reports of lands rich in resources other than gold,
+      lying in the far Northwest, beyond the great mountain ranges and, before
+      the Forty-Niners were heard of, farmers, home-builders, emigrants, men with
+      their families, men with their household goods, were steadily passing out
+      for the far-off and unknown country of Oregon.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Oregon Trail was the pathway for Fremont in 1842, perhaps the most
+      overvalued explorer of all the West; albeit this comment may to some seem
+      harsh. Kit Carson and Bill Williams led Fremont across the Rockies almost
+      by the hand. Carson and Williams themselves had been taken across by the
+      Indian tribes. But Fremont could write; and the story which he set down of
+      his first expedition inflamed the zeal of all. Men began to head out for
+      that far-away country beyond the Rockies. Not a few scattered bands, but
+      very many, passed up the valley of the Platte. There began a tremendous
+      trek of thousands of men who wanted homes somewhere out beyond the
+      frontier. And that was more than ten years before the Civil War. The cow
+      trade was not dreamed of; the coming cow country was overleaped and
+      ignored.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Our national horizon extended immeasurably along that dusty way. In the
+      use of the Oregon Trail we first began to be great. The chief figure of
+      the American West, the figure of the ages, is not the long-haired,
+      fringed-legging man riding a raw-boned pony, but the gaunt and sad-faced
+      woman sitting on the front seat of the wagon, following her lord where he
+      might lead, her face hidden in the same ragged sunbonnet which had crossed
+      the Appalachians and the Missouri long before. That was America, my
+      brethren! There was the seed of America's wealth. There was the great
+      romance of all America—the woman in the sunbonnet; and not, after
+      all, the hero with the rifle across his saddle horn. Who has written her
+      story? Who has painted her picture?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They were large days, those of the great Oregon Trail, not always
+      pleasingly dramatic, but oftentimes tragic and terrible. We speak of the
+      Oregon Trail, but it means little to us today; nor will any mere
+      generalities ever make it mean much to us. But what did it mean to the men
+      and women of that day? What and who were those men and women? What did it
+      mean to take the Overland Trail in the great adventure of abandoning
+      forever the known and the safe and setting out for Oregon or California at
+      a time when everything in the far West was new and unknown? How did those
+      good folk travel? Why and whither did they travel?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is a book done by C. F. McGlashan, a resident of Truckee,
+      California, known as "The History of the Donner Party," holding a great
+      deal of actual history. McGlashan, living close to Donner Lake, wrote in
+      1879, describing scenes with which he was perfectly familiar, and
+      recounting facts which he had from direct association with participants in
+      the ill-fated Donner Party. He chronicles events which happened in 1846—a
+      date before the discovery of gold in California. The Donner Party was one
+      of the typical American caravans of homeseekers who started for the
+      Pacific Slope with no other purpose than that of founding homes there, and
+      with no expectation of sudden wealth to be gained in the mines. I desire
+      therefore to quote largely from the pages of this book, believing that, in
+      this fashion, we shall come upon history of a fundamental sort, which
+      shall make us acquainted with the men and women of that day, with the
+      purposes and the ambitions which animated them, and with the hardships
+      which they encountered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "The States along the Mississippi were but sparsely settled in 1846, yet
+      the fame of the fruitfulness, the healthfulness, and the almost tropical
+      beauty of the land bordering the Pacific, tempted the members of the
+      Donner Party to leave their homes. These homes were situated in Illinois,
+      Iowa, Tennessee, Missouri, and Ohio. Families from each of these States
+      joined the train and participated in its terrible fate; yet the party
+      proper was organized in Sangamon County, Illinois, by George and Jacob
+      Donner and James F. Reed. Early in April, 1846, the party set out from
+      Springfield, Illinois, and by the first week in May reached Independence,
+      Missouri. Here the party was increased by additional members, and the
+      train comprised about one hundred persons....
+</p>
+    <p>
+In the party were aged
+      fathers with their trusting families about them, mothers whose very lives
+      were wrapped up in their children, men in the prime and vigor of manhood,
+      maidens in all the sweetness and freshness of budding womanhood, children
+      full of glee and mirthfulness, and babes nestling on maternal breasts.
+      Lovers there were, to whom the journey was tinged with rainbow hues of joy
+      and happiness, and strong, manly hearts whose constant support and
+      encouragement was the memory of dear ones left behind in homeland.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "The wonderment which all experience in viewing the scenery along the line
+      of the old emigrant road was peculiarly vivid to these people. Few
+      descriptions had been given of the route, and all was novel and
+      unexpected. In later years the road was broadly and deeply marked, and
+      good camping grounds were distinctly indicated. The bleaching bones of
+      cattle that had perished, or the broken fragments of wagons or castaway
+      articles, were thickly strewn on either side of the highway. But in 1846
+      the way was through almost trackless valleys waving with grass, along
+      rivers where few paths were visible, save those made by the feet of
+      buffalo and antelope, and over mountains and plains where little more than
+      the westward course of the sun guided the travelers. Trading-posts were
+      stationed at only a few widely distant points, and rarely did the party
+      meet with any human beings, save wandering bands of Indians. Yet these
+      first days are spoken of by all of the survivors as being crowned with
+      peaceful enjoyment and pleasant anticipations. There were beautiful
+      flowers by the roadside, an abundance of game in the meadows and
+      mountains, and at night there were singing, dancing, and innocent plays.
+      Several musical instruments, and many excellent voices, were in the party,
+      and the kindliest feeling and goodfellowship prevailed among the members.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "The formation of the company known as the Donner Party was purely
+      accidental. The union of so many emigrants into one train was not
+      occasioned by any preconcerted arrangement. Many composing the Donner
+      Party were not aware, at the outset, that such a tide of emigration was
+      sweeping to California. In many instances small parties would hear of the
+      mammoth train just ahead of them or just behind them, and by hastening
+      their pace, or halting for a few days, joined themselves to the party.
+      Many were with the train during a portion of the journey, but from some
+      cause or other became parted from the Donner company before reaching
+      Donner Lake. Soon after the train left Independence it contained between
+      two and three hundred wagons, and when in motion was two miles in length.
+      The members of the party proper numbered ninety."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This caravan, like many others of the great assemblage westbound at that
+      time, had great extremes in personnel. Some were out for mere adventure;
+      some were single men looking for a location. Most of them were fathers of
+      families, among them several persons of considerable means and of good
+      standing in the community which they were leaving. While we may suppose
+      that most of them were folk of no extraordinary sort, certainly some were
+      persons of education and intelligence. Among these was the wife of George
+      Donner—Tamsen Donner, a woman of education, a musician, a linguist,
+      a botanist, and of the most sublime heroism.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Tamsen Donner sent back now and then along the route some story of the
+      daily doings of the caravan; and such letters as these are of the utmost
+      interest to any who desire precise information of that time. It would seem
+      that the emigrants themselves for a great part of their route met with no
+      great adventures, nor indeed, appeared to be undertaking any unusual
+      affair. They followed a route up the Platte Valley already long known to
+      those of the eastern settlements.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Near the Junction of the North and South Platte, June 16, 1846.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "My Old Friend: We are now on the Platte, two hundred miles from Fort
+      Laramie. Our journey so far has been pleasant, the roads have been good,
+      and food plentiful. The water for part of the way has been indifferent,
+      but at no time have our cattle suffered for it. Wood is now very scarce,
+      but 'buffalo chips' are excellent; they kindle quickly and retain heat
+      surprisingly. We had this morning buffalo steaks broiled upon them that
+      had the same flavor they would have had upon hickory coals.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "We feel no fear of Indians; our cattle graze quietly around our
+      encampment unmolested. Two or three men will go hunting twenty miles from
+      camp; and last night two of our men lay out in the wilderness rather than
+      ride their horses after a hard chase.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Indeed, if I do not experience something far worse than I have yet done,
+      I shall say the trouble is all in getting started. Our wagons have not
+      needed much repair, and I can not yet tell in what respects they could be
+      improved. Certain it is, they can not be too strong. Our preparations for
+      the journey might have been in some respects bettered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Bread has been the principal article of food in our camp. We laid in one
+      hundred and fifty pounds of flour and seventy-five pounds of meat for each
+      individual, and I fear bread will be scarce. Meat is abundant. Rice and
+      beans are good articles on the road; cornmeal too, is acceptable. Linsey
+      dresses are the most suitable for children. Indeed, if I had one, it would
+      be acceptable. There is so cool a breeze at all times on the Plains that
+      the sun does not feel so hot as one would suppose.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "We are now four hundred and fifty miles from Independence. Our route at
+      first was rough, and through a timbered country, which appeared to be
+      fertile. After striking the prairie, we found a firstrate road, and the
+      only difficulty we have had, has been in crossing the creeks. In that,
+      however, there has been no danger.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "I never could have believed we could have traveled so far with so little
+      difficulty. The prairie between the Blue and the Platte Rivers is
+      beautiful beyond description. Never have I seen so varied a country, so
+      suitable for cultivation. Everything is new and pleasing; the Indians
+      frequently come to see us, and the chiefs of a tribe breakfasted at our
+      tent this morning. All are so friendly that I can not help feeling
+      sympathy and friendship for them. But on one sheet what can I say?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Since we have been on the Platte, we have had the river on one side and
+      the ever varying mounds on the other, and have traveled through the bottom
+      lands from one to two miles wide, with little or no timber. The soil is
+      sandy, and last year, on account of the dry season, the emigrants found
+      grass here scarce. Our cattle are in good order, and when proper care has
+      been taken, none have been lost. Our milch cows have been of great
+      service, indeed. They have been of more advantage than our meat. We have
+      plenty of butter and milk.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "We are commanded by Captain Russell, an amiable man. George Donner is
+      himself yet. He crows in the morning and shouts out, 'Chain up, boys—chain
+      up,' with as much authority as though he was 'something in particular.'
+      John Denton is still with us. We find him useful in the camp. Hiram Miller
+      and Noah James are in good health and doing well. We have of the best
+      people in our company, and some, too, that are not so good.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Buffalo show themselves frequently. We have found the wild tulip, the
+      primrose, the lupine, the eardrop, the larkspur, and creeping hollyhock,
+      and a beautiful flower resembling the bloom of the beech tree, but in
+      bunches as large as a small sugarloaf, and of every variety of shade, to
+      red and green.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "I botanize, and read some, but cook 'heaps' more. There are four hundred
+      and twenty wagons, as far as we have heard, on the road between here and
+      Oregon and California.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Give our love to all inquiring friends. God bless them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Yours truly, Mrs. George Donner."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      By the Fourth of July the Donner Party had reached Fort Laramie. They
+      pushed on west over the old trail up the Sweetwater River and across the
+      South Pass, the easiest of all the mountain passes known to the early
+      travelers. Without much adventure they reached Fort Bridger, then only a
+      trading-post. Here occurred the fatal mistake of the Donner Party.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Some one at the fort strongly advised them to take a new route, a cut-off
+      said to shorten the distance by about three hundred miles. This cut-off
+      passed along the south shore of Great Salt Lake and caught up the old
+      California Trail from Fort Hall—then well established and well
+      known-along the Humboldt River. The great Donner caravan delayed for some
+      days at Fort Bridger, hesitating over the decision of which route to
+      follow. The party divided. All those who took the old road north of Salt
+      Lake by way of Fort Hall reached California in complete safety. Of the
+      original Donner Party there remained eighty-seven persons. All of these
+      took the cut-off, being eager to save time in their travel. They reached
+      Salt Lake after unspeakable difficulties. Farther west, in the deserts of
+      Nevada, they lost many of their cattle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now began among the party dissensions and grumblings. The story is a long
+      one. It reached its tragic denouement just below the summit of the
+      Sierras, on the shores of Donner Lake. The words of McGlashan may now best
+      serve our purpose.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Generally, the ascent of the Sierra brought joy and gladness to weary
+      overland emigrants. To the Donner Party it brought terror and dismay. The
+      company had hardly obtained a glimpse of the mountains, ere the winter
+      storm clouds began to assemble their hosts around the loftier crests.
+      Every day the weather appeared more ominous and threatening. The delay at
+      the Truckee Meadows had been brief, but every day ultimately cost a dozen
+      lives. On the twenty-third of October, they became thoroughly alarmed at
+      the angry heralds of the gathering storm, and with all haste resumed the
+      journey. It was too late! At Prosser Creek, three miles below Truckee,
+      they found themselves encompassed with six inches of snow. On the summits,
+      the snow was from two to five feet in depth. This was October 28, 1846.
+      Almost a month earlier than usual, the Sierra had donned its mantle of ice
+      and snow. The party were prisoners!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "All was consternation. The wildest confusion prevailed. In their
+      eagerness, many went far in advance of the main train. There was little
+      concert of action or harmony of plan. All did not arrive at Donner Lake
+      the same day. Some wagons and families did not reach the lake until the
+      thirty-first day of October, some never went farther than Prosser Creek,
+      while others, on the evening of the twenty-ninth, struggled through the
+      snow, and reached the foot of the precipitous cliffs between the summit
+      and the upper end of the lake. Here, baffled, wearied, disheartened, they
+      turned back to the foot of the lake."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These emigrants did not lack in health, strength, or resolution, but here
+      they were in surroundings absolutely new to them. A sort of panic seized
+      them now. They scattered; their organization disintegrated. All thought of
+      conjoint action, of a social compact, a community of interests, seems to
+      have left them. It was a history of every man for himself, or at least
+      every family for itself. All track of the road was now lost under the
+      snow. At the last pitch up to the summit of the Sierras precipitous cliffs
+      abounded. No one knew the way. And now the snows came once again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "The emigrants suffered a thousand deaths. The pitiless snow came down in
+      large, steady masses. All understood that the storm meant death. One of
+      the Indians silently wrapped his blanket about him and in deepest
+      dejection seated himself beside a tall pine. In this position he passed
+      the entire night, only moving occasionally to keep from being covered with
+      snow. Mrs. Reed spread down a shawl, placed her four children—Virginia,
+      Patty, James, and Thomas—thereon, and putting another shawl over
+      them, sat by the side of her babies during all the long hours of darkness.
+      Every little while she was compelled to lift the upper shawl and shake off
+      the rapidly accumulating snow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "With slight interruptions, the storm continued several days. The mules
+      and oxen that had always hovered about camp were blinded and bewildered by
+      the storm, and straying away were literally buried alive in the drifts.
+      What pen can describe the horror of the position in which the emigrants
+      found themselves? It was impossible to move through the deep, soft snow
+      without the greatest effort. The mules were gone, and were never found.
+      Most of the cattle had perished, and were wholly hidden from sight. The
+      few oxen which were found were slaughtered for beef."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The travelers knew that the supplies they had could not last long. On the
+      12th of November a relief party essayed to go forward, but after
+      struggling a short distance toward the summit, came back wearied and
+      broken-hearted, unable to make way through the deep, soft snow. Then some
+      one—said to have been F. W. Graves of Vermont—bethought
+      himself of making snowshoes out of the oxbows and the hides of the
+      slaughtered oxen. With these they did better.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Volunteers were called for yet another party to cross the mountains into
+      California. Fifteen persons volunteered. Not all of them were men—some
+      were mothers, and one was a young woman. Their mental condition was little
+      short of desperation. Only, in the midst of their intense hardships it
+      seemed to all, somewhere to the westward was California, and that there
+      alone lay any hope. The party traveled four miles the first day; and their
+      camp fires were visible below the summit. The next day they traveled six
+      miles and crossed the divide.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They were starving, cold, worn out, their feet frozen to bursting, their
+      blood chilled. At times they were caught in some of the furious storms of
+      the Sierras. They did not know their way. On the 27th of December certain
+      of the party resolved themselves to that last recourse which alone might
+      mean life. Surrounded by horrors as they were, it seemed they could endure
+      the thought of yet an additional horror.... There were the dead, the
+      victims who already had perished!...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Seven of the fifteen got through to the Sacramento Valley, among these the
+      young girl, Mary Graves, described as "a very beautiful girl, of tall and
+      slender build, and, exceptionally graceful character." The story brought
+      out by these survivors of the first party to cross the Sierras from the
+      starving camp set all California aflame. There were no less than three
+      relief expeditions formed, which at varying dates crossed the mountains to
+      the east. Some men crossed the snow belt five times in all. The rescuers
+      were often in as much danger as the victims they sought to save.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And they could not save them. Back there in their tents and hovels around
+      Donner Lake starvation was doing its work steadily. There is contemporary
+      history also covering the details of this. Tamsen Donner, heroine that she
+      was, kept a diary which would have been valuable for us, but this was lost
+      along with her paintings and her botanical collections. The best preserved
+      diary is that of Patrick Breen, done in simple and matter-of-fact fashion
+      throughout most of the starving winter. Thus:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Dec. 17. Pleasant; William Murphy returned from the mountain party last
+      evening; Baylis Williams died night before last; Milton and Noah started
+      for Donner's eight days ago; not returned yet; think they are lost in the
+      snow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Dec. 21. Milton got back last night from Donner's camp. Sad news; Jacob
+      Donner, Samuel Shoemaker, Rhineheart, and Smith are dead; the rest of them
+      in a low situation; snowed all night, with a strong southwest wind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Dec. 23. Clear to-day; Milton took some of his meat away; all well at
+      their camp. Began this day to read the 'Thirty Days' Prayers'; Almighty
+      God, grant the requests of unworthy sinners!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Jan. 13. Snowing fast; snow higher than the shanty; it must be thirteen
+      feet deep. Can not get wood this morning; it is a dreadful sight for us to
+      look upon.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Jan. 27. Commenced snowing yesterday; still continues today. Lewis
+      Keseberg, Jr., died three days ago; food growing scarce; don't have fire
+      enough to cook our hides.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Jan. 31. The sun does not shine out brilliant this morning; froze hard
+      last night; wind northwest. Landrum Murphy died last night about ten
+      o'clock; Mrs. Reed went to Graves's this morning to look after goods.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Feb. 4. Snowed hard until twelve o'clock last night; many uneasy for fear
+      we shall all perish with hunger; we have but little meat left, and only
+      three hides; Mrs. Reed has nothing but one hide, and that is on Graves's
+      house; Milton lives there, and likely will keep that. Eddy's child died
+      last night.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Feb. 7. Ceased to snow at last; today it is quite pleasant. McCutchen's
+      child died on the second of this month.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "[This child died and was buried in the Graves's cabin. Mr. W. C. Graves
+      helped dig the grave near one side of the cabin, and laid the little one
+      to rest. One of the most heart-rending features of this Donner tragedy is
+      the number of infants that perished. Mrs. Breen, Mrs. Pike, Mrs. Foster,
+      Mrs. McCutchen, Mrs. Eddy, and Mrs. Graves each had nursing babes when the
+      fatal camp was pitched at Donner Lake.]
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Feb. 8. Fine, clear morning. Spitzer died last night, and we will bury
+      him in the snow; Mrs. Eddy died on the night of the seventh.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Feb. 9. Mrs. Pike's child all but dead; Milton is at Murphy's, not able
+      to get out of bed; Mrs. Eddy and child buried today; wind southeast.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Feb. 10. Beautiful morning; thawing in the sun; Milton Elliott died last
+      night at Murphy's cabin, and Mrs. Reed went there this morning to see
+      about his effects. John Denton trying to borrow meat for Graves; had none
+      to give; they had nothing but hides; all are entirely out of meat, but a
+      little we have; our hides are nearly all eat up, but with God's help
+      spring will soon smile upon us."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was one survivor of the camp at Donner Lake, a man named Lewis
+      Keseberg, of German descent. That he was guilty of repeated cannibalism
+      cannot be doubted. It was in his cabin that, after losing all her loved
+      ones, the heroic Tamsen Donner met her end. Many thought he killed her for
+      the one horrid purpose. *
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    * Many years later (1879) Keseberg declared under oath to C. F.
+McGlashan that he did not take her life. See "History of the Donner"
+Party, pp. 212, 213.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Such then is the story of one of the great emigrant parties who started
+      West on a hazard of new fortunes in the early days of the Oregon Trail.
+      Happily there has been no parallel to the misadventures of this ill-fated
+      caravan. It is difficult—without reading these bald and awful
+      details—to realize the vast difference between that day and this.
+      Today we may by the gentle stages of a pleasant railway journey arrive at
+      Donner Lake. Little trace remains, nor does any kindly soul wish for more
+      definite traces, of those awful scenes. Only a cross here and there with a
+      legend, faint and becoming fainter every year, may be seen, marking the
+      more prominent spots of the historic starving camp.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Up on the high mountain side, for the most part hid in the forest, lie the
+      snowsheds and tunnels of the railway, now encountering its stiffest climb
+      up the steep slopes to the summit of the Sierras. The author visited this
+      spot of melancholy history in company with the vice-president of the great
+      railway line which here swings up so steadily and easily over the Sierras.
+      Bit by bit we checked out as best we might the fateful spots mentioned in
+      the story of the Donner Party. A splendid motor highway runs by the
+      lakeside now. While we halted our own car there, a motor car drove up from
+      the westward—following that practical automobile highway which now
+      exists from the plains of California across the Sierras and east over
+      precisely that trail where once the weary feet of the oxen dragged the
+      wagons of the early emigrants. It was a small car of no expensive type. It
+      was loaded down with camping equipment until the wheels scarcely could be
+      seen. It carried five human occupants—an Iowa farmer and his family.
+      They had been out to California for a season. Casually they had left Los
+      Angeles, had traveled north up the valleys of California, east across the
+      summit of the Sierras, and were here now bound for Iowa over the old
+      emigrant trail!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We hailed this new traveler on the old trail. I do not know whether or not
+      he had any idea of the early days of that great highway; I suspect that he
+      could tell only of its present motoring possibilities. But his wheels were
+      passing over the marks left more than half a century ago by the cracked
+      felloes of the emigrant wagons going west in search of homes. If we seek
+      history, let us ponder that chance pause of the eastbound family,
+      traveling by motor for pleasure, here by the side of the graves of the
+      travelers of another day, itself so briefly gone. What an epoch was
+      spanned in the passing of that frontier!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0007" id="link2HCH0007">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter VII. The Indian Wars
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      It might well be urged against the method employed in these pages that,
+      although we undertook to speak of the last American frontier, all that we
+      really thus far have done has been to describe a series of frontiers from
+      the Missouri westward. In part this is true. But it was precisely in this
+      large, loose, and irregular fashion that we actually arrived at our last
+      frontier. Certainly our westbound civilization never advanced by any
+      steady or regular process. It would be a singularly illuminating map—and
+      one which I wish we might show—which would depict in different
+      colors the great occupied areas of the West, with the earliest dates of
+      their final and permanent occupation. Such a map as this would show us
+      that the last frontier of America was overleaped and left behind not once
+      but a score of times.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The land between the Missouri and the Rockies, along the Great Plains and
+      the high foothills, was crossed over and forgotten by the men who were
+      forging on into farther countries in search of lands where fortune was
+      swift and easy. California, Oregon, all the early farming and timbering
+      lands of the distant Northwest—these lay far beyond the Plains; and
+      as we have noted, they were sought for, even before gold was dreamed of
+      upon the Pacific Slope.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So here, somewhere between the Missouri and the Rockies, lay our last
+      frontier, wavering, receding, advancing, gaining and losing, changing a
+      little more every decade—and at last so rapidly changed as to be
+      outworn and abolished in one swift decade all its own.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This unsettled land so long held in small repute by the early Americans,
+      was, as we have pointed out, the buffalo-range and the country of the
+      Horse Indians—the Plains tribes who lived upon the buffalo. For a
+      long time it was this Indian population which held back the white
+      settlements of Kansas, Nebraska, the Dakotas, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado.
+      But as men began to work farther and farther westward in search of homes
+      in Oregon, or in quest of gold in California or Idaho or Montana, the
+      Indian question came to be a serious one.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To the Army, soon after the Civil War, fell the task of exterminating, or
+      at least evicting, the savage tribes over all this unvalued and unknown
+      Middle West. This was a process not altogether simple. For a considerable
+      time the Indians themselves were able to offer very effective resistance
+      to the enterprise. They were accustomed to living upon that country, and
+      did not need to bring in their own supplies; hence the Army fought them at
+      a certain disadvantage. In sooth, the Army had to learn to become half
+      Indian before it could fight the Indians on anything like even terms. We
+      seem not so much to have coveted the lands in the first Indian-fighting
+      days; we fought rather for the trails than for the soil. The Indians
+      themselves had lived there all their lives, had conquered their
+      environment, and were happy in it. They made a bitter fight; nor are they
+      to be blamed for doing so.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The greatest of our Indian wars have taken place since our own Civil War;
+      and perhaps the most notable of all the battles are those which were
+      fought on the old cow range—in the land of our last frontier. We do
+      not lack abundant records of this time of our history. Soon after the
+      Civil War the railroads began edging out into the plains. They brought,
+      besides many new settlers, an abundance of chroniclers and historians and
+      writers of hectic fiction or supposed fact. A multitude of books came out
+      at this time of our history, most of which were accepted as truth. That
+      was the time when we set up as Wild West heroes rough skin-clad hunters and
+      so-called scouts, each of whom was allowed to tell his own story and to
+      have it accepted at par. As a matter of fact, at about the time the Army
+      had succeeded in subduing the last of the Indian tribes on the
+      buffalo-range, the most of our Wild West history, at least so far as
+      concerned the boldest adventure, was a thing of the past. It was easy to
+      write of a past which every one now was too new, too ignorant, or too busy
+      critically to remember.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Even as early as 1866, Colonel Marcy, an experienced army officer and
+      Indian-fighter, took the attitude of writing about a vanishing phase of
+      American life. In his "Army Life on the Border," he says:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "I have been persuaded by many friends that the contents of the book which
+      is herewith presented to the public are not without value as records of a
+      fast-vanishing age, and as truthful sketches of men of various races whose
+      memory will shortly depend only on romance, unless some one who knew them
+      shall undertake to leave outlines of their peculiar characteristics.... I
+      am persuaded that excuse may be found in the simple fact that all these
+      peoples of my description—men, conditions of life, races of
+      aboriginal inhabitants and adventurous hunters and pioneers—are
+      passing away. A few years more and the prairie will be transformed into
+      farms. The mountain ravines will be the abodes of busy manufacturers, and
+      the gigantic power of American civilization will have taken possession of
+      the land from the great river of the West to the very shores of the
+      Pacific.... The world is fast filling up. I trust I am not in error when I
+      venture to place some value, however small, on everything which goes to
+      form the truthful history of a condition of men incident to the advances
+      of civilization over the continent—a condition which forms peculiar
+      types of character, breeds remarkable developments of human nature—a
+      condition also which can hardly again exist on this or any other
+      continent, and which has, therefore, a special value in the sum of human
+      history."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Such words as the foregoing bespeak a large and dignified point of view.
+      No one who follows Marcy's pages can close them with anything but respect
+      and admiration. It is in books such as this, then, that we may find
+      something about the last stages of the clearing of the frontier.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Even in Marcy's times the question of our Government's Indian policy was a
+      mooted one. He himself as an Army officer looked at the matter
+      philosophically, but his estimate of conditions was exact. Long ago as he
+      wrote, his conclusions were such as might have been given forty years
+      later.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "The limits of their accustomed range are rapidly contracting, and their
+      means of subsistence undergoing a corresponding diminution. The white man
+      is advancing with rapid strides upon all sides of them, and they are
+      forced to give way to his encroachments. The time is not far distant when
+      the buffalo will become extinct, and they will then be compelled to adopt
+      some other mode of life than the chase for a subsistence.... No man will
+      quietly submit to starvation when food is within his reach, and if he
+      cannot obtain it honestly he will steal it or take it by force. If,
+      therefore, we do not induce them to engage in agricultural avocations we
+      shall in a few years have before us the alternative of exterminating them
+      or fighting them perpetually. That they are destined ultimately to
+      extinction does not in my mind admit of a doubt. For the reasons above
+      mentioned it may at first be necessary for our government to assert its
+      authority over them by a prompt and vigorous exercise of the military
+      arm.... The tendency of the policy I have indicated will be to assemble
+      these people in communities where they will be more readily controlled;
+      and I predict from it the most gratifying results."
+</p>
+    <p>
+Another well-informed
+      army officer, Colonel Richard Dodge, himself a hunter, a trailer, and a
+      rider able to compete with the savages in their own fields, penetrated to
+      the heart of the Indian problem when he wrote:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "The conception of Indian character is almost impossible to a man who has
+      passed the greater portion of his life surrounded by the influences of a
+      cultivated, refined, and moral society.... The truth is simply too
+      shocking, and the revolted mind takes refuge in disbelief as the less
+      painful horn of the dilemma. As a first step toward an understanding of
+      his character we must get at his standpoint of morality. As a child he is
+      not brought up.... From the dawn of intelligence his own will is his law.
+      There is no right and no wrong to him.... No dread of punishment restrains
+      him from any act that boyish fun or fury may prompt. No lessons
+      inculcating the beauty and sure reward of goodness or the hideousness and
+      certain punishment of vice are ever wasted on him. The men by whom he is
+      surrounded, and to whom he looks as models for his future life, are great
+      and renowned just in proportion to their ferocity, to the scalps they have
+      taken, or the thefts they have committed. His earliest boyish memory is
+      probably a dance of rejoicing over the scalps of strangers, all of whom he
+      is taught to regard as enemies. The lessons of his mother awaken only a
+      desire to take his place as soon as possible in fight and foray. The
+      instruction of his father is only such as is calculated to fit him best to
+      act a prominent part in the chase, in theft, and in murder.... Virtue,
+      morality, generosity, honor, are words not only absolutely without
+      significance to him, but are not accurately translatable into any Indian
+      language on the Plains."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These are sterner, less kindly, less philosophic words than Marcy's, but
+      they keenly outline the duty of the Army on the frontier. We made treaties
+      with the Indians and broke them. In turn men such as these ignorant
+      savages might well be expected to break their treaties also; and they did.
+      Unhappily our Indian policy at that time was one of mingled ferocity and
+      wheedling. The Indians did not understand us any more than we did them.
+      When we withdrew some of the old frontier posts from the old
+      hunting-range, the action was construed by the tribesmen as an admission
+      that we feared them, and they acted upon that idea. In one point of view
+      they had right with them, for now we were moving out into the last of the
+      great buffalo country. Their war was one of desperation, whereas ours was
+      one of conquest, no better and no worse than all the wars of conquest by
+      which the strong have taken the possessions of the weak.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Our Army at the close of the Civil War and at the beginning of the wars
+      with the Plains tribes was in better condition than it has ever been since
+      that day. It was made up of the soundest and best-seasoned soldiers that
+      ever fought under our flag; and at that time it represented a greater
+      proportion of our fighting strength than it ever has before or since. In
+      1860 the Regular Army, not counting the volunteer forces, was 16,000. In
+      1870 it was 37,000—one soldier to each one thousand of our
+      population.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Against this force, pioneers of the vaster advancing army of peaceful
+      settlers now surging West, there was arrayed practically all the
+      population of fighting tribes such as the Sioux, the two bands of the
+      Cheyennes, the Piegans, the Assiniboines, the Arapahoes, the Kiowas, the
+      Comanches, and the Apaches. These were the leaders of many other tribes in
+      savage campaigns which set the land aflame from the Rio Grande to our
+      northern line. The Sioux and Cheyennes were more especially the leaders,
+      and they always did what they could to enlist the aid of the less warlike
+      tribes such as the Crows, the Snakes, the Bannacks, the Utes—indeed
+      all of the savage or semi-civilized tribes which had hung on the flanks of
+      the traffic of the westbound trail.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Sioux, then at the height of their power, were distinguished by many
+      warlike qualities. They fought hard and were quick to seize upon any signs
+      of weakness in their enemies. When we, in the course of our Civil War, had
+      withdrawn some of the upper posts, the Sioux edged in at once and pressed
+      back the whites quite to the eastern confines of the Plains. When we were
+      locked in the death grip of internecine war in 1862, they rose in one
+      savage wave of rebellion of their own and massacred with the most horrible
+      ferocity not less than six hundred and forty-four whites in Minnesota and
+      South Dakota. When General Sibley went out among them on his later
+      punitive campaign he had his hands full for many a long and weary day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Events following the close of the Civil War did not mend matters in the
+      Indian situation. The railroads had large land grants given to them along
+      their lines, and they began to offer these lands for sale to settlers.
+      Soldier scrip entitling the holder to locate on public lands now began to
+      float about. Some of the engineers, even some of the laborers, upon the
+      railroads, seeing how really feasible was the settlement of these Plains,
+      began to edge out and to set up their homes, usually not far from the
+      railway lines. All this increase in the numbers of the white population
+      not only infuriated the Indians the more, but gave them the better chance
+      to inflict damage upon our people. Our Army therefore became very little
+      more than a vast body of police, and it was always afoot with the purpose
+      of punishing these offending tribesmen, who knew nothing of the higher
+      laws of war and who committed atrocities that have never been equalled in
+      history; unless it be by one of the belligerents of the Great War in
+      Europe, with whom we are at this writing engaged—once more in the
+      interest of a sane and human civilization. The last great struggle for the
+      occupation of the frontier was on. It involved the ownership of the last
+      of our open lands; and hence may be called the war of our last frontier.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The settler who pushed West continued to be the man who shared his time
+      between his rifle and his plough. The numerous buffalo were butchered with
+      an endless avidity by the men who now appeared upon the range. As the
+      great herds regularly migrated southward with each winter's snows, they
+      were met by the settlers along the lower railway lines and in a brutal
+      commerce were killed in thousands and in millions. The Indians saw this
+      sudden and appalling shrinkage of their means of livelihood. It meant
+      death to them. To their minds, especially when they thought we feared
+      them, there was but one answer to all this—the whites must all be
+      killed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Red Cloud, Crazy Horse, Roman Nose, American Horse, Black Kettle—these
+      were names of great Indian generals who proved their ability to fight. At
+      times they brought into the open country, which as yet remained unoccupied
+      by the great pastoral movement from the south, as many as five thousand
+      mounted warriors in one body, and they were well armed and well supplied
+      with ammunition. Those were the days when the Indian agents were carrying
+      on their lists twice as many Indians as actually existed—and
+      receiving twice as many supplies as really were issued to the tribes. The
+      curse of politics was ours even at that time, and it cost us then, as now,
+      unestimated millions of our nation's dearest treasures. As to the
+      reservations which the Indians were urged to occupy, they left them when
+      they liked. In the end, when they were beaten, all they were asked to do
+      was to return to these reservations and be fed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There were fought in the West from 1869 to 1875 more than two hundred
+      pitched actions between the Army and the Indians. In most cases the white
+      men were heavily outnumbered. The account which the Army gave of itself on
+      scores of unremembered minor fields—which meant life or death to all
+      engaged—would make one of the best pages of our history, could it be
+      written today. The enlisted men of the frontier Army were riding and
+      shooting men, able to live as the Indians did and able to beat them at
+      their own game. They were led by Army officers whose type has never been
+      improved upon in any later stage of our Army itself, or of any army in the
+      world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There are certain great battles which may at least receive notice,
+      although it would be impossible to mention more than a few of the
+      encounters of the great Indian wars on the buffalo-range at about the time
+      of the buffalo's disappearance. The Fetterman Massacre in 1866, near Fort
+      Phil Kearney, a post located at the edge of the Big Horn Mountains, was a
+      blow which the Army never has forgotten. "In a place of fifty feet square
+      lay the bodies of Colonel Fetterman, Captain Brown, and sixty-five
+      enlisted men. Each man was stripped naked and hacked and scalped, the
+      skulls beaten in with war clubs and the bodies gashed with knives almost
+      beyond recognition, with other ghastly mutilations that the civilized pen
+      hesitates to record."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This tragedy brought the Indian problem before the country as never
+      before. The hand of the Western rancher and trader was implacably against
+      the tribesmen of the plains; the city-dweller of the East, with hazy
+      notions of the Indian character, was disposed to urge lenient methods upon
+      those responsible for governmental policy. While the Sioux and Cheyenne
+      wars dragged on, Congress created, by act of July 20, 1867, a peace
+      commission of four civilians and three army officers to deal with the
+      hostile tribes. For more than a year, with scant sympathy from the
+      military members, this commission endeavored to remove the causes of
+      friction by amicable conference with the Indian chiefs. The attitude of
+      the Army is reflected in a letter of General Sherman to his brother. "We
+      have now selected and provided reservations for all, off the great roads.
+      All who cling to their old hunting-grounds are hostile and will remain so
+      till killed off. We will have a sort of predatory war for years—every
+      now and then be shocked by the indiscriminate murder of travelers and
+      settlers, but the country is so large, and the advantage of the Indians so
+      great, that we cannot make a single war and end it. From the nature of
+      things we must take chances and clean out Indians as we encounter them."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Segregation of the Indian tribes upon reservations seemed to the
+      commission the only solution of the vexing problem. Various treaties were
+      made and others were projected looking toward the removal of the tribesmen
+      from the highways of continental travel. The result was misgiving and
+      increased unrest among the Indians.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In midsummer of 1868 forays occurred at many points along the border of
+      the Indian Territory. General Sheridan, who now commanded the Department
+      of the Missouri, believed that a general war was imminent. He determined
+      to teach the southern tribesmen a lesson they would not forget. In the
+      dead of winter our troops marched against the Cheyennes, then in their
+      encampments below the Kansas line. The Indians did not believe that white
+      men could march in weather forty below zero, during which they themselves
+      sat in their tepees around their fires; but our cavalrymen did march in
+      such weather, and under conditions such as our cavalry perhaps could not
+      endure today. Among these troops was the Seventh Cavalry, Custer's
+      Regiment, formed after the Civil War, and it was led by Lieutenant-Colonel
+      George A. Custer himself, that gallant officer whose name was to go into
+      further and more melancholy history of the Plains.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Custer marched until he got in touch with the trails of the Cheyennes,
+      whom he knew to belong to Black Kettle's band. He did not at the time know
+      that below them, in the same valley of the Washita, were also the winter
+      encampments of the Kiowas, the Comanches, the Arapahoes, and even a few
+      Apaches. He attacked at dawn of a bleak winter morning, November 27, 1868,
+      after taking the precaution of surrounding the camp, and killed Black
+      Kettle, and another chief, Little Rock, and over a hundred of their
+      warriors. Many women and children also were killed in this attack. The
+      result was one which sank deep into the Indian mind. They began to respect
+      the men who could outmarch them and outlive them on the range. Surely,
+      they thought, these were not the same men who had abandoned Forts Phil
+      Kearney, C. F. Smith, and Reno. There had been some mistake about this
+      matter. The Indians began to think it over. The result was a pacifying of
+      all the country south of the Platte. The lower Indians began to come in
+      and give themselves up to the reservation life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One of the hardest of pitched battles ever fought with an Indian tribe
+      occurred in September, 1868, on the Arickaree or South Fork of the
+      Republican River, where General "Sandy" Forsyth, and his scouts, for nine
+      days fought over six hundred Cheyennes and Arapahoes. These savages had
+      been committing atrocities upon the settlers of the Saline, the Solomon,
+      and the Republican valleys, and were known to have killed some sixty-four
+      men and women at the time General Sheridan resolved to punish them.
+      Forsyth had no chance to get a command of troops, but he was allowed to
+      enlist fifty scouts, all "first-class, hardened frontiersmen," and with
+      this body of fighting men he carried out the most dramatic battle perhaps
+      ever waged on the Plains.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Forsyth ran into the trail of two or three large Indian villages, but none
+      the less he followed on until he came to the valley of the South Fork.
+      Here the Cheyennes under the redoubtable Roman Nose surrounded him on the
+      17th of September. The small band of scouts took refuge on a brushy island
+      some sixty yards from shore, and hastily dug themselves in under fire.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They stood at bay outnumbered ten to one, with small prospect of escape,
+      for the little island offered no protection of itself, and was in
+      pointblank range from the banks of the river. All their horses soon were
+      shot down, and the men lay in the rifle pits with no hope of escape. Roman
+      Nose, enraged at the resistance put up by Forsyth's men, led a band of
+      some four hundred of his warriors in the most desperate charge that has
+      been recorded in all our Indian fighting annals. It was rarely that the
+      Indian would charge at all; but these tribesmen, stripped naked for the
+      encounter, and led at first by that giant warrior, who came on shouting
+      his defiance, charged in full view not only once but three times in one
+      day, and got within a hundred feet of the foot of the island where the
+      scouts were lying.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      According to Forsyth's report, the Indians came on in regular ranks like
+      the cavalry of the white men, more than four hundred strong. They were met
+      by the fire of repeating carbines and revolvers, and they stood for the
+      first, second, third, fourth, and fifth fire of repeating weapons, and
+      still charged in! Roman Nose was killed at last within touch of the rifle
+      pits against which he was leading his men. The second charge was less
+      desperate, for the savages lost heart after the loss of their leader. The
+      third one, delivered towards the evening of that same day, was desultory.
+      By that time the bed of the shallow stream was well filled with fallen
+      horses and dead warriors.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Forsyth ordered meat cut from the bodies of his dead horses and buried in
+      the wet sand so that it might keep as long as possible. Lieutenant
+      Beecher, his chief of scouts, was killed, as also were Surgeon Mooers, and
+      Scouts Smith, Chalmers, Wilson, Farley, and Day. Seventeen others of the
+      party were wounded, some severely. Forsyth himself was shot three times,
+      once in the head. His left leg was broken below the knee, and his right
+      thigh was ripped up by a rifle ball, which caused him extreme pain. Later
+      he cut the bullet out of his own leg, and was relieved from some part of
+      the pain. After his rescue, when his broken leg was set it did not suit
+      him, and he had the leg broken twice in the hospital and reset until it
+      knitted properly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Forsyth's men lay under fire under a blazing sun in their holes on the
+      sandbar for nine days. But the savages never dislodged them, and at last
+      they made off, their women and children beating the death drums, and the
+      entire village mourning the unreturning brave. On the second day of the
+      fighting Forsyth had got out messengers at extreme risk, and at length the
+      party was rescued by a detachment of the Tenth Cavalry. The Indians later
+      said that they had in all over six hundred warriors in this fight. Their
+      losses, though variously estimated, were undoubtedly heavy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was encounters such as this which gradually were teaching the Indians
+      that they could not beat the white men, so that after a time they began to
+      yield to the inevitable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What is known as the Baker Massacre was the turning-point in the
+      half-century of warfare with the Blackfeet, the savage tribe which had
+      preyed upon the men of the fur trade in a long-continued series of
+      robberies and murders. On January 22, 1870, Major E. M. Baker, led by
+      half-breeds who knew the country, surprised the Piegans in their winter
+      camp on the Marias River, just below the border. He, like Custer, attacked
+      at dawn, opening the encounter with a general fire into the tepees. He
+      killed a hundred and seventy-three of the Piegans, including very many
+      women and children, as was unhappily the case so often in these surprise
+      attacks. It was deplorable warfare. But it ended the resistance of the
+      savage Blackfeet. They have been disposed for peace from that day to this.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The terrible revenge which the Sioux and Cheyennes took in the battle
+      which annihilated Custer and his men on the Little Big Horn in the summer
+      of 1876; the Homeric running fight made by Chief Joseph of the Nez Perces—a
+      flight which baffled our best generals and their men for a hundred and ten
+      days over more than fourteen hundred miles of wilderness—these are
+      events so well known that it seems needless to do more than to refer to
+      them. The Nez Perces in turn went down forever when Joseph came out and
+      surrendered, saying, "From where the sun now stands I fight against the
+      white man no more forever." His surrender to fate did not lack its
+      dignity. Indeed, a mournful interest attached to the inevitable destiny of
+      all these savage leaders, who, no doubt, according to their standards,
+      were doing what men should do and all that men could do.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The main difficulty in administering full punishment to such bands was
+      that after a defeat they scattered, so that they could not be overtaken in
+      any detailed fashion. After the Custer fight many of the tribe went north
+      of the Canadian line and remained there for some time. The writer himself
+      has seen along the Qu'Appelle River in Saskatchewan some of the wheels
+      taken out of the watches of Custer's men. The savages broke them up and
+      used the wheels for jewelry. They even offered the Canadians for trade
+      boots, hats, and clothing taken from the bodies of Custer's men.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Modoc war against the warriors of Captain Jack in 1873 was waged in
+      the lava beds of Oregon, and it had the distinction of being one of the
+      first Indian wars to be well reported in the newspapers. We heard a great
+      deal of the long and trying campaigns waged by the Army in revenge for the
+      murder of General Canby in his council tent. We got small glory out of
+      that war, perhaps, but at last we hanged the ringleader of the murderers;
+      and the extreme Northwest remained free from that time on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Far in the dry Southwest, where home-building man did not as yet essay a
+      general occupation of the soil, the blood-thirsty Apache long waged a
+      warfare which tried the mettle of our Army as perhaps no other tribes ever
+      have done. The Spaniards had fought these Apaches for nearly three hundred
+      years, and had not beaten them. They offered three hundred dollars each
+      for Apache scalps, and took a certain number of them. But they left all
+      the remaining braves sworn to an eternal enmity. The Apaches became
+      mountain outlaws, whose blood-mad thirst for revenge never died. No tribe
+      ever fought more bitterly. Hemmed in and surrounded, with no hope of
+      escape, in some instances they perished literally to the last man. General
+      George Crook finished the work of cleaning up the Apache outlaws only by
+      use of the trailers of their own people who sided with the whites for pay.
+      Without the Pima scouts he never could have run down the Apaches as he
+      did. Perhaps these were the hardest of all the Plains Indians to find and
+      to fight. But in 1872 Crook subdued them and concentrated them in
+      reservations in Arizona. Ten years later, under Geronimo, a tribe of the
+      Apaches broke loose and yielded to General Crook only after a prolonged
+      war. Once again they raided New Mexico and Arizona in 1885-6. This was the
+      last raid of Geronimo. He was forced by General Miles to surrender and,
+      together with his chief warriors, was deported to Fort Pickens in Florida.
+</p>
+    <p>
+      In all these savage pitched battles and bloody skirmishes, the surprises
+      and murderous assaults all over the old range, there were hundreds of
+      settlers killed, hundreds also of our army men, including some splendid
+      officers. In the Custer fight alone, on the Little Big Horn, the Army lost
+      Custer himself, thirteen commissioned officers, and two hundred and
+      fifty-six enlisted men killed, with two officers and fifty-one men
+      wounded; a total of three hundred and twenty-three killed and wounded in
+      one battle. Custer had in his full column about seven hundred men. The
+      number of the Indians has been variously estimated. They had perhaps five
+      thousand men in their villages when they met Custer in this, the most
+      historic and most ghastly battle of the Plains. It would be bootless to
+      revive any of the old discussions regarding Custer and his rash courage.
+      Whether in error or in wisdom, he died, and gallantly. He and his men
+      helped clear the frontier for those who were to follow, and the task took
+      its toll.
+</p>
+    <p>
+Thus, slowly but steadily, even though handicapped by a
+      vacillating governmental policy regarding the Indians, we muddled through
+      these great Indian wars of the frontier, our soldiers doing their work
+      splendidly and uncomplainingly, such work as no other body of civilized
+      troops has ever been asked to do or could have done if asked. At the close
+      of the Civil War we ourselves were a nation of fighting men. We were fit
+      and we were prepared. The average of our warlike qualities never has been
+      so high as then. The frontier produced its own pathfinders, its own
+      saviors, its own fighting men.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So now the frontier lay ready, waiting for the man with the plough. The
+      dawn of that last day was at hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0008" id="link2HCH0008">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter VIII. The Cattle Kings
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      It is proper now to look back yet again over the scenes with which we
+      hitherto have had to do. It is after the railways have come to the Plains.
+      The Indians now are vanishing. The buffalo have not yet gone, but are soon
+      to pass.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Until the closing days of the Civil War the northern range was a wide,
+      open domain, the greatest ever offered for the use of a people. None
+      claimed it then in fee; none wanted it in fee. The grasses and the sweet
+      waters offered accessible and profitable chemistry for all men who had
+      cows to range. The land laws still were vague and inexact in application,
+      and each man could construe them much as he liked. The excellent homestead
+      law of 1862, one of the few really good land laws that have been put on
+      our national statute books, worked well enough so long as we had good
+      farming lands for homesteading—lands of which a quarter section
+      would support a home and a family. This same homestead law was the only
+      one available for use on the cattle-range. In practice it was violated
+      thousands of times—in fact, of necessity violated by any cattle man
+      who wished to acquire sufficient range to run a considerable herd. Our
+      great timber kings, our great cattle kings, made their fortunes out of
+      their open contempt for the homestead law, which was designed to give all
+      the people an even chance for a home and a farm. It made, and lost,
+      America.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Swiftly enough, here and there along all the great waterways of the
+      northern range, ranchers and their men filed claims on the water fronts.
+      The dry land thus lay tributary to them. For the most part the open lands
+      were held practically under squatter right; the first cowman in any valley
+      usually had his rights respected, at least for a time. These were the days
+      of the open range. Fences had not come, nor had farms been staked out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From the South now appeared that tremendous and elemental force—most
+      revolutionary of all the great changes we have noted in the swiftly
+      changing West—the bringing in of thousands of horned kine along the
+      northbound trails. The trails were hurrying from the Rio Grande to the
+      upper plains of Texas and northward, along the north and south line of the
+      Frontier—that land which now we have been seeking less to define and
+      to mark precisely than fundamentally to understand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Indian wars had much to do with the cow trade. The Indians were
+      crowded upon the reservations, and they had to be fed, and fed on beef.
+      Corrupt Indian agents made fortunes, and the Beef Ring at Washington, one
+      of the most despicable lobbies which ever fattened there, now wrote its
+      brief and unworthy history. In a strange way corrupt politics and corrupt
+      business affected the phases of the cattle industry as they had affected
+      our relations with the Indians. More than once a herd of some thousand
+      beeves driven up from Texas on contract, and arriving late in autumn, was
+      not accepted on its arrival at the army post—some pet of Washington
+      perhaps had his own herd to sell! All that could be done then would be to
+      seek out a "holding range." In this way, more and more, the capacity of
+      the northern Plains to nourish and improve cattle became established.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Naturally, the price of cows began to rise; and naturally, also, the
+      demand for open range steadily increased. There now began the whole
+      complex story of leased lands and fenced lands. The frontier still was
+      offering opportunity for the bold man to reap where he had not sown. Lands
+      leased to the Indians of the civilized tribes began to cut large figure in
+      the cow trade—as well as some figure in politics—until at
+      length the thorny situation was handled by a firm hand at Washington. The
+      methods of the East were swiftly overrunning those of the West. Politics
+      and graft and pull, things hitherto unknown, soon wrote their hurrying
+      story also over all this newly won region from which the rifle-smoke had
+      scarcely yet cleared away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But every herd which passed north for delivery of one sort or the other
+      advanced the education of the cowman, whether of the northern or the
+      southern ranges. Some of the southern men began to start feeding ranges in
+      the North, retaining their breeding ranges in the South. The demand of the
+      great upper range for cattle seemed for the time insatiable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To the vision of the railroad builders a tremendous potential freightage
+      now appeared. The railroad builders began to calculate that one day they
+      would parallel the northbound cow trail with iron trails of their own and
+      compete with nature for the carrying of this beef. The whole swift story
+      of all that development, while the westbound rails were crossing and
+      criss-crossing the newly won frontier, scarce lasted twenty years.
+      Presently we began to hear in the East of the Chisholm Trail and of the
+      Western Trail which lay beyond it, and of many smaller and intermingling
+      branches. We heard of Ogallalla, in Nebraska, the "Gomorrah of the Range,"
+      the first great upper market-place for distribution of cattle to the
+      swiftly forming northern ranches. The names of new rivers came upon our
+      maps; and beyond the first railroads we began to hear of the Yellowstone,
+      the Powder, the Musselshell, the Tongue, the Big Horn, the Little
+      Missouri.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The wild life, bold and carefree, coming up from the South now in a mighty
+      surging wave, spread all over that new West which offered to the people of
+      older lands a strange and fascinating interest. Every one on the range had
+      money; every one was independent. Once more it seemed that man had been
+      able to overleap the confining limitations of his life, and to attain
+      independence, self-indulgence, ease and liberty. A chorus of Homeric,
+      riotous mirth, as of a land in laughter, rose up all over the great range.
+      After all, it seemed that we had a new world left, a land not yet used. We
+      still were young! The cry arose that there was land enough for all out
+      West. And at first the trains of white-topped wagons rivaled the crowded
+      coaches westbound on the rails.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In consequence there came an entire readjustment of values. This country,
+      but yesterday barren and worthless, now was covered with gold, deeper than
+      the gold of California or any of the old placers. New securities and new
+      values appeared. Banks did not care much for the land as security—it
+      was practically worthless without the cattle—but they would lend
+      money on cattle at rates which did not then seem usurious. A new system of
+      finance came into use. Side by side with the expansion of credits went the
+      expansion of the cattle business. Literally in hundreds of thousands the
+      cows came north from the exhaustless ranges of the lower country.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a wild, strange day. But withal it was the kindliest and most
+      generous time, alike the most contented and the boldest time, in all the
+      history of our frontiers. There never was a better life than that of the
+      cowman who had a good range on the Plains and cattle enough to stock his
+      range. There never will be found a better man's country in all the world
+      than that which ran from the Missouri up to the low foothills of the
+      Rockies.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The lower cities took their tribute of the northbound cattle for quite a
+      time. Wichita, Coffeyville, and other towns of lower Kansas in turn made
+      bids for prominence as cattle marts. Agents of the Chicago stockyards
+      would come down along the trails into the Indian Nations to meet the
+      northbound herds and to try to divert them to this or that market as a
+      shipping-point. The Kiowas and Comanches, not yet wholly confined to their
+      reservations, sometimes took tribute, whether in theft or in open
+      extortion, of the herds laboring upward through the long slow season.
+      Trail-cutters and herd-combers, licensed or unlicensed hangers-on to the
+      northbound throngs of cattle, appeared along the lower trails—with
+      some reason, occasionally; for in a great northbound herd there might be
+      many cows included under brands other than those of the road brands
+      registered for the drovers of that particular herd. Cattle thieving became
+      an industry of certain value, rivaling in some localities the operations
+      of the bandits of the placer camps. There was great wealth suddenly to be
+      seen. The weak and the lawless, as well as the strong and the
+      unscrupulous, set out to reap after their own fashion where they had not
+      sown. If a grave here or there appeared along the trail or at the edge of
+      the straggling town, it mattered little. If the gamblers and the
+      desperadoes of the cow towns such as Newton, Ellsworth, Abilene, Dodge,
+      furnished a man for breakfast day after day, it mattered little, for
+      plenty of men remained, as good or better. The life was large and
+      careless, and bloodshed was but an incident.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      During the early and unregulated days of the cattle industry, the frontier
+      insisted on its own creed, its own standards. But all the time, coming out
+      from the East, were scores and hundreds of men of exacter notions of trade
+      and business. The enormous waste of the cattle range could not long
+      endure. The toll taken by the thievery of the men who came to be called
+      range-rustlers made an element of loss which could not long be sustained
+      by thinking men. As the Vigilantes regulated things in the mining camps,
+      so now in slightly different fashion the new property owners on the upper
+      range established their own ideas, their own sense of proportion as to law
+      and order. The cattle associations, the banding together of many owners of
+      vast herds, for mutual protection and mutual gain were a natural and
+      logical development. Outside of these there was for a time a highly
+      efficient corps of cattle-range Vigilantes, who shot and hanged some
+      scores of rustlers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a frenzied life while it lasted—this lurid outburst, the last
+      flare of the frontier. Such towns as Dodge and Ogallalla offered
+      extraordinary phenomena of unrestraint. But fortunately into the worst of
+      these capitals of license came the best men of the new regime, and the new
+      officers of the law, the agents of the Vigilantes, the advance-guard of
+      civilization now crowding on the heels of the wild men of the West. In
+      time the lights of the dance-halls and the saloons and the gambling
+      parlors went out one by one all along the frontier. By 1885 Dodge City, a
+      famed capital of the cow trade, which will live as long as the history of
+      that industry is known, resigned its eminence and declared that from where
+      the sun then stood it would be a cow camp no more! The men of Dodge knew
+      that another day had dawned. But this was after the homesteaders had
+      arrived and put up their wire fences, cutting off from the town the
+      holding grounds of the northbound herds.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This innovation of barb-wire fences in the seventies had caused a
+      tremendous alteration of conditions over all the country. It had enabled
+      men to fence in their own water-fronts, their own homesteads. Casually,
+      and at first without any objection filed by any one, they had included in
+      their fences many hundreds of thousands of acres of range land to which
+      they had no title whatever. These men—like the large-handed cow
+      barons of the Indian Nations, who had things much as they willed in a
+      little unnoted realm all their own—had money and political
+      influence. And there seemed still range enough for all. If a man wished to
+      throw a drift fence here or there, what mattered it?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Up to this time not much attention had been paid to the Little Fellow, the
+      man of small capital who registered a brand of his own, and who with a
+      Maverick * here and there and the natural increase, and perhaps a trifle
+      of unnatural increase here and there—had proved able to accumulate
+      with more or less rapidity a herd of his own. Now the cattle associations
+      passed rules that no foreman should be allowed to have or register a brand
+      of his own. Not that any foreman could be suspected—not at all!—but
+      the foreman who insisted on his old right to own a running iron and a
+      registered brand was politely asked to find his employment somewhere else.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+  * In the early days a rancher by the name of Maverick, a Texas
+man, had made himself rich simply by riding out on the open range and
+branding loose and unmarked occupants of the free lands. Hence the term
+"Maverick" was applied to any unbranded animal running loose on
+the range. No one cared to interfere with these early activities in
+collecting unclaimed cattle. Many a foundation for a great fortune was
+laid in precisely that way. It was not until the more canny days in the
+North that Mavericks were regarded with jealous eyes.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      The large-handed and once generous methods of the old range now began to
+      narrow themselves. Even if the Little Fellow were able to throw a fence
+      around his own land, very often he did not have land enough to support his
+      herd with profit. A certain antipathy now began to arise between the great
+      cattle owners and the small ones, especially on the upper range, where
+      some rather bitter wars were fought—the cow kings accusing their
+      smaller rivals of rustling cows; the small man accusing the larger
+      operators of having for years done the same thing, and of having grown
+      rich at it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The cattle associations, thrifty and shifty, sending their brand
+      inspectors as far east as the stockyards of Kansas City and Chicago,
+      naturally had the whip hand of the smaller men. They employed detectives
+      who regularly combed out the country in search of men who had loose ideas
+      of mine and thine. All the time the cow game was becoming stricter and
+      harder. Easterners brought on the East's idea of property, of low
+      interest, sure returns, and good security. In short, there was set on once
+      more—as there had been in every great movement across the entire
+      West—the old contest between property rights and human independence
+      in action. It was now once more the Frontier against the States, and the
+      States were foredoomed to win.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The barb-wire fence, which was at first used extensively by the great
+      operators, came at last to be the greatest friend of the Little Fellow on
+      the range. The Little Fellow, who under the provisions of the homestead
+      act began to push West and to depart farther and farther from the
+      protecting lines of the railways, could locate land and water for himself
+      and fence in both. "I've got the law back of me," was what he said; and
+      what he said was true. Around the old cow camps of the trails, and around
+      the young settlements which did not aspire to be called cow camps, the
+      homesteaders fenced in land—so much land that there came to be no
+      place near any of the shipping-points where a big herd from the South
+      could be held. Along the southern range artificial barriers to the long
+      drive began to be raised. It would be hard to say whether fear of Texas
+      competition or of Texas cattle fever was the more powerful motive in the
+      minds of ranchers in Colorado and Kansas. But the cattle quarantine laws
+      of 1885 nearly broke up the long drive of that year. Men began to talk of
+      fencing off the trails, and keeping the northbound herds within the fences—a
+      thing obviously impossible.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The railroads soon rendered this discussion needless. Their agents went
+      down to Texas and convinced the shippers that it would be cheaper and
+      safer to put their cows on cattle trains and ship them directly to the
+      ranges where they were to be delivered. And in time the rails running
+      north and south across the Staked Plains into the heart of the lower range
+      began to carry most of the cattle. So ended the old cattle trails.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What date shall we fix for the setting of the sun of that last frontier?
+      Perhaps the year 1885 is as accurate as any—the time when the cattle
+      trails practically ceased to bring north their vast tribute. But, in fact,
+      there is no exact date for the passing of the frontier. Its decline set in
+      on what day the first lank "nester" from the States outspanned his
+      sun-burned team as he pulled up beside some sweet water on the rolling
+      lands, somewhere in the West, and looked about him, and looked again at
+      the land map held in his hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "I reckon this is our land, Mother," said he.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When he said that, he pronounced the doom of the old frontier.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0009" id="link2HCH0009">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      Chapter IX. The Homesteader
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      His name was usually Nester or Little Fellow. It was the old story of the
+      tortoise and the hare. The Little Fellow was from the first destined to
+      win. His steady advance, now on this flank, now on that, just back of the
+      vanguard pushing westward, had marked the end of all our earlier
+      frontiers. The same story now was being written on the frontier of the
+      Plains.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But in the passing of this last frontier the type of the land-seeking man,
+      the type of the American, began to alter distinctly. The million dead of
+      our cruel Civil War left a great gap in the American population which
+      otherwise would have occupied the West and Northwest after the clearing
+      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 Northwest became
+      largely foreign. Each German or Scandinavian who found himself prospering
+      in this rich new country was himself an immigration agency. He sent back
+      word to his friends and relatives in the Old World and these came to swell
+      the steadily thickening population of the New.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We have seen that the enterprising cattlemen had not been slow to reach
+      out for such resources as they might. Perhaps at one time between 1885 and
+      1890 there were over ten million acres of land illegally fenced in on the
+      upper range by 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 first." For the Nester who wanted a way
+      through these fences out into the open public lands, he cherished a bitter
+      resentment. And yet the Nester must in time win through, must eventually
+      find the little piece of land which he was seeking.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The government at Washington was finally obliged to take action. In the
+      summer of 1885, acting under authorization of Congress, President
+      Cleveland ordered the removal of all illegal enclosures and forbade any
+      person or association to prevent the peaceful occupation 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 Dawes Act of 1887 allotted the tribal
+      lands to the Indians in severalty and threw open the remainder to the
+      impatient homeseekers. Waiting thousands were ready at the Kansas line,
+      eager for the starting gun which was to let loose a mad stampede of crazed
+      human beings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It always was contended by the cowman that these settlers coming in on the
+      semi-arid range could not make a living there, that all they could do was
+      legally to starve 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 of that time. The western
+      Canadian farmer of today is a cherished, almost a petted being. But no one
+      ever showed any mercy to the American farmer who moved out West.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As always has been the case, a certain number of wagons might be seen
+      passing back East, as well as the somewhat larger number steadily moving
+      westward. There were lean years and dry years, hot years, yellow years
+      here and there upon the range. The phrase written on one disheartened
+      farmer's wagon top, "Going back to my wife's folks," became historic.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The railways were finding profit in carrying human beings out to the
+      cow-range just as once they had in transporting cattle. Indeed, it did not
+      take the wiser railroad men long to see that they could afford to set down
+      a farmer, at almost no cost for transportation, in any part of the new
+      West. He would after that be dependent upon the railroad in every way. The
+      railroads deliberately devised the 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-stock free on request. The same road, and others also, preached
+      steadily the doctrine of diversified farming. In short, the railroads, in
+      their own interests, did all they could to make prosperous the farms or
+      ranches of the West. The usual Western homestead now was part ranch and
+      part farm, although the term "ranch" continued for many years to cover all
+      the meanings of the farm of whatever sort.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There appeared now in the new country yet another figure of the Western
+      civilization, the land-boomer, with his irresponsible and unregulated
+      statements in regard to the values of these Western lands. These men were
+      not always desirable citizens, although of course no industry 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 world. In any one of these towns the
+      main industry was that of selling lands or "real estate." During the
+      Kansas boom of 1886 the land-boomers had their desks in the lobbies of
+      banks, the windows of hardware stores—any place and every place
+      offering room for a desk and chair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now also flourished apace the industry of mortgage loans. Eastern money
+      began to flood the western Plains, attracted by the high rates of
+      interest. In 1886 the customary 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 town lots far out in the
+      cornfields, and of buying unimproved subdivision property with borrowed
+      money at usurious rates of interest, was one riding for its own fall.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      None the less the Little Fellow kept on going out into the West. We did
+      not change our land laws for his sake, and for a time he needed no
+      sympathy. 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
+      of land. The foundations of many comfortable fortunes were laid in
+      precisely this way by thrifty men who were willing to work and willing to
+      wait.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was not until 1917 that the old homestead law limiting the settler to a
+      hundred and sixty acres of land was modified for the benefit of the
+      stock-raiser. The stock-raising homestead law, as it is called, permits a
+      man to make entry for not more than six hundred and forty acres of
+      unappropriated land which shall have been designated by the Secretary of
+      the Interior as "stock-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 stroll down to the land office and swear
+      solemnly that he had lived the legal length of time on his homestead,
+      whereas perhaps he had never seen it or had no more than ridden across it.
+      Today matters perhaps will be administered somewhat more strictly; for of
+      all those millions of acres of open land once in the West there is almost
+      none left worth the holding for farm purposes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Such dishonest practices were, however, indignantly denied by those who
+      fostered the irrigation and dry-farming booms which made the last phase of
+      exploitation of the old range. A vast amount of disaster was worked by the
+      failure of numberless irrigation companies, each of them offering lands
+      to the settlers through the medium of most alluring advertising. In almost
+      every case the engineers underestimated 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, purporting to
+      assure sudden wealth in apples, pears, celery, garden truck, cherries,
+      small fruits, alfalfa, pecans, eucalyptus or catalpa trees-anything you
+      liked—went to the wall. Sometimes whole communities became
+      straitened by the collapse of these overblown enterprises. The recovery
+      was slow, though usually the result of that recovery was a far healthier
+      and more stable condition of society.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This whole question of irrigation and dry farming, this or that phase of
+      the last scrambling, feverish settling on the last lands, was sorely
+      wasteful of human enterprise and human happiness. It was much like the
+      spawning rush of the salmon 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 went out to the dry
+      country to farm under the ditch, or to take up that still more hazardous
+      occupation—successful sometimes, though always hard and always risky—dry
+      farming on the benches which cannot be reached with irrigating waters.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Strangely changed was all the face of the cattle range by these successive
+      and startling innovations. The smoke of many little homes rose now,
+      scattered over all that tremendous country from the Rockies to the edge of
+      the short grass country, from Texas to the Canadian line. The cattle 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 Westerner who knew the
+      inside and out of local politics to pick up permanently considerable
+      tracts of land. Some of these ranches held together as late as 1916;
+      indeed, there are some such oldtime holdings still existent in the West,
+      although far more rare than formerly was the case.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Under all these conditions the price of land went up steadily. Land was
+      taken eagerly which would have been refused with contempt a decade
+      earlier. The parings and scraps and crumbs of the Old West now were fought
+      for avidly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The need of capital became more and more important in many of the great
+      land operations. Even the government reclamation enterprises could not
+      open lands to the settler on anything like the old homestead basis. The
+      water right cost money—sometimes twenty-five or thirty dollars an
+      acre; in some of the private reclamation enterprises, fifty dollars an
+      acre, or even more. Very frequently when 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. Naturally,
+      when the new farmers were starved out and in one way or another had made
+      other plans, the country itself went to pieces. That part of it was wisest
+      which did not kill the goose of the golden egg. But be these things as
+      they may be and as they were, the whole readjustment in agricultural
+      values over the once measureless and valueless cow country was a
+      stupendous and staggering thing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now appeared yet another agency of change. The high dry lands of many of
+      the Rocky Mountain States had long been regarded covetously by an industry
+      even more cordially disliked by the cattleman than the industry of
+      farming. The sheepman began to raise his head and to plan certain things
+      for himself in turn. 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 the feud between the
+      sheepmen and the cowmen was bitter and implacable. The issues in those
+      quarrels rarely got into the courts but were fought out on the ground. The
+      old Wyoming dead-line of the cowmen against intruding bands of Green River
+      sheep made a considerable amount of history which was never recorded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The sheepmen at length began to succeed in their plans. Themselves not
+      paying many taxes, not supporting the civilization of the country, not
+      building the schools or roads or bridges, they none the less claimed the
+      earth and the fullness thereof.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After the establishment of the great forest reserves, the sheepmen coveted
+      the range thus included. It has been the governmental policy to sell range
+      privileges in the forest reserves for sheep, on 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 course the issue even in this ancient contest is
+      foregone—as the cowman has had to raise his cows under fence, so
+      ultimately must the sheepman also buy his range in fee and raise his
+      product under fence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The wandering bands of sheep belong nowhere. They ruin a country. It is a
+      pathetic spectacle to see parts of the Old West in which sheep steadily
+      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 surface
+      of the earth. The denuded soil crumbles under their countless hoofs,
+      becomes dust, and blows away. They leave a waste, a desert, an
+      abomination.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There were yet other phases of change which followed hard upon the heels
+      of our soldiers after they had completed their task of subjugating the
+      tribes of the buffalo Indians. After the homesteads had been proved up in
+      some of the Northwestern States, such as Montana and the Dakotas, large
+      bodies of land were acquired by certain capitalistic farmers. All this new
+      land had been proved to be exceedingly 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 their innumerable stacks of wheat—the figures of the
+      vast mileage of their fencing—the yet more stupendous figures of the
+      outlay required to operate these farms, and the splendid totals of the
+      receipts from such operations—these at one time were familiar and
+      proudly presented features of boom advertising in the upper portions of
+      our black land belt, which day just at the eastern edge of the old Plains.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was to be repeated in this country something of the history of
+      California. In the great valleys, such as the San Joaquin, the first
+      interests were pastoral, and the cowmen found a vast realm which seemed to
+      be theirs forever. There came to them, however, the bonanza wheat farmers,
+      who flourished there about 1875 and through the next decade. Their highly
+      specialized industry boasted that it could bake a loaf of bread out of a
+      wheat field between the hours of sunrise and sunset. The outlay 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 turned over to the bank
+      owning the mortgages on his lands and plant. He turned in also all his
+      mules and horses, and retired worse than broke from an industry in which
+      he had once made his hundreds of thousands. Something of this same story
+      was to follow in the Dakotas. Presently we heard no more of the bonanza
+      wheat farms; and a little later they were not. The one-crop country is
+      never one of sound investing values; and a land boom is something of which
+      to beware—always and always to beware.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The prairie had passed; the range had passed; the illegal fences had
+      passed; and presently the cattle themselves were to pass—that is to
+      say, the great herds. As recently as five years ago (1912) it was my
+      fortune to be in the town of Belle Fourche, near the Black Hills—a
+      region long accustomed to vivid history, whether of Indians, mines, or
+      cows—at the time when the last of the great herds of the old
+      industry thereabouts were breaking up; and to see, coming down to the
+      cattle chutes to be shipped to the Eastern stockyards, the last hundreds
+      of 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, men grown gray in range
+      work. Alongside the herds, after the ancient fashion of trailing cattle,
+      rode cowboys who handled their charges with the same old skill. But even
+      the cowboys had changed. These were without exception men from the East
+      who had learned their trade here in the West. Here indeed was one of the
+      last acts of the great drama of the Plains. To many an observer there it
+      was a tragic thing. I saw many a cowman there the gravity on whose face
+      had nothing to do with commercial loss. It was the Old West he mourned. I
+      mourned with him.
+</p>
+    <p>
+Naturally the growth of the great stockyards of the
+      Middle West had an effect upon all the cattle-producing country of the
+      West, whether those cattle were bred in large or in small numbers. The
+      dealers of the stockyards, let us say, gradually evolved a perfect
+      understanding among 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; and their industry, since the invention of refrigerator cars and
+      the shipment of dressed beef in tins, has been one which has extended to
+      all the corners of the world. The great packers would rather talk of
+      "by-products" than of these things. Always they have been poor, so very
+      poor!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For a time the railroads east of the stockyard cities of Kansas City and
+      Chicago divided up _pro rata_ the dressed beef traffic. Investigation after
+      investigation has been made of the methods of the stockyard firms, but
+      thus far the law has not laid its hands successfully upon them. Naturally
+      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 range.
+      Where once a half ton of hay might have been sufficient to tide a cow over
+      the bad part of the winter, the Little Fellow who fences his own range of
+      a few hundred acres is obliged to figure on two or three tons, for he must
+      feed his herd on hay through the long months of the winter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The ultimate consumer, of course, is the one who pays the freight and
+      stands the cost of all this. Hence we have the swift growth of American
+      discontent 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 man's country. We have arrived all too swiftly upon the ways of the
+      Old World. And today, in spite of our love of peace, we are in an Old
+      World's war!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The insatiable demand of Americans for cheap lands assumed a certain
+      international phase at the period lying between 1900 and 1913 or later—the
+      years of the last great boom in Canadian lands. The Dominion Government,
+      represented by shrewd and enterprising men able to handle large
+      undertakings, saw with a certain satisfaction of 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 industry in Alberta and Saskatchewan. The Canadian Government went
+      into the publicity business on its own part. To a certain extent European
+      immigration was encouraged, but the United States really was the country
+      most combed out for settlers for these Canadian lands. As by magic,
+      millions of acres in western Canada were settled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The young American farmers of our near Northwest were especially coveted
+      as settlers, because they knew how to farm these upper lands far better
+      than any Europeans, and because each of them was able 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 farmers, resolved to live under
+      another flag. In one year the State of Iowa lost over fifteen million
+      dollars of money withdrawn from bank deposits by farmers moving across the
+      line into Canada.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The story of these land rushes was much the same there as it had been with
+      us. Not all succeeded. The climatic conditions were far more severe than
+      any which we had endured, and if the soil for 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. But the great Canadian land booms, carefully
+      fostered and well developed, offered a curious illustration of the
+      tremendous pressure of all the populations of the world for land and yet
+      more land.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the year 1911 the writer saw, all through the Peace River Valley and
+      even in the neighborhood of the Little Slave Lake, the advance-guard of
+      wheat farmers crowding out even beyond the Canadian frontier in the
+      covetous search for yet more cheap 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 homestead land
+      under the regulations of the Dominion Government! In the year 1913 I saw
+      an active business done in town lots at Fort McMurray, five hundred miles
+      north of the last railroad of Alberta, on the ancient Athabasca waterway
+      of the fur trade!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Who shall state the limit of all this expansion? The farmer has ever found
+      more and more land on which he could make a living; he is always taking
+      land which his predecessor has scornfully refused. If presently there
+      shall come the news that the land boomer has reached the mouth of the
+      Mackenzie River—as long ago he reached certain 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 may take us easily where I have stood, somewhat wearied,
+      at that spot on the Little Bell tributary of the Porcupine, where a slab
+      on a post said, "Portage Road to Ft. McPherson"—a "road" which is
+      not even a trail, but which crosses the most northerly of all the passes
+      of the Rockies, within a hundred miles of the Arctic Ocean.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Land, land, more land! It is the cry of the ages, more imperative and
+      clamorous now than ever in the history of the world and only arrested for
+      the time by the cataclysm of the Great War. The earth is well-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 land left
+      in Europe; but, unbelievably soon, the Great War will have been forgotten;
+      and then the march of the people will be resumed toward such frontiers of
+      the world as yet may remain. Land, land, more land!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Always in America we have occupied the land as fast as it was feasible to
+      do so. We have survived incredible hardships on the mining frontier, have
+      lived through desperate social conditions in the cow country, have fought
+      many of 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 failing, hoping and despairing—but steadily advancing
+      in the net result—has come that portion of the population which
+      builds homes and lives in them, and which is not content with a blanket
+      for a bed and the sky for a roof above.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We had a frontier once. It was our most priceless possession. It has not
+      been possible to eliminate from the blood of the American West, diluted
+      though it has 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 the United States. It was there we showed our
+      fighting edge, our unconquerable resolution, our undying faith. There, for
+      a time at least, we were Americans.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We had our frontier. We shall do ill indeed if we forget and abandon its
+      strong lessons, its great hopes, its splendid human dreams.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      ANDY ADAMS, "The Log of a Cowboy," 1903. "The Outlet," 1905. Homely but
+      excellently informing books done by a man rarely qualified for his task by
+      long experience in the cattle business and on the trail. Nothing better
+      exists than Adams's several books for the man who wishes trustworthy
+      information on the early American cattle business.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      GEORGE A. FORSYTH, "The Story of the Soldier," 1900.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      GEORGE BIRD GRINNELL, "The Story of the Indian," 1895.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      EMERSON HOUGH, "The Story of the Cowboy," 1897.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      CHARLES HOWARD SHINN, "The Story of the Mine," 1901.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      CY WARMAN, "The Story of the Railroad," 1898. The foregoing books of
+      Appleton's interesting series known as "The Story of the West" are
+      valuable as containing much detailed information, done by contemporaries
+      of wide experience.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      FRANCIS PARKMAN, "The Oregon Trail," 1901, with preface by the author to
+      the edition of 18991. This is a reprint of the edition published in 1857
+      under the title "Prairie and Rocky Mountain 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 the middle of the last century. The original title is more
+      accurate than the more usual one "The Oregon Trail," as the book itself is
+      in no sense an exclusive study of that historic highway.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      COLONEL R. B. MARCY, U. S. A., "Thirty Years of Army Life on the Border,"
+      1866. An admirable and very informing book done by an Army officer who was
+      also a sportsman and a close observer of the conditions of the life about
+      him. One of the standard books for any library of early Western
+      literature.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      EMERSON HOUGH, "The Story of the Outlaw," 1907. A study of the Western
+      desperado, with historical narratives of famous outlaws, stories of noted
+      border movements, Vigilante activities, and armed conflicts on the border.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      NATHANIEL PITT LANGFORD, "Vigilante Days and Ways," 1893. A storehouse of
+      information done in graphic anecdotal fashion of the scenes in the early
+      mining camps of Idaho and Montana. Valuable as the work of a contemporary
+      writer who took part in the scenes he describes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      JOHN C. VAN TRAMP, "Prairie and Rocky Mountain Adventures or Life in the
+      West," 1870. A study of the States and territorial regions of our Western
+      empire, embracing history, statistics, and geography, with descriptions of
+      the chief cities of the West. In large part a compilation of earlier
+      Western literature.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      SAMUEL BOWLES, "Our New West," 1869. Records of travel between the
+      Mississippi River and the Pacific Ocean, with details regarding scenery,
+      agriculture, mines, business, social life, etc., including a full
+      description of the Pacific States and studies of the "Mormons, Indians,
+      and Chinese" at that time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      HIRAM MARTIN CHITTENDEN, "The American Fur Trade of the Far West," 1902.
+      The work of a distinguished Army officer. Done with the exact care of an
+      Army engineer. An extraordinary collection of facts and a general view of
+      the picturesque early industry of the fur trade, which did so much toward
+      developing the American West. See also his "History of Steamboat
+      Navigation on the Missouri River" (1903).
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A. J. SOWELL, "Early Settlers and Indian Fighters of Southwest Texas,"
+      1900. A local book, but done with contemporary accuracy by a man who also
+      studied the Texas Rangers and who was familiar with some of the earlier
+      frontier characters of the Southwest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The foregoing volumes are of course but a few among the many scores or
+      hundreds which will have been read avidly by every man concerned with
+      frontier life or with the expansion of the American people to the West.
+      Space lacks for a fuller list, but the foregoing readings will serve to
+      put upon the trail of wider information any one interested in these and
+      kindred themes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Let especial stress again be laid upon the preeminent value of books done
+      by contemporaries, men who wrote, upon the ground, of things which they
+      actually saw and actually understood. It is not always, or perhaps often,
+      that these contemporary books achieve the place which they ought to have
+      and hold.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Among the many books dealing with the Indians and Indian Wars, the
+      following may be mentioned: J. P. DUNN, "Massacres of the Mountains, A
+      History of the Indian Wars of the Far West," 1886.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      L. E. TEXTOR, "Official Relations between the United States and the Sioux
+      Indians," 1896.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      G. W. MANYPENNY, "Our Indian Wards," 1880.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is an extensive bibliography appended to Frederic L. Paxson's "The
+      Last American Frontier" (1910), the first book to bring together the many
+      aspects of the Far West.
+    </p>
+
+<div>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 3033 ***</div>
+</body>
+</html>
+
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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Passing of the Frontier
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+Title: The Passing of the Frontier
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+
+
+
+Title: The Passing of the Frontier, A Chronicle of the Old West
+
+Author: Emerson Hough
+
+This Book, Volume 26 In The Chronicles Of America Series, Allen
+Johnson, Editor, Was Donated To Project Gutenberg By The James J.
+Kelly Library Of St. Gregory's University; Thanks To Alev Akman.
+
+
+THE PASSING OF THE FRONTIER, A CHRONICLE OF THE OLD WEST
+
+BY EMERSON HOUGH
+
+New Haven: Yale University Press
+Toronto: Glasgow, Brook & Co.
+London: Humphrey Milford
+Oxford University Press
+1918
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+I. THE FRONTIER IN HISTORY
+II. THE RANGE
+III. THE CATTLE TRAILS
+IV. THE COWBOY
+V. THE MINES
+VI. PATHWAYS OF THE WEST
+VII. THE INDIAN WARS
+VIII. THE CATTLE KINGS
+IX. THE HOMESTEADER
+BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
+
+
+
+THE PASSING OF THE FRONTIER
+
+Chapter I. The Frontier In History
+
+The frontier! There is no word in the English language more
+stirring, more intimate, or more beloved. It has in it all the
+elan of the old French phrase, En avant! It carries all of the
+old Saxon command, Forward!! It means all that America ever
+meant. It means the old hope of a real personal liberty, and yet
+a real human advance in character and achievement. To a genuine
+American it is the dearest word in all the world.
+
+What is, or was, the frontier? Where was it? Under what stars did
+it lie? Because, as the vague Iliads of ancient heroes or the
+nebulous records of the savage gentlemen of the Middle Ages make
+small specific impingement on our consciousness today, so also
+even now begin the tales of our own old frontier to assume a
+haziness, an unreality, which makes them seem less history than
+folklore. Now the truth is that the American frontier of history
+has many a local habitation and many a name. And this is why it
+lies somewhat indefinite under the blue haze of the years, all
+the more alluring for its lack of definition, like some old
+mountain range, the softer and more beautiful for its own
+shadows.
+
+The fascination of the frontier is and has ever been an undying
+thing. Adventure is the meat of the strong men who have built the
+world for those more timid. Adventure and the frontier are one
+and inseparable. They suggest strength, courage,
+hardihood--qualities beloved in men since the world
+began--qualities which are the very soul of the United States,
+itself an experiment, an adventure, a risk accepted. Take away
+all our history of political regimes, the story of the rise and
+fall of this or that partisan aggregation in our government; take
+away our somewhat inglorious military past; but leave us forever
+the tradition of the American frontier! There lies our comfort
+and our pride. There we never have failed. There, indeed, we
+always realized our ambitions. There, indeed, we were efficient,
+before that hateful phrase was known. There we were a melting-pot
+for character, before we came to know that odious appellation
+which classifies us as the melting-pot of the nations.
+
+The frontier was the place and the time of the strong man, of the
+self-sufficient but restless individual. It was the home of the
+rebel, the protestant, the unreconciled, the intolerant, the
+ardent--and the resolute. It was not the conservative and tender
+man who made our history; it was the man sometimes illiterate,
+oftentimes uncultured, the man of coarse garb and rude weapons.
+But the frontiersmen were the true dreamers of the nation. They
+really were the possessors of a national vision. Not statesmen
+but riflemen and riders made America. The noblest conclusions of
+American history still rest upon premises which they laid.
+
+But, in its broadest significance, the frontier knows no country.
+It lies also in other lands and in other times than our own. When
+and what was the Great Frontier? We need go back only to the time
+of Drake and the sea-dogs, the Elizabethan Age, when all North
+America was a frontier, almost wholly unknown, compellingly
+alluring to all bold men. That was the day of new stirrings in
+the human heart. Some strange impulse seemed to act upon the soul
+of the braver and bolder Europeans; and they moved westward, nor
+could have helped that had they tried. They lived largely and
+blithely, and died handsomely, those old Elizabethan adventurers,
+and they lie today in thousands of unrecorded graves upon two
+continents, each having found out that any place is good enough
+for a man to die upon, provided that he be a man.
+
+The American frontier was Elizabethan in its quality--childlike,
+simple, and savage. It has not entirely passed; for both
+Elizabethan folk and Elizabethan customs are yet to be found in
+the United States. While the half-savage civilization of the
+farther West was roaring on its way across the continent--while
+the day of the keelboatman and the plainsman, of the
+Indian-fighter and the miner, even the day of the cowboy, was
+dawning and setting--there still was a frontier left far behind
+in the East, near the top of the mountain range which made the
+first great barrier across our pathway to the West. That
+frontier, the frontier of Boone and Kenton, of Robertson and
+Sevier, still exists and may be seen in the Cumberland--the only
+remaining part of America which is all American. There we may
+find trace of the Elizabethan Age--idioms lost from English
+literature and American speech long ago. There we may see the
+American home life as it went on more than a hundred years ago.
+We may see hanging on the wall the long muzzle-loading rifle of
+an earlier day. We may see the spinning-wheel and the loom. The
+women still make in part the clothing for their families, and the
+men still make their own household furniture, their own farming
+implements, their own boots.
+
+This overhanging frontier of America is a true survival of the
+days of Drake as well as of the days of Boone. The people are at
+once godly and savage. They breed freely; they love their homes;
+they are ever ready for adventure; they are frugal, abstemious,
+but violent and strong. They carry on still the half-religious
+blood feuds of the old Scotch Highlands or the North of Ireland,
+whence they came. They reverence good women. They care little for
+material accumulations. They believe in personal ease and
+personal independence. With them life goes on not in the slow
+monotony of reiterated performance, but in ragged profile, with
+large exertions followed by large repose. Now that has been the
+fashion of the frontier in every age and every land of all the
+world. And so, by studying these people, we may even yet arrive
+at a just and comprehensive notion of what we might call the
+"feel" of the old frontier.
+
+There exists, too, yet another Saxon frontier in a far-off
+portion of the world. In that strange country, Australia,
+tremendous unknown regions still remain, and the wild pastoral
+life of such regions bids fair to exist yet for many years. A
+cattle king of Queensland held at one time sixty thousand square
+miles of land. It is said that the average size of pastoral
+holdings in the northern territory of Australia is two hundred
+and seventy-five thousand acres. Does this not recall the old
+times of free range in the American West?
+
+This strange antipodal civilization also retains a curious flavor
+of Elizabethan ideas. It does not plan for inordinate fortunes,
+the continual amassing of money, but it does deliberately plan
+for the use by the individual of his individual life. Australian
+business hours are shorter than American. Routine is less
+general. The individual takes upon himself a smaller load of
+effort. He is restive under monotony. He sets aside a great part
+of his life for sport. He lives in a large and young day of the
+world. Here we may see a remote picture of our own American
+West--better, as it seems to me, than that reflected in the rapid
+and wholly commercialized development of Western Canada, which is
+not flavored by any age but this.
+
+But much of the frontier of Australia is occupied by men of means
+who had behind them government aid and a semi-paternal
+encouragement in their adventures. The same is true in part of
+the government-fostered settlement of Western Canada. It was not
+so with the American West. Here was not the place of the rich man
+but of the poor man, and he had no one to aid him or encourage
+him. Perhaps no man ever understood the American West who did not
+himself go there and make his living in that country, as did the
+men who found it and held it first. Each life on our old frontier
+was a personal adventure. The individual had no government behind
+him and he lacked even the protection of any law.
+
+Our frontier crawled west from the first seaport settlements,
+afoot, on horseback, in barges, or with slow wagon-trains. It
+crawled across the Alleghanies, down the great river valleys and
+up them yet again; and at last, in days of new transportation, it
+leaped across divides, from one river valley to another. Its
+history, at first so halting, came to be very swift--so swift
+that it worked great elisions in its own story.
+
+In our own day, however, the Old West generally means the old cow
+country of the West--the high plains and the lower foothills
+running from the Rio Grande to the northern boundary. The still
+more ancient cattle-range of the lower Pacific Slope will never
+come into acceptance as the Old West. Always, when we use these
+words, we think of buffalo plains and of Indians, and of their
+passing before the footmen and riders who carried the phantom
+flag of Drake and the Virgin Queen from the Appalachians to the
+Rockies--before the men who eventually made good that glorious
+and vaunting vision of the Virginia cavaliers, whose party turned
+back from the Rockfish Gap after laying claim in the name of King
+George on all the country lying west of them, as far as the South
+Sea!
+
+The American cow country may with very good logic arrogate to
+itself the title of the real and typical frontier of all the
+world. We call the spirit of the frontier Elizabethan, and so it
+was; but even as the Elizabethan Age was marked by its contact
+with the Spanish civilization in Europe, on the high seas, and in
+both the Americas, so the last frontier of the American West also
+was affected, and largely, deeply, by Spanish influence and
+Spanish customs. The very phraseology of range work bears proof
+of this. Scores of Spanish words are written indelibly in the
+language of the Plains. The frontier of the cow-range never was
+Saxon alone.
+
+It is a curious fact also, seldom if ever noted, that this Old
+West of the Plains was very largely Southern and not Northern on
+its Saxon side. No States so much as Kentucky and Tennessee and,
+later, Missouri--daughters of Old Virginia in her
+glory--contributed to the forces of the frontiersmen. Texas,
+farther to the south, put her stamp indelibly upon the entire
+cattle industry of the West. Visionary, impractical, restless,
+adventurous, these later Elizabethan heroes--bowing to no yoke,
+insisting on their own rights and scorning often the laws of
+others, yet careful to retain the best and most advantageous
+customs of any conquered country--naturally came from those
+nearest Elizabethan countries which lay abandoned behind them.
+
+If the atmosphere of the Elizabethan Age still may be found in
+the forgotten Cumberlands, let us lay claim to kinship with
+yonder roystering heroes of a gallant day; for this was ever the
+atmosphere of our own frontier. To feel again the following
+breezes of the Golden Hind, or see again, floating high in the
+cloudless skies, the sails of the Great Armada, was the privilege
+of Americans for a double decade within the memory of men yet
+living, in that country, so unfailingly beloved, which we call
+the Old West of America.
+
+
+
+Chapter II. The Range
+
+When, in 1803, those two immortal youths, Meriwether Lewis and
+William Clark, were about to go forth on their great journey
+across the continent, they were admonished by Thomas Jefferson
+that they would in all likelihood encounter in their travels,
+living and stalking about, the mammoth or the mastodon, whose
+bones had been found in the great salt-licks of Kentucky. We
+smile now at such a supposition; yet it was not unreasonable
+then. No man knew that tremendous country that lay beyond the
+mouth of the Missouri.
+
+The explorers crossed one portion of a vast land which was like
+to nothing they had ever seen--the region later to become the
+great cattle-range of America. It reached, although they could
+know nothing of that, from the Spanish possessions on the south
+across a thousand miles of short grass lands to the present
+Canadian boundary line which certain obdurate American souls
+still say ought to have been at 54 degrees 40 minutes, and not
+where it is! From the Rio Grande to "Fifty-four forty," indeed,
+would have made nice measurements for the Saxon cattle-range.
+
+Little, however, was the value of this land understood by the
+explorers; and, for more than half a century afterwards, it
+commonly was supposed to be useless for the occupation of white
+men and suitable only as a hunting-ground for savage tribes. Most
+of us can remember the school maps of our own youth, showing a
+vast region marked, vaguely, "The Great American Desert," which
+was considered hopeless for any human industry, but much of which
+has since proved as rich as any land anywhere on the globe.
+
+Perhaps it was the treeless nature of the vast Plains which
+carried the first idea of their infertility. When the first
+settlers of Illinois and Indiana came up from south of the Ohio
+River they had their choice of timber and prairie lands. Thinking
+the prairies worthless--since land which could not raise a tree
+certainly could not raise crops--these first occupants of the
+Middle West spent a generation or more, axe in hand, along the
+heavily timbered river-bottoms. The prairies were long in
+settling. No one then could have predicted that farm lands in
+that region would be worth three hundred dollars an acre or
+better, and that these prairies of the Mississippi Valley would,
+in a few generations, be studded with great towns and would form
+a part of the granary of the world.
+
+But, if our early explorers, passing beyond the valley of the
+Missouri, found valueless the region of the Plains and the
+foothills, not so the wild creatures or the savage men who had
+lived there longer than science records. The buffalo then ranged
+from the Rio Grande to the Athabaska, from the Missouri to the
+Rockies, and beyond. No one seems to have concluded in those days
+that there was after all slight difference between the buffalo
+and the domestic ox. The native cattle, however, in untold
+thousands and millions, had even then proved beyond peradventure
+the sustaining and strengthening nature of the grasses of the
+Plains.
+
+Now, each creature, even of human species, must adjust itself to
+its environment. Having done so, commonly it is disposed to love
+that environment. The Eskimo and the Zulu each thinks that he has
+the best land in the world: So with the American Indian, who,
+supported by the vast herds of buffalo, ranged all over that
+tremendous country which was later to be given over to the white
+man with his domestic cattle. No freer life ever was lived by any
+savages than by the Horse Indians of the Plains in the buffalo
+days; and never has the world known a physically higher type of
+savage.
+
+On the buffalo-range--that is to say, on the cattle-range which
+was to be--Lewis and Clark met several bands of the Sioux--the
+Mandans and the Assiniboines, the Blackfeet, the Shoshones.
+Farther south were the Pawnees, the Kaws, the Otoes, the Osages,
+most of whom depended in part upon the buffalo for their living,
+though the Otoes, the Pawnees, the Mandans, and certain others
+now and then raised a little corn or a few squashes to help out
+their bill of fare. Still farther south dwelt the Kiowas, the
+Comanches, and others. The Arapahoes, the Cheyennes, the Crows,
+and the Utes, all hunters, were soon to come into the ken of the
+white man. Of such of these tribes as they met, the youthful
+captains made accounting, gravely and with extraordinary
+accuracy, but without discovering in this region much future for
+Americans. They were explorers and not industrial investigators.
+
+It was nearly half a century after the journey of Lewis and Clark
+that the Forty-Niners were crossing the Plains, whither,
+meanwhile, the Mormons had trekked in search of a country where
+they might live as they liked. Still the wealth of the Plains
+remained untouched. California was in the eyes of the world. The
+great cow-range was overleaped. But, in the early fifties, when
+the placer fields of California began to be less numerous and
+less rich, the half-savage population of the mines roared on
+northward, even across our northern line. Soon it was to roll
+back. Next it worked east and southeast and northeast over the
+great dry plains of Washington and Oregon, so that, as readily
+may be seen, the cow-range proper was not settled as most of the
+West was, by a directly westbound thrust of an eastern
+population; but, on the contrary, it was approached from several
+different angles--from the north, from the east, from the west
+and northwest, and finally from the south.
+
+The early, turbulent population of miners and adventurers was
+crude, lawless, and aggressive. It cared nothing whatever for the
+Indian tribes. War, instant and merciless, where it meant murder
+for the most part, was set on foot as soon as white touched red
+in that far western region.
+
+All these new white men who had crowded into the unknown country
+of the Plains, the Rockies, the Sierras, and the Cascades, had to
+be fed. They could not employ and remain content with the means
+by which the red man there had always fed himself. Hence a new
+industry sprang up in the United States, which of itself made
+certain history in that land. The business of freighting supplies
+to the West, whether by bull-train or by pack-train, was an
+industry sui generic, very highly specialized, and pursued by men
+of great business ability as well as by men of great hardihood
+and daring.
+
+Each of these freight trains which went West carried hanging on
+its flank more and more of the white men. As the trains returned,
+more and more was learned in the States of the new country which
+lay between the Missouri and the Rockies, which ran no man knew
+how far north, and no man could guess how far south. Now appears
+in history Fort Benton, on the Missouri, the great northern
+supply post--just as at an earlier date there had appeared Fort
+Hall, one of the old fur-trading posts beyond the Rockies, Bent's
+Fort on the Arkansas, and many other outposts of the new Saxon
+civilization in the West.
+
+Later came the pony express and the stage coach which made
+history and romance for a generation. Feverishly, boisterously, a
+strong, rugged, womanless population crowded westward and formed
+the wavering, now advancing, now receding line of the great
+frontier of American story.
+
+But for long there was no sign of permanent settlement on the
+Plains, and no one thought of this region as the frontier. The
+men there who were prospecting and exploiting were classified as
+no more than adventurers. No one seems to have taken a lesson
+from the Indian and the buffalo. The reports of Fremont long
+since had called attention to the nourishing quality of those
+grasses of the high country, but the day of the cowboy had not
+yet dawned. There is a somewhat feeble story which runs to the
+effect that in 1866 one of the great wagon-trains, caught by the
+early snows of winter, was obliged to abandon its oxen on the
+range. It was supposed that, of course, the oxen must perish
+during the winter. But next spring the owners were surprised to
+find that the oxen, so far from perishing, had flourished very
+much--indeed, were fat and in good condition. So runs the story
+which is often repeated. It may be true, but to accredit to this
+incident the beginnings of the cattle industry in the Indian
+country would surely be going too far. The truth is that the cow
+industry was not a Saxon discovery. It was a Latin enterprise,
+flourishing in Mexico long before the first of these miners and
+adventurers came on the range.
+
+Something was known of the Spanish lands to the south through the
+explorations of Pike, but more through the commerce of the
+prairies--the old wagon trade from the Missouri River to the
+Spanish cities of Sante Fe and Chihuahua. Now the cow business,
+south of the Rio Grande, was already well differentiated and
+developed at the time the first adventurers from the United
+States went into Texas and began to crowd their Latin neighbors
+for more room. There it was that our Saxon frontiersmen first
+discovered the cattle industry. But these southern and northern
+riflemen--ruthless and savage, yet strangely
+statesmanlike--though they might betimes drive away the owners of
+the herds, troubled little about the herds themselves. There was
+a certain fascination to these rude strangers in the slow and
+easeful civilization of Old Spain which they encountered in the
+land below them. Little by little, and then largely and yet more
+largely, the warriors of San Jacinto reached out and began to
+claim lands for themselves--leagues and uncounted leagues of
+land, which had, however, no market value. Well within the memory
+of the present generation large tracts of good land were bought
+in Texas for six cents an acre; some was bought for half that
+price in a time not much earlier. Today much of that land is
+producing wealth; but land then was worthless--and so were cows.
+
+This civilization of the Southwest, of the new Republic of Texas,
+may be regarded as the first enduring American result of contact
+with the Spanish industry. The men who won Texas came mostly from
+Kentucky and Tennessee or southern Ohio, and the first colonizer
+of Texas was a Virginian, Stephen Fuller Austin. They came along
+the old Natchez Trace from Nashville to the Mississippi
+River--that highway which has so much history of its own. Down
+this old winding trail into the greatest valley of all the world,
+and beyond that valley out into the Spanish country, moved
+steadily the adventurers whose fathers had but recently crossed
+the Appalachians. One of the strongest thrusts of the American
+civilization thus entered the cattle-range at its lower end,
+between the Rio Grande and the Red River.
+
+In all the several activities, mining, freighting, scouting,
+soldiering, riding pony express, or even sheer adventuring for
+what might come, there was ever a trading back and forth between
+home-staying men and adventuring men. Thus there was an
+interchange of knowledge and of customs between East and West,
+between our old country and our new. There was an interchange,
+too, at the south, where our Saxon civilization came in touch
+with that of Mexico.
+
+We have now to note some fundamental facts and principles of the
+cattle industry which our American cattlemen took over ready-made
+from the hands of Mexico.
+
+The Mexicans in Texas had an abundance of small, hardy horses of
+African and Spanish breed, which Spain had brought into the New
+World--the same horses that the Moors had brought into Spain--a
+breed naturally hardy and able to subsist upon dry food. Without
+such horses there could have been no cattle industry. These
+horses, running wild in herds, had crossed to the upper Plains.
+La Verendrye, and later Lewis and Clark, had found the Indians
+using horses in the north. The Indians, as we have seen, had
+learned to manage the horse. Formerly they had used dogs to drag
+the travois, but now they used the "elk-dog," as they first
+called the horse.
+
+In the original cow country, that is, in Mexico and Texas,
+countless herds of cattle were held in a loose sort of ownership
+over wide and unknown plains. Like all wild animals in that warm
+country, they bred in extraordinary numbers. The southern range,
+indeed, has always been called the breeding range. The cattle had
+little value. He who wanted beef killed beef. He who wanted
+leather killed cattle for their hides. But beyond these scant and
+infrequent uses cattle had no definite value.
+
+The Mexican, however, knew how to handle cows. He could ride a
+horse, and he could rope cattle and brand them. Most of the
+cattle of a wide range would go to certain water-holes more or
+less regularly, where they might be roughly collected or
+estimated. This coming of the cattle to the watering-places made
+it unnecessary for owners of cattle to acquire ranch land. It was
+enough to secure the water-front where the cows must go to drink.
+That gave the owner all the title he needed. His right to the
+increase he could prove by another phenomenon of nature, just as
+inevitable and invariable as that of thirst. The maternal
+instinct of a cow and the dependence of the calf upon its mother
+gave the old rancher of immemorial times sufficient proof of
+ownership in the increase of his herd. The calf would run with
+its own mother and with no other cow through its first season. So
+that if an old Mexican ranchero saw a certain number of cows at
+his watering-places, and with them calves, he knew that all
+before him were his property--or, at least, he claimed them as
+such and used them.
+
+Still, this was loose-footed property. It might stray away after
+all, or it might be driven away. Hence, in some forgotten time,
+our shrewd Spaniard invented a system of proof of ownership which
+has always lain at the very bottom of the organized cow industry;
+he invented the method of branding. This meant his sign, his
+name, his trade-mark, his proof of ownership. The animal could
+not shake it off. It would not burn off in the sun or wash off in
+the rain. It went with the animal and could not be eradicated
+from the animal's hide. Wherever the bearer was seen, the brand
+upon its hide provided certain identification of the owner.
+
+Now, all these basic ideas of the cow industry were old on the
+lower range in Texas when our white men first drifted thither.
+The cattle industry, although in its infancy, and although
+supposed to have no great future, was developed long before Texas
+became a republic. It never, indeed, changed very much from that
+time until the end of its own career.
+
+One great principle was accepted religiously even in those early
+and crude days. A man's cow was HIS cow. A man's brand was HIS
+brand. There must be no interference with his ownership. Hence
+certain other phases of the industry followed inevitably. These
+cattle, these calves, each branded by the iron of the owner, in
+spite of all precautions, began to mingle as settlers became more
+numerous; hence came the idea of the round-up. The country was
+warm and lazy. If a hundred or a thousand cows were not
+collected, very well. If a calf were separated from its mother,
+very well. The old ranchers never quarreled among themselves.
+They never would have made in the South anything like a cattle
+association; it was left for the Yankees to do that at a time
+when cows had come to have far greater values. There were few
+arguments in the first rodeos of the lower range. One rancher
+would vie with his neighbor in generosity in the matter of
+unbranded calves. Haggling would have been held contemptible. On
+the lower range in the old times no one cared much about a cow.
+Why should one do so? There was no market for cows--no one who
+wished to buy them. If one tendered a Mexican cinquo pesos for a
+yearling or a two-year-old, the owner might perhaps offer the
+animal as a gift, or he might smile and say "Con mucho gusto" as
+he was handed a few pieces of silver. There were plenty of cows
+everywhere in the world!
+
+Let us, therefore, give the old Spaniard full credit alike in
+picturesque romance and in the organized industry of the cow. The
+westbound thrust which came upon the upper part of the range in
+the days of more shrewd and exacting business methods was simply
+the best-known and most published phase of frontier life in the
+cow country; hence we have usually accepted it as typical. It
+would not be accurate to say that the cattle industry was
+basically much influenced or governed by northern or eastern men.
+In practically all of its great phenomena the frontier of the old
+cow-range was southern by birth and growth.
+
+There lay, then, so long unused, that vast and splendid land so
+soon to write romantic history of its own, so soon to come into
+the admiration or the wonder of a great portion of the earth--a
+land of fascinating interest to the youth of every country, and a
+region whose story holds a charm for young and old alike even
+today. It was a region royal in its dimensions. Far on the west
+it was hedged by the gray-sided and white-topped mountains, the
+Rockies. Where the buffalo once lived, the cattle were to live,
+high up in the foothills of this great mountain range which ran
+from the Rio Grande to Canada. On the east, where lay the
+Prairies rather than the Plains, it was a country waving with
+high native grasses, with many brilliant flowers hiding among
+them, the sweet-William, the wild rose, and often great masses of
+the yellow sunflower.
+
+>From the Rio Grande to the Athabaska, for the greater part, the
+frontier sky was blue and cloudless during most of the year. The
+rainfall was not great. The atmosphere was dry. It was a cheerful
+country, one of optimism and not of gloom. In the extreme south,
+along the Rio Grande, the climate was moister, warmer, more
+enervating; but on the high steppes of the middle range in
+Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, western Nebraska, there lay the
+finest out-of-doors country, man's country the finest of the
+earth.
+
+But for the time, busy with more accustomed things, mining and
+freighting and fighting and hunting and trading and trapping, we
+Americans who had arrived upon the range cared little for cows.
+The upper thrust of the great herds from the south into the north
+had not begun. It was after the Civil War that the first great
+drives of cattle from the south toward the north began, and after
+men had learned in the State of Texas that cattle moved from the
+Rio Grande to the upper portions of the State and fed on the
+mesquite grass would attain greater stature than in the hot coast
+country. Then swiftly, somewhat luridly, there leaped into our
+comprehension and our interest that strange country long loosely
+held under our flag, the region of the Plains, the region which
+we now call the Old West.
+
+In great bands, in long lines, slowly, towheaded, sore-footed,
+the vast gatherings of the prolific lower range moved north, each
+cow with its title indelibly marked upon its hide. These cattle
+were now going to take the place of those on which the Indians
+had depended for their living these many years. A new day in
+American history had dawned.
+
+
+
+Chapter III. The Cattle Trails
+
+The customary method of studying history by means of a series of
+events and dates is not the method which we have chosen to
+employ in this study of the Old West. Speaking generally, our
+minds are unable to assimilate a condensed mass of events and
+dates; and that is precisely what would be required of us if we
+should attempt here to follow the ways of conventional history.
+Dates are at best no more than milestones on the pathway of time;
+and in the present instance it is not the milestones but the road
+itself with which we are concerned. Where does the road begin?
+Why comes it hither? Whither does it lead? These are the real
+questions.
+
+Under all the exuberance of the life of the range there lay a
+steady business of tremendous size and enormous values. The
+"uproarious iniquity" of the West, its picturesqueness, its
+vividness--these were but froth on the stream. The stream itself
+was a steady and somber flood. Beyond this picturesqueness of
+environment very few have cared to go, and therefore sometimes
+have had little realization of the vastness of the cowboy's
+kingdom, the "magnitude of the interests in his care, or the
+fortitude, resolution, and instant readiness essential to his
+daily life." The American cowboy is the most modern
+representative of a human industry that is second to very few in
+antiquity.
+
+Julius Caesar struck the note of real history: Quorum pars magna
+fui--"Of which I was a great part." If we are to seek the actual
+truth, we ought most to value contemporary records,
+representations made by men who were themselves a part of the
+scenes which they describe. In that way we shall arrive not
+merely upon lurid events, not alone upon the stereotyped
+characters of the "Wild West," but upon causes which are much
+more interesting and immensely more valuable than any merely
+titillating stories from the weirdly illustrated Apocrypha of the
+West. We must go below such things if we would gain a just and
+lasting estimate of the times. We ought to look on the old range
+neither as a playground of idle men nor as a scene of hysterical
+and contorted human activities. We ought to look upon it from the
+point of view of its uses to mankind. The explorers found it a
+wilderness, the home of the red man and the buffalo. What were
+the underlying causes of its settlement and development?
+
+There is in history no agency so wondrous in events, no working
+instrumentality so great as transportation. The great seeking of
+all human life is to find its level. Perhaps the first men
+traveled by hollowed logs down stream. Then possibly the idea of
+a sail was conceived. Early in the story of the United States men
+made commercial journeys from the head of the Ohio to the mouth
+of the Mississippi by flatboats, and came back by keelboats. The
+pole, the cordelle, the paddle, and the sail, in turn helped them
+to navigate the great streams which led out into the West. And
+presently there was to come that tremendous upheaval wrought by
+the advent of the iron trails which, scorning alike waterways and
+mountain ranges, flung themselves almost directly westward across
+the continent.
+
+The iron trails, crossing the northern range soon after the Civil
+War, brought a market to the cattle country. Inevitably the men
+of the lower range would seek to reach the railroads with what
+they had to sell--their greatest natural product, cattle on the
+hoof. This was the primary cause of the great northbound drives
+already mentioned, the greatest pastoral phenomena in the story
+of the world.
+
+The southern herds at that time had no market at their doors.
+They had to go to the market, and they had to go on foot. That
+meant that they must be driven northward by cattle handlers who
+had passed their days in the wild life of the lower range. These
+cowmen of course took their character and their customs northward
+with them, and so they were discovered by those enthusiastic
+observers, newly arrived by rail, whom the cowmen were wont to
+call "pilgrims."
+
+Now the trail of the great cattle drives--the Long Trail-was a
+thing of tremendous importance of itself and it is still full of
+interest. As it may not easily be possible for the author to
+better a description of it that was written some twenty years
+ago, that description is here again set down.*
+
+* "The Story of the Cowboy," by E. Hough. Appleton. 1897.
+Reprinted by permission.
+
+
+The braiding of a hundred minor pathways, the Long Trail lay like
+a vast rope connecting the cattle country of the South with that
+of the North. Lying loose or coiling, it ran for more than two
+thousand miles along the eastern edge of the Rocky Mountains,
+sometimes close in at their feet, again hundreds of miles away
+across the hard tablelands or the well-flowered prairies. It
+traversed in a fair line the vast land of Texas, curled over the
+Indian Nations, over Kansas, Colorado, Nebraska, Wyoming, and
+Montana, and bent in wide overlapping circles as far west as Utah
+and Nevada; as far east as Missouri, Iowa, even Illinois; and as
+far north as the British possessions. Even today you may trace
+plainly its former course, from its faint beginnings in the lazy
+land of Mexico, the Ararat of the cattle-range. It is distinct
+across Texas, and multifold still in the Indian lands. Its many
+intermingling paths still scar the iron surface of the Neutral
+Strip, and the plows have not buried all the old furrows in the
+plains of Kansas. Parts of the path still remain visible in the
+mountain lands of the far North. You may see the ribbons banding
+the hillsides today along the valley of the Stillwater, and along
+the Yellowstone and toward the source of the Missouri. The hoof
+marks are beyond the Musselshell, over the Bad Lands and the
+coulees and the flat prairies; and far up into the land of the
+long cold you may see, even today if you like, the shadow of that
+unparalleled pathway, the Long Trail of the cattle-range. History
+has no other like it.
+
+The Long Trail was surveyed and constructed in a century and a
+day. Over the Red River of the South, a stream even today perhaps
+known but vaguely in the minds of many inhabitants of the
+country, there appeared, almost without warning, vast processions
+of strange horned kine--processions of enormous wealth, owned by
+kings who paid no tribute, and guarded by men who never knew a
+master. Whither these were bound, what had conjured them forth,
+whence they came, were questions in the minds of the majority of
+the population of the North and East to whom the phenomenon
+appeared as the product of a day. The answer to these questions
+lay deep in the laws of civilization, and extended far back into
+that civilization's history. The Long Trail was finished in a
+day. It was begun more than a century before that day, and came
+forward along the very appointed ways of time.... Thus, far
+down in the vague Southwest, at some distant time, in some
+distant portion of old, mysterious Mexico, there fell into line
+the hoof prints which made the first faint beginnings of the Long
+Trail, merely the path of a half nomadic movement along the line
+of the least resistance.
+
+The Long Trail began to deepen and extend. It received then, as
+it did later, a baptism of human blood such as no other pathway
+of the continent has known. The nomadic and the warlike days
+passed, and there ensued a more quiet and pastoral time. It was
+the beginning of a feudalism of the range, a barony rude enough,
+but a glorious one, albeit it began, like all feudalism, in
+large-handed theft and generous murdering. The flocks of these
+strong men, carelessly interlapping, increased and multiplied
+amazingly. They were hardly looked upon as wealth. The people
+could not eat a tithe of the beef; they could not use a hundredth
+of the leather. Over hundreds and hundreds of miles of ownerless
+grass lands, by the rapid waters of the mountains, by the slow
+streams of the plains or the long and dark lagoons of the low
+coast country the herds of tens grew into droves of hundreds and
+thousands and hundreds of thousands. This was really the dawning
+of the American cattle industry.
+
+Chips and flakes of the great Southwestern herd began to be seen
+in the Northern States. As early as 1857 Texas cattle were driven
+to Illinois. In 1861 Louisiana was, without success, tried as an
+outlet. In 1867 a venturous drover took a herd across the Indian
+Nations, bound for California, and only abandoned the project
+because the Plains Indians were then very bad in the country to
+the north. In 1869 several herds were driven from Texas to
+Nevada. These were side trails of the main cattle road. It seemed
+clear that a great population in the North needed the cheap beef
+of Texas, and the main question appeared to be one of
+transportation. No proper means for this offered. The Civil War
+stopped almost all plans to market the range cattle, and the
+close of that war found the vast grazing lands of Texas covered
+fairly with millions of cattle which had no actual or determinate
+value. They were sorted and branded and herded after a fashion,
+but neither they nor their increase could be converted into
+anything but more cattle. The cry for a market became imperative.
+
+Meantime the Anglo-Saxon civilization was rolling swiftly toward
+the upper West. The Indians were being driven from the Plains. A
+solid army was pressing behind the vanguard of soldier, scout,
+and plainsman. The railroads were pushing out into a new and
+untracked empire. They carried the market with them. The market
+halted, much nearer, though still some hundred of miles to the
+north of the great herd. The Long Trail tapped no more at the
+door of Illinois, Missouri, Arkansas, but leaped north again
+definitely, this time springing across the Red River and up to
+the railroads, along sharp and well-defined channels deepened in
+the year of 1866 alone by the hoofs of more than a quarter of a
+million cattle.
+
+In 1871, only five years later, over six hundred thousand cattle
+crossed the Red River for the Northern markets. Abilene, Newton,
+Wichita, Ellsworth, Great Bend, Dodge, flared out into a swift
+and sometime evil blossoming. Thus the men of the North first
+came to hear of the Long Trail and the men who made it, although
+really it had begun long ago and had been foreordained to grow.
+
+By this time, 1867 and 1868, the northern portions of the region
+immediately to the east of the Rocky Mountains had been
+sufficiently cleared of their wild inhabitants to admit a gradual
+though precarious settlement. It had been learned yet again that
+the buffalo grass and the sweet waters of the far North would
+fatten a range broadhorn to a stature far beyond any it could
+attain on the southern range. The Long Trail pushed rapidly even
+farther to the north where there still remained "free grass" and
+a new market. The territorial ranges needed many thousands of
+cattle for their stocking, and this demand took a large part of
+the Texas drive which came to Abilene, Great Bend, and Fort
+Dodge. Moreover, the Government was now feeding thousands of its
+new red wards, and these Indians needed thousands of beeves for
+rations, which were driven from the southern range to the upper
+army posts and reservations. Between this Government demand and
+that of the territorial stock ranges there was occupation for the
+men who made the saddle their home.
+
+The Long Trail, which had previously found the black corn lands
+of Illinois and Missouri, now crowded to the West, until it had
+reached Utah and Nevada, and penetrated every open park and mesa
+and valley of Colorado, and found all the high plains of Wyoming.
+Cheyenne and Laramie became common words now, and drovers spoke
+as wisely of the dangers of the Platte as a year before they had
+mentioned those of the Red River or the Arkansas. Nor did the
+Trail pause in its irresistible push to the north until it had
+found the last of the five great transcontinental lines, far in
+the British provinces. Here in spite of a long season of ice and
+snow the uttermost edges of the great herd might survive, in a
+certain percentage at least, each year in an almost unassisted
+struggle for existence, under conditions different enough, it
+would seem, from those obtaining at the opposite extreme of the
+wild roadway over which they came.
+
+The Long Trail of the cattle-range was done! By magic the cattle
+industry had spread over the entire West. Today many men think of
+that industry as belonging only to the Southwest, and many would
+consider that it was transferred to the North. Really it was not
+transferred but extended, and the trail of the old drive marks
+the line of that extension.
+
+Today the Long Trail is replaced by other trails, product of the
+swift development of the West, and it remains as the connection,
+now for the most part historical only, between two phases of an
+industry which, in spite of differences of climate and condition,
+retain a similarity in all essential features. When the last
+steer of the first herd was driven into the corral at the Ultima
+Thule of the range, it was the pony of the American cowboy which
+squatted and wheeled under the spur and burst down the straggling
+street of the little frontier town. Before that time, and since
+that time, it was and has been the same pony and the same man who
+have traveled the range, guarding and guiding the wild herds,
+from the romantic to the commonplace days of the West.
+
+
+
+Chapter IV. The Cowboy
+
+The Great West, vast and rude, brought forth men also vast and
+rude. We pass today over parts of that matchless region, and we
+see the red hills and ragged mountain-fronts cut and crushed into
+huge indefinite shapes, to which even a small imagination may
+give a human or more than human form. It would almost seem that
+the same great hand which chiseled out these monumental forms had
+also laid its fingers upon the people of this region and
+fashioned them rude and ironlike, in harmony with the stern faces
+set about them.
+
+Of all the babes of that primeval mother, the West, the cowboy
+was perhaps her dearest because he was her last. Some of her
+children lived for centuries; this one for not a triple decade
+before he began to be old. What was really the life of this child
+of the wild region of America, and what were the conditions of
+the experience that bore him, can never be fully known by those
+who have not seen the West with wide eyes--for the cowboy was
+simply a part of the West. He who does not understand the one can
+never understand the other.
+
+If we care truly to see the cowboy as he was and seek to give our
+wish the dignity of a real purpose, we should study him in
+connection with his surroundings and in relation to his work.
+Then we shall see him not as a curiosity but as a product--not as
+an eccentric driver of horned cattle but as a man suited to his
+times.
+
+Large tracts of that domain where once the cowboy reigned supreme
+have been turned into farms by the irrigator's ditch or by the
+dry-farmer's plan. The farmer in overalls is in many instances
+his own stockman today. On the ranges of Arizona, Wyoming, and
+Texas and parts of Nevada we may find the cowboy, it is true,
+even today: but he is no longer the Homeric figure that once
+dominated the plains. In what we say as to his trade, therefore,
+or his fashion in the practice of it, we speak in terms of thirty
+or forty years ago, when wire was unknown, when the round-up
+still was necessary, and the cowboy's life was indeed that of the
+open.
+
+By the costume we may often know the man. The cowboy's costume
+was harmonious with its surroundings. It was planned upon lines
+of such stern utility as to leave no possible thing which we may
+call dispensable. The typical cowboy costume could hardly be said
+to contain a coat and waistcoat. The heavy woolen shirt, loose
+and open at the neck, was the common wear at all seasons of the
+year excepting winter, and one has often seen cowboys in the
+winter-time engaged in work about the yard or corral of the ranch
+wearing no other cover for the upper part of the body but one or
+more of these heavy shirts. If the cowboy wore a coat he would
+wear it open and loose as much as possible. If he wore a "vest"
+he would wear it slouchily, hanging open or partly unbuttoned
+most of the time. There was a reason for this slouchy habit. The
+cowboy would say that the vest closely buttoned about the body
+would cause perspiration, so that the wearer would quickly chill
+upon ceasing exercise. If the wind were blowing keenly when the
+cowboy dismounted to sit upon the ground for dinner, he would
+button up his waistcoat and be warm. If it were very cold he
+would button up his coat also.
+
+The cowboy's boots were of fine leather and fitted tightly, with
+light narrow soles, extremely small and high heels. Surely a more
+irrational foot-covering never was invented; yet these tight,
+peaked cowboy boots had a great significance and may indeed be
+called the insignia of a calling. There was no prouder soul on
+earth than the cowboy. He was proud of being a horseman and had a
+contempt for all human beings who walked. On foot in his
+tight-toed boots he was lost; but he wished it to be understood
+that he never was on foot. If we rode beside him and watched his
+seat in the big cow saddle we found that his high and narrow
+heels prevented the slipping forward of the foot in the stirrup,
+into which he jammed his feet nearly full length. If there was a
+fall, the cowboy's foot never hung in the stirrup. In the corral
+roping, afoot, his heels anchored him. So he found his little
+boots not so unserviceable and retained them as a matter of
+pride. Boots made for the cowboy trade sometimes had fancy tops
+of bright-colored leather. The Lone Star of Texas was not
+infrequent in their ornamentation.
+
+The curious pride of the horseman extended also to his gloves.
+The cowboy was very careful in the selection of his gloves. They
+were made of the finest buckskin, which could not be injured by
+wetting. Generally they were tanned white and cut with a deep
+cuff or gauntlet from which hung a little fringe to flutter in
+the wind when he rode at full speed on horseback.
+
+The cowboy's hat was one of the typical and striking features of
+his costumes. It was a heavy, wide, white felt hat with a heavy
+leather band buckled about it. There has been no other head
+covering devised so suitable as the Stetson for the uses of the
+Plains, although high and heavy black hats have in part
+supplanted it today among stockmen. The boardlike felt was
+practically indestructible. The brim flapped a little and, in
+time, was turned up and perhaps held fast to the crown by a
+thong. The wearer might sometimes stiffen the brim by passing a
+thong through a series of holes pierced through the outer edge.
+He could depend upon his hat in all weathers. In the rain it was
+an umbrella; in the sun a shield; in the winter he could tie it
+down about his ears with his handkerchief.
+
+Loosely thrown about the cowboy's shirt collar was a silk
+kerchief. It was tied in a hard knot in front, and though it
+could scarcely be said to be devoted to the uses of a neck scarf,
+yet it was a great comfort to the back of the neck when one was
+riding in a hot wind. It was sure to be of some bright color,
+usually red. Modern would-be cowpunchers do not willingly let
+this old kerchief die, and right often they over-play it. For the
+cowboy of the "movies," however, let us register an unqualified
+contempt. The real range would never have been safe for him.
+
+A peculiar and distinctive feature of the cowboy's costume was
+his "chaps" (chaparejos). The chaps were two very wide and
+full-length trouser-legs made of heavy calfskin and connected by
+a narrow belt or strap. They were cut away entirely at front and
+back so that they covered only the thigh and lower legs and did
+not heat the body as a complete leather garment would. They were
+intended solely as a protection against branches, thorns, briers,
+and the like, but they were prized in cold or wet weather.
+Sometimes there was seen, more often on the southern range, a
+cowboy wearing chaps made of skins tanned with the hair on; for
+the cowboy of the Southwest early learned that goatskin left
+with the hair on would turn the cactus thorns better than any
+other material. Later, the chaps became a sort of affectation on
+the part of new men on the range; but the old-time cowboy wore
+them for use, not as a uniform. In hot weather he laid them off.
+
+In the times when some men needed guns and all men carried them,
+no pistol of less than 44-caliber was tolerated on the range, the
+solid framed 45-caliber being the one almost universally used.
+The barrel was eight inches long, and it shot a rifle cartridge
+of forty grains of powder and a blunt-ended bullet that made a
+terrible missile. This weapon depended from a belt worn loose
+resting upon the left hip and hanging low down on the right hip
+so that none of the weight came upon the abdomen. This was
+typical, for the cowboy was neither fancy gunman nor army
+officer. The latter carries the revolver on the left, the butt
+pointing forward.
+
+An essential part of the cow-puncher's outfit was his "rope."
+This was carried in a close coil at the side of the saddle-horn,
+fastened by one of the many thongs scattered over the saddle. In
+the Spanish country it was called reata and even today is
+sometimes seen in the Southwest made of rawhide. In the South it
+was called a lariat. The modern rope is a well-made
+three-quarter-inch hemp rope about thirty feet in length, with a
+leather or rawhide eye. The cowboy's quirt was a short heavy
+whip, the stock being of wood or iron covered with braided
+leather and carrying a lash made of two or three heavy loose
+thongs. The spur in the old days had a very large rowel with
+blunt teeth an inch long. It was often ornamented with little
+bells or oblongs of metal, the tinkling of which appealed to the
+childlike nature of the Plains rider. Their use was to lock the
+rowel.
+
+His bridle--for, since the cowboy and his mount are inseparable,
+we may as well speak of his horse's dress also--was noticeable
+for its tremendously heavy and cruel curbed bit, known as the
+"Spanish bit." But in the ordinary riding and even in the
+exciting work of the old round-up and in "cutting out," the
+cowboy used the bit very little, nor exerted any pressure on the
+reins. He laid the reins against the neck of the pony opposite to
+the direction in which he wished it to go, merely turning his
+hand in the direction and inclining his body in the same way. He
+rode with the pressure of the knee and the inclination of the
+body and the light side-shifting of both reins. The saddle was
+the most important part of the outfit. It was a curious thing,
+this saddle developed by the cattle trade, and the world has no
+other like it. Its great weight--from thirty to forty pounds--was
+readily excusable when one remembers that it was not only seat
+but workbench for the cowman. A light saddle would be torn to
+pieces at the first rush of a maddened steer, but the sturdy
+frame of a cow-saddle would throw the heaviest bull on the range.
+The high cantle would give a firmness to the cowboy's seat when
+he snubbed a steer with a sternness sufficient to send it rolling
+heels over head. The high pommel, or "horn," steel-forged and
+covered with cross braids of leather, served as anchor post for
+this same steer, a turn of the rope about it accomplishing that
+purpose at once. The saddle-tree forked low down over the pony's
+back so that the saddle sat firmly and could not readily be
+pulled off. The great broad cinches bound the saddle fast till
+horse and saddle were practically one fabric. The strong wooden
+house of the old heavy stirrup protected the foot from being
+crushed by the impact of the herd. The form of the cow-saddle has
+changed but little, although today one sees a shorter seat and
+smaller horn, a "swell front" or roll, and a stirrup of open
+"ox-bow" pattern.
+
+The round-up was the harvest of the range. The time of the calf
+round-up was in the spring after the grass had become good and
+after the calves had grown large enough for the branding. The
+State Cattle Association divided the entire State range into a
+number of round-up districts. Under an elected round-up captain
+were all the bosses in charge of the different ranch outfits sent
+by men having cattle in the round-up. Let us briefly draw a
+picture of this scene as it was.
+
+Each cowboy would have eight or ten horses for his own use, for
+he had now before him the hardest riding of the year. When the
+cow-puncher went into the herd to cut out calves he mounted a
+fresh horse, and every few hours he again changed horses, for
+there was no horse which could long endure the fatigue of the
+rapid and intense work of cutting. Before the rider stretched a
+sea of interwoven horns, waving and whirling as the densely
+packed ranks of cattle closed in or swayed apart. It was no
+prospect for a weakling, but into it went the cow-puncher on his
+determined little horse, heeding not the plunging, crushing, and
+thrusting of the excited cattle. Down under the bulks of the
+herd, half hid in the whirl of dust, he would spy a little curly
+calf running, dodging, and twisting, always at the heels of its
+mother; and he would dart in after, following the two through the
+thick of surging and plunging beasts. The sharp-eyed pony would
+see almost as soon as his rider which cow was wanted and he
+needed small guidance from that time on. He would follow hard at
+her heels, edging her constantly toward the flank of the herd, at
+times nipping her hide as a reminder of his own superiority. In
+spite of herself the cow would gradually turn out toward the
+edge, and at last would be swept clear of the crush, the calf
+following close behind her. There was a whirl of the rope and the
+calf was laid by the heels and dragged to the fire where the
+branding irons were heated and ready.
+
+Meanwhile other cow-punchers are rushing calves to the branding.
+The hubbub and turmoil increase. Taut ropes cross the ground in
+many directions. The cutting ponies pant and sweat, rear and
+plunge. The garb of the cowboy is now one of white alkali which
+hangs gray in his eyebrows and moustache. Steers bellow as they
+surge to and fro. Cows charge on their persecutors. Fleet
+yearlings break and run for the open, pursued by men who care not
+how or where they ride.
+
+We have spoken in terms of the past. There is no calf round-up of
+the open range today. The last of the roundups was held in Routt
+County, Colorado, several years ago, so far as the writer knows,
+and it had only to do with shifting cattle from the summer to the
+winter range.
+
+After the calf round-up came the beef round-up, the cowman's
+final harvest. This began in July or August. Only the mature or
+fatted animals were cut out from the herd. This "beef cut" was
+held apart and driven on ahead from place to place as the
+round-up progressed. It was then driven in by easy stages to the
+shipping point on the railroad, whence the long trainloads of
+cattle went to the great markets.
+
+In the heyday of the cowboy it was natural that his chief
+amusements should be those of the outdoor air and those more or
+less in line with his employment. He was accustomed to the sight
+of big game, and so had the edge of his appetite for its pursuit
+worn off. Yet he was a hunter, just as every Western man was a
+hunter in the times of the Western game. His weapons were the
+rifle, revolver, and rope; the latter two were always with him.
+With the rope at times he captured the coyote, and under special
+conditions he has taken deer and even antelope in this way,
+though this was of course most unusual and only possible under
+chance conditions of ground and cover. Elk have been roped by
+cowboys many times, and it is known that even the mountain sheep
+has been so taken, almost incredible as that may seem. The young
+buffalo were easy prey for the cowboy and these he often roped
+and made captive. In fact the beginnings of all the herds of
+buffalo now in captivity in this country were the calves roped
+and secured by cowboys; and these few scattered individuals of a
+grand race of animals remain as melancholy reminders alike of a
+national shiftlessness and an individual skill and daring.
+
+The grizzly was at times seen by the cowboys on the range, and if
+it chanced that several cowboys were together it was not unusual
+to give him chase. They did not always rope him, for it was
+rarely that the nature of the country made this possible.
+Sometimes they roped him and wished they could let him go, for a
+grizzly bear is uncommonly active and straightforward in his
+habits at close quarters. The extreme difficulty of such a
+combat, however, gave it its chief fascination for the cowboy. Of
+course, no one horse could hold the bear after it was roped, but,
+as one after another came up, the bear was caught by neck and
+foot and body, until at last he was tangled and tripped and
+hauled
+about till he was helpless, strangled, and nearly dead. It is
+said that cowboys have so brought into camp a grizzly bear,
+forcing him to half walk and half slide at the end of the ropes.
+No feat better than this could show the courage of the plainsman
+and of the horse which he so perfectly controlled.
+
+Of such wild and dangerous exploits were the cowboy's amusements
+on the range. It may be imagined what were his amusements when he
+visited the "settlements." The cow-punchers, reared in the free
+life of the open air, under circumstances of the utmost freedom
+of individual action, perhaps came off the drive or round-up
+after weeks or months of unusual restraint or hardship, and felt
+that the time had arrived for them to "celebrate." Merely great
+rude children, as wild and untamed and untaught as the herds they
+led, they regarded their first look at the "settlements" of the
+railroads as a glimpse of a wider world. They pursued to the
+uttermost such avenues of new experience as lay before them,
+almost without exception avenues of vice. It is strange that the
+records of those days should be chosen by the public to be held
+as the measure of the American cowboy. Those days were brief, and
+they are long since gone. The American cowboy atoned for them by
+a quarter of a century of faithful labor.
+
+The amusements of the cowboy were like the features of his daily
+surroundings and occupation--they were intense, large, Homeric.
+Yet, judged at his work, no higher type of employee ever existed,
+nor one more dependable. He was the soul of honor in all the ways
+of his calling. The very blue of the sky, bending evenly over all
+men alike, seemed to symbolize his instinct for justice.
+Faithfulness and manliness were his chief traits; his
+standard--to be a "square man."
+
+Not all the open range will ever be farmed, but very much that
+was long thought to be irreclaimable has gone under irrigation or
+is being more or less successfully "dryfarmed." The man who
+brought water upon the arid lands of the West changed the entire
+complexion of a vast country and with it the industries of that
+country. Acres redeemed from the desert and added to the realm of
+the American farmer were taken from the realm of the American
+cowboy.
+
+The West has changed. The curtain has dropped between us and its
+wild and stirring scenes. The old days are gone. The house dog
+sits on the hill where yesterday the coyote sang. There are
+fenced fields and in them stand sleek round beasts, deep in crops
+such as their ancestors never saw. In a little town nearby is the
+hurry and bustle of modern life. This town is far out upon what
+was called the frontier, long after the frontier has really gone.
+Guarding its ghost here stood a little army post, once one of the
+pillars, now one of the monuments of the West.
+
+Out from the tiny settlement in the dusk of evening, always
+facing toward where the sun is sinking, might be seen riding, not
+so long ago, a figure we should know. He would thread the little
+lane among the fences, following the guidance of hands other than
+his own, a thing he would once have scorned to do. He would ride
+as lightly and as easily as ever, sitting erect and jaunty in the
+saddle, his reins held high and loose in the hand whose fingers
+turn up gracefully, his whole body free yet firm in the saddle
+with the seat of the perfect horseman. At the boom of the cannon,
+when the flag dropped fluttering down to sleep, he would rise in
+his stirrups and wave his hat to the flag. Then, toward the edge,
+out into the evening, he would ride on. The dust of his riding
+would mingle with the dusk of night. We could not see which was
+the one or the other. We could only hear the hoofbeats passing,
+boldly and steadily still, but growing fainter, fainter, and more
+faint.*
+
+* For permission to use in this chapter material from the
+author's "The Story of the Cowboy," acknowledgment is made to D.
+Appleton & Co.
+
+
+
+Chapter V. The Mines
+
+If the influence of the cattle industry was paramount in the
+development of the frontier region found by the first railways,
+it should not be concluded that this upthrust of the southern
+cattle constituted the only contribution to the West of that day.
+There were indeed earlier influences, the chief of which was the
+advent of the wild population of the placer mines. The riches of
+the gold-fields hastened the building of the first
+transcontinental railroads and the men of the mines set their
+mark also indelibly upon the range.
+
+It is no part of our business here to follow the great
+discoveries of 1849 in California.* Neither shall we chronicle
+the once-famous rushes from California north into the Fraser
+River Valley of British Columbia; neither is it necessary to
+mention in much detail the great camps of Nevada; nor yet the
+short-lived stampede of 1859 to the Pike's Peak country in
+Colorado. The rich placer fields of Idaho and Montana, from which
+enormous amounts were taken, offer typical examples of the mining
+communities of the Rockies.
+
+* See Stewart Edward White: "The Forty-Niners" ("Chronicles of
+America").
+
+
+We may never know how much history remains forever unwritten. Of
+the beginnings of the Idaho camps there have trickled back into
+record only brief, inconsequent, and partial stories. The miners
+who surged this way and that all through the Sierras, the upper
+Cascades, north into the Selkirks, and thence back again into the
+Rockies were a turbulent mob. Having overrun all our mountain
+ranges, following the earlier trails of the traders and trappers,
+they now recoiled upon themselves and rolled back eastward to
+meet the advancing civilization of the westbound rails, caring
+nothing for history and less for the civilized society in which
+they formerly had lived. This story of bedlam broken loose, of
+men gone crazed, by the sudden subversion of all known values
+and all standards of life, was at first something which had no
+historian and can be recorded only by way of hearsay stories
+which do not always tally as to the truth.
+
+The mad treasure-hunters of the California mines, restless,
+insubordinate, incapable of restraint, possessed of the belief
+that there might be gold elsewhere than in California, and having
+heard reports of strikes to the north, went hurrying out into the
+mountains of Oregon and Washington, in a wild stampede, all eager
+again to engage in the glorious gamble where by one lucky stroke
+of the pick a man might be set free of the old limitations of
+human existence.
+
+So the flood of gold-seekers--passing north into the Fraser River
+country, south again into Oregon and Washington, and across the
+great desert plains into Nevada and Idaho--made new centers of
+lurid activity, such as Oro Fino, Florence, and Carson. Then it
+was that Walla Walla and Lewiston, outfitting points on the
+western side of the range, found place upon the maps of the land,
+such as they were.
+
+Before these adventurers, now eastbound and no longer facing
+west, there arose the vast and formidable mountain ranges which
+in their time had daunted even the calm minds of Meriwether Lewis
+and William Clark. But the prospectors and the pack-trains alike
+penetrated the Salmon River Range. Oro Fino, in Idaho, was old in
+1861. The next great strikes were to be made around Florence.
+Here the indomitable packer from the West, conquering unheard-of
+difficulties, brought in whiskey, women, pianos, food, mining
+tools. Naturally all these commanded fabulous prices. The price
+for each and all lay underfoot. Man, grown superman, could
+overleap time itself by a stroke of the pick! What wonder
+delirium reigned!
+
+These events became known in the Mississippi Valley and farther
+eastward. And now there came hurrying out from the older regions
+many more hundreds and thousands eager to reach a land not so far
+as California, but reputed to be quite as rich. It was then, as
+the bull-trains came in from the East, from the head of
+navigation on the Missouri River, that the western outfitting
+points of Walla Walla and Lewiston lost their importance.
+
+Southward of the Idaho camps the same sort of story was repeating
+itself. Nevada had drawn to herself a portion of the wild men of
+the stampedes. Carson for its day (1859-60) was a capital not
+unlike the others. Some of its men had come down from the upper
+fields, some had arrived from the East over the old Santa Fe
+Trail, and yet others had drifted in from California.
+
+All the camps were very much alike. A straggling row of log
+cabins or huts of motley construction; a few stores so-called,
+sometimes of logs, or, if a saw-mill was at hand, of rude sawn
+boards; a number of saloons, each of which customarily also
+supported a dance-hall; a series of cabins or huts where dwelt
+individual men, each doing his own cooking and washing; and
+outside these huts the uptorn earth--such were the camps which
+dotted the trails of the stampedes across inhospitable deserts
+and mountain ranges. Church and school were unknown. Law there
+was none, for of organized society there was none. The women who
+lived there were unworthy of the name of woman. The men strode
+about in the loose dress of the camp, sometimes without
+waistcoat, sometimes coatless, shod with heavy boots, always
+armed.
+
+If we look for causes contributory to the history of the
+mining-camp, we shall find one which ordinarily is
+overlooked--the invention of Colt's revolving pistol. At the time
+of the Civil War, though this weapon was not old, yet it had
+attained very general use throughout the frontier. That was
+before the day of modern ammunition. The six-shooter of the
+placer days was of the old cap-and-ball type, heavy,
+long-barreled, and usually wooden-handled. It was the general
+ownership of these deadly weapons which caused so much bloodshed
+in the camps. The revolver in the hands of a tyro is not
+especially serviceable, but it attained great deadliness in the
+hands of an expert user. Such a man, naturally of quick nerve
+reflexes, skillful and accurate in the use of the weapon through
+long practice, became a dangerous, and for a time an
+unconquerable, antagonist.
+
+It is a curious fact that the great Montana fields were doubly
+discovered, in part by men coming east from California, and in
+part by men passing west in search of new gold-fields. The first
+discovery of gold in Montana was made on Gold Creek by a
+half-breed trapper named Francois, better known as Be-net-see.
+This was in 1852, but the news seems to have lain dormant for a
+time--naturally enough, for there was small ingress or egress for
+that wild and unknown country. In 1857, however, a party of
+miners who had wandered down the Big Hole River on their way back
+east from California decided to look into the Gold Creek
+discovery, of which they had heard. This party was led by James
+and Granville Stuart, and among others in the party were Jake
+Meeks, Robert Hereford, Robert Dempsey, John W. Powell, John M.
+Jacobs, Thomas Adams, and some others. These men did some work on
+Gold Creek in 1858, but seem not to have struck it very rich, and
+to have withdrawn to Fort Bridger in Utah until the autumn of
+1860. Then a prospector by the name of Tom Golddigger turned up
+at Bridger with additional stories of creeks to the north, so
+that there was a gradual straggling back toward Gold Creek and
+other gulches. This prospector had been all over the Alder Gulch,
+which was ere long to prove fabulously rich.
+
+It was not, however, until 1863 that the Montana camps sprang
+into fame. It was not Gold Creek or Alder Gulch, but Florence and
+other Idaho camps, that, in the summer and autumn of 1862,
+brought into the mountains no less than five parties of
+gold-seekers, who remained in Montana because they could not
+penetrate the mountain barrier which lay between them and the
+Salmon River camps in Idaho.
+
+The first of these parties arrived at Gold Creek by wagon-train
+from Fort Benton and the second hailed from Salt Lake. An
+election was held for the purpose of forming a sort of community
+organization, the first election ever known in Montana. The men
+from the East had brought with them some idea of law and
+organization. There were now in the Montana fields many good men
+such as the Stuart Brothers, Samuel T. Hauser, Walter Dance, and
+others later well known in the State. These men were prominent in
+the organization of the first miners' court, which had occasion
+to try--and promptly to hang--Stillman and Jernigan, two ruffians
+who had been in from the Salmon River mines only about four days
+when they thus met retribution for their early crimes. An
+associate of theirs, Arnett, had been killed while resisting
+arrest. The reputation of Florence for lawlessness and bloodshed
+was well known; and, as the outrages of the well-organized band
+of desperadoes operating in Idaho might be expected to begin at
+any time in Montana, a certain uneasiness existed among the
+newcomers from the States.
+
+Two more parties, likewise bound for Idaho and likewise baffled
+by the Salmon River range, arrived at the Montana camps in the
+same summer. Both these were from the Pike's Peak country in
+Colorado. And in the autumn came a fifth--this one under military
+protection, Captain James L. Fisk commanding, and having in the
+party a number of settlers bound for Oregon as well as miners for
+Idaho. This expedition arrived in the Prickly Pear Valley in
+Montana on September 21, 1862, having left St. Paul on the 16th
+of June, traveling by steamboat and wagon-train. While Captain
+Fisk and his expedition pushed on to Walla Walla, nearly half of
+the immigrants stayed to try their luck at placer-mining. But the
+yield was not great and the distant Salmon River mines, their
+original destination, still awaited them. Winter was approaching.
+It was now too late in the season to reach the Salmon River
+mines, five hundred miles across the mountains, and it was four
+hundred miles to Salt Lake, the nearest supply post; therefore,
+most of the men joined this little army of prospectors in
+Montana. Some of them drifted to the Grasshopper diggings, soon
+to be known under the name of Bannack--one of the wildest
+mining-camps of its day.
+
+These different origins of the population of the first Montana
+camps are interesting because of the fact that they indicate a
+difference in the two currents of population which now met here
+in the new placer fields. In general the wildest and most
+desperate of the old-time adventurers, those coming from the
+West, had located in the Idaho camps, and might be expected in
+Montana at any time. In contrast to these, the men lately out
+from the States were of a different type, many of them sober,
+most of them law-abiding, men who had come out to better their
+fortunes and not merely to drop into the wild and licentious life
+of a placercamp. Law and order always did prevail eventually in
+any mining community. In the case of Montana, law and order
+arrived almost synchronously with lawlessness and desperadoism.
+
+Law and order had not long to wait before the arrival of the
+notorious Henry Plummer and his band from Florence. Plummer was
+already known as a bad man, but was not yet recognized as the
+leader of that secret association of robbers and murderers which
+had terrorized the Idaho camps. He celebrated his arrival in
+Bannack by killing a man named Cleveland. He was acquitted in the
+miners' court that tried him, on the usual plea of self-defense.
+He was a man of considerable personal address.
+
+The same tribunal soon assembled once more to try three other
+murderers, Moore, Reeves, and Mitchell, with the agreement that
+the men should have a jury and should be provided with counsel.
+They were all practically freed; and after that the roughs grew
+bolder than ever. The Plummer band swore to kill every man who
+had served in that court, whether as juryman or officer. So well
+did they make good their threat that out of the twenty-seven men
+thus engaged all but seven were either killed or driven out of
+the country, nine being murdered outright. The man who had acted
+as sheriff of this miners' court, Hank Crawford, was unceasingly
+hounded by Plummer, who sought time and again to fix a quarrel on
+him. Plummer was the best shot in the mountains at that time, and
+he thought it would be easy for him to kill his man and enter the
+usual plea of self-defense. By good fortune, however, Crawford
+caught Plummer off his guard and fired upon him with a rifle,
+breaking his right arm. Plummer's friends called in Dr. Glick,
+the best physician in Bannack, to treat the wounded man, warning
+him that if he told anything about the visit he would be shot
+down. Glick held his peace, and later was obliged to attend many
+of the wounded outlaws, who were always engaged in affairs with
+firearms.
+
+Of all these wild affrays, of the savage life which they denoted,
+and of the stern ways in which retribution overtook the
+desperadoes of the mines, there is no better historian than
+Nathaniel P. Langford, a prominent citizen of the West, who
+accompanied the overland expedition of 1862 and took part in the
+earliest life of Montana. His work, "Vigilante Days and Ways," is
+an invaluable contemporary record.
+
+It is mentally difficult for us now fully to restore these
+scenes, although the events occurred no earlier than the Civil
+War. "Life in Bannack at this time," says Langford, "was perfect
+isolation from the rest of the world. Napoleon was not more of an
+exile on St. Helena than a newly arrived immigrant from the
+States in this region of lakes and mountains. All the great
+battles of the season of 1862--Antietam, Fredericksburg, Second
+Bull Run--all the exciting debates of Congress, and the more
+exciting combats at sea, first became known to us on the arrival
+of newspapers and letters in the spring of 1863.
+
+The Territory of Idaho, which included Montana and nearly all
+Wyoming, was organized March 3, 1863. Previous to that time
+western Montana and Idaho formed a part of Washington Territory,
+of which Olympia was the capital, and Montana, east of the
+mountains, belonged to the Territory of Dakota, of which the
+capital was Yankton, on the Missouri. Langford makes clear the
+political uncertainties of the time, the difficulty of enforcing
+the laws, and narrates the circumstances which led to the
+erection in 1864 of the new Territory of Montana, comprising the
+limits of the present State.*
+
+* The Acts of Congress organizing Territories and admitting
+States are milestones in the occupation of this last West. On the
+eve of the Civil War, Kansas was admitted into the Union; during
+the war, the Territories of Colorado, Nevada, Dakota, Arizona,
+Idaho, and Montana were organized, and Nevada was admitted as a
+State. Immediately after the war, Nebraska was admitted and
+Wyoming was organized as a Territory. In the Centennial Year
+(1876) Colorado became a State. In 1889 and 1890 North and South
+Dakota, Montana, Washington, Idaho, and Wyoming were admitted as
+States. In the latter year Oklahoma was carved out of the Indian
+Territory. Utah with its Mormon population was kept waiting at
+the doors of the Union until 1896. Oklahoma became a State in
+1907; Arizona and New Mexico were admitted in 1912.
+
+
+In Montana as elsewhere in these days of great sectional
+bitterness, there was much political strife; and this no doubt
+accounts for an astonishing political event that now took place.
+Henry Plummer, the most active outlaw of his day, was elected
+sheriff and entrusted with the enforcement of the laws! He made
+indeed a great show of enforcing the laws. He married, settled
+down, and for a time was thought by some of the ill-advised to
+have reformed his ways, although in truth he could not have
+reformed.
+
+By June, 1863, the extraordinarily rich strike in Alder Gulch had
+been made. The news of this spread like wildfire to Bannack and
+to the Salmon River mines in Idaho as well, and the result was
+one of the fiercest of all the stampedes, and the rise, almost
+overnight, of Virginia City. Meanwhile some Indian fighting had
+taken place and in a pitched battle on the Bear River General
+Connor had beaten decisively the Bannack Indians, who for years
+had preyed on the emigrant trains. This made travel on the
+mountain trails safer than it had been; and the rich Last Chance
+Gulch on which the city of Helena now stands attracted a
+tremendous population almost at once. The historian above cited
+lived there. Let him tell of the life.
+
+"One long stream of active life filled the little creek on its
+auriferous course from Bald Mountain, through a canyon of wild
+and picturesque character, until it emerged into the large and
+fertile valley of the Pas-sam-a-ri...the mountain stream
+called by Lewis and Clark in their journal "Philanthropy River."
+Lateral streams of great beauty pour down the sides of the
+mountain chain bounding the valley.... Gold placers were
+found upon these streams and occupied soon after the settlement
+at Virginia City was commenced.... This human hive, numbering
+at least ten thousand people, was the product of ninety days.
+Into it were crowded all the elements of a rough and active
+civilization. Thousands of cabins and tents and brush wakiups...
+were seen on every hand. Every foot of the gulch...was
+undergoing displacement, and it was already disfigured by huge
+heaps of gravel which had been passed through the sluices and
+rifled of their glittering contents.... Gold was abundant,
+and every possible device was employed by the gamblers, the
+traders, the vile men and women that had come in with the miners
+into the locality, to obtain it. Nearly every third cabin was a
+saloon where vile whiskey was peddled out for fifty cents a
+drink in gold dust. Many of these places were filled with
+gambling tables and gamblers.... Hurdy-gurdy dance-houses
+were numerous.... Not a day or night passed which did not
+yield its full fruition of vice, quarrels, wounds, or murders.
+The crack of the revolver was often heard above the merry notes
+of the violin. Street fights were frequent, and as no one knew
+when or where they would occur, every one was on his guard
+against a random shot.
+
+"Sunday was always a gala day.... The stores were all open....
+Thousands of people crowded the thoroughfares ready to rush
+in the direction of any promised excitement. Horse-racing was
+among the most favored amusements. Prize rings were formed, and
+brawny men engaged in fisticuffs until their sight was lost and
+their bodies pommelled to a jelly, while hundreds of onlookers
+cheered the victor.... Pistols flashed, bowie knives
+flourished, and braggart oaths filled the air, as often as men's
+passions triumphed over their reason. This was indeed the reign
+of unbridled license, and men who at first regarded it with
+disgust and terror, by constant exposure soon learned to become a
+part of it and forget that they had ever been aught else. All
+classes of society were represented at this general exhibition.
+Judges, lawyers, doctors, even clergymen, could not claim
+exemption. Culture and religion afforded feeble protection, where
+allurement and indulgence ruled the hour."
+
+Imagine, therefore, a fabulously rich mountain valley twelve
+miles in extent, occupied by more than ten thousand men and
+producing more than ten millions of dollars before the close of
+the first year! It is a stupendous demand on any imagination. How
+might all this gold be sent out in safe-keeping? We are told that
+the only stage route extended from Virginia City no farther than
+Bannack. Between Virginia City and Salt Lake City there was an
+absolute wilderness, wholly unsettled, four hundred and
+seventy-five miles in width. "There was no post office in the
+Territory. Letters were brought from Salt Lake first at a cost of
+two dollars and a half each, and later in the season at one
+dollar each. All money at infinite risk was sent to the nearest
+express office at Salt Lake City by private hands."
+
+Practically every man in the new gold-fields was aware of the
+existence of a secret band of well-organized ruffians and
+robbers. The general feeling was one of extreme uneasiness. There
+were plenty of men who had taken out of the ground considerable
+quantities of gold, and who would have been glad to get back to
+the East with their little fortunes, but they dared not start.
+Time after time the express coach, the solitary rider, the
+unguarded wagon-train, were held up and robbed, usually with the
+concomitant of murder. When the miners did start out from one
+camp to another they took all manner of precautions to conceal
+their gold dust. We are told that on one occasion one party bored
+a hole in the end of the wagon tongue with an auger and filled it
+full of gold dust, thus escaping observation! The robbers learned
+to know the express agents, and always had advice of every large
+shipment of gold. It was almost useless to undertake to conceal
+anything from them; and resistance was met with death. Such a
+reign of terror, such an organized system of highway robbery,
+such a light valuing of human life, has been seldom found in any
+other time or place.
+
+There were, as we have seen, good men in these camps--although
+the best of them probably let down the standards of living
+somewhat after their arrival there; but the trouble was that the
+good men did not know one another, had no organization, and
+scarcely dared at first to attempt one. On the other hand, the
+robbers' organization was complete and kept its secrets as the
+grave; indeed, many and many a lonesome grave held secrets none
+ever was to know. How many men went out from Eastern States and
+disappeared, their fate always to remain a mystery, is a part of
+the untold story of the mining frontier.
+
+There are known to have been a hundred and two men killed by
+Plummer and his gang; how many were murdered without their fate
+ever being discovered can not be told. Plummer was the leader of
+the band, but, arch-hypocrite that he was, he managed to keep his
+own connection with it a secret. His position as sheriff gave him
+many advantages. He posed as being a silver-mine expert, among
+other things, and often would be called out to "expert" some new
+mine. That usually meant that he left town in order to commit
+some desperate robbery. The boldest outrages always required
+Plummer as the leader. Sometimes he would go away on the pretense
+of following some fugitive from justice. His horse, the fleetest
+in the country, often was found, laboring and sweating, at the
+rear of his house. That meant that Plummer had been away on some
+secret errand of his own. He was suspected many times, but
+nothing could be fastened upon him; or there lacked sufficient
+boldness and sufficient organization on the part of the
+law-and-order men to undertake his punishment.
+
+We are not concerned with repeating thrilling tales, bloody
+almost beyond belief, and indicative of an incomprehensible
+depravity in human nature, so much as we are with the causes and
+effects of this wild civilization which raged here quite alone in
+the midst of one of the wildest of the western mountain regions.
+It will best serve our purpose to retain in mind the twofold
+character of this population, and to remember that the frontier
+caught to itself not only ruffians and desperadoes, men undaunted
+by any risk, but also men possessed of a yet steadier personal
+courage and hardihood. There were men rough, coarse, brutal,
+murderous; but against them were other men self-reliant, stern,
+just, and resolved upon fair play.
+
+That was indeed the touchstone of the entire civilization which
+followed upon the heels of these scenes of violence. It was fair
+play which really animated the great Montana Vigilante movement
+and which eventually cleaned up the merciless gang of Henry
+Plummer and his associates. The centers of civilization were far
+removed. The courts were powerless. In some cases even the
+machinery of the law was in the hands of these ruffians. But so
+violent were their deeds, so brutal, so murderous, so unfair,
+that slowly the indignation of the good men arose to the
+white-hot point of open resentment and of swift retribution. What
+the good men of the frontier loved most of all was justice. They
+now enforced justice in the only way left open to them. They did
+this as California earlier had done; and they did it so well that
+there was small need to repeat the lesson.
+
+The actual extermination of the Henry Plummer band occurred
+rather promptly when the Vigilantes once got under way. One of
+the band by the name of Red Yager, in company with yet another by
+the name of Brown, had been concerned in the murder of Lloyd
+Magruder, a merchant of the Territory. The capture of these two
+followed closely upon the hanging of George Ives, also accused of
+more than one murder. Ives was an example of the degrading
+influence of the mines. He was a decent young man until he left
+his home in Wisconsin. He was in California from 1857 to 1858.
+When he appeared in Idaho he seemed to have thrown off all
+restraint and to have become a common rowdy and desperado. It is
+said of him that "few men of his age ever had been guilty of so
+many fiendish crimes."
+
+Yager and Brown, knowing the fate which Ives had met, gave up
+hope when they fell into the hands of the newly organized
+Vigilantes. Brown was hanged; so was Yager; but Yager, before his
+death, made a full confession which put the Vigilantes in
+possession of information they had never yet been able to
+secure.*
+
+* Langford gives these names disclosed by Yager as follows:
+"Henry Plummer was chief of the band; Bill Bunton, stool pigeon
+and second in command; George Brown, secretary; Sam Bunton,
+roadster; Cyrus Skinner, fence, spy, and roadster; George Shears,
+horse thief and roadster; Frank Parish, horse thief and roadster;
+Hayes Lyons, telegraph man and roadster; Bill Hunter, telegraph
+man and roadster; Ned Ray, council-room keeper at Bannack City;
+George Ives, Stephen Marshland, Dutch John (Wagner), Alex Carter,
+Whiskey Bill (Graves), Johnny Cooper, Buck Stinson, Mexican
+Franks Bob Zachary, Boone Helm, Clubfoot George (Lane), Billy
+Terwiliger, Gad Moore were roadsters." Practically all these were
+executed by the Vigilantes, with many others, and eventually the
+band of outlaws was entirely broken up.
+
+
+Much has been written and much romanced about the conduct of
+these desperadoes when they met their fate. Some of them were
+brave and some proved cowards at the last. For a time, Plummer
+begged abjectly, his eyes streaming with tears. Suddenly he was
+smitten with remorse as the whole picture of his past life
+appeared before him. He promised everything, begged everything,
+if only life might be spared him--asked his captors to cut off
+his ears, to cut out his tongue, then strip him naked and banish
+him. At the very last, however, he seems to have become composed.
+Stinson and Ray went to their fate alternately swearing and
+whining. Some of the ruffians faced death boldly. More than one
+himself jumped from the ladder or kicked from under him the box
+which was the only foothold between him and eternity. Boone Helm
+was as hardened as any of them. This man was a cannibal and
+murderer. He seems to have had no better nature whatever. His
+last words as he sprang off were "Hurrah for Jeff Davis! Let her
+rip!" Another man remarked calmly that he cared no more for
+hanging than for drinking a glass of water. But each after his
+own fashion met the end foreordained for him by his own lack of
+compassion; and of compassion he received none at the hands of
+the men who had resolved that the law should be established and
+should remain forever.
+
+There was an instant improvement in the social life of Virginia
+City, Bannack, and the adjoining camps as soon as it was
+understood that the Vigilantes were afoot. Langford, who
+undoubtedly knew intimately of the activities of this
+organization, makes no apology for the acts of the Vigilantes,
+although they did not have back of them the color of the actual
+law. He says:
+
+"The retribution dispensed to these daring freebooters in no
+respect exceeded the demands of absolute justice.... There
+was no other remedy. Practically the citizens had no law, but if
+law had existed it could not have afforded adequate redress. This
+was proven by the feeling of security consequent upon the
+destruction of the band. When the robbers were dead the people
+felt safe, not for themselves alone but for their pursuits and
+their property. They could travel without fear. They had
+reasonable assurance of safety in the transmission of money to
+the States and in the arrival of property over the unguarded
+route from Salt Lake. The crack of pistols had ceased, and they
+could walk the streets without constant exposure to danger. There
+was an omnipresent spirit of protection, akin to that omnipresent
+spirit of law which pervaded older and more civilized
+communities....Young men who had learned to believe that the
+roughs were destined to rule and who, under the influence of that
+faith, were fast drifting into crime shrunk appalled before the
+thorough work of the Vigilantes. Fear, more potent than
+conscience, forced even the worst of men to observe the
+requirements of society, and a feeling of comparative security
+among all classes was the result."
+
+Naturally it was not the case that all the bad men were thus
+exterminated. From time to time there appeared vividly in the
+midst of these surroundings additional figures of solitary
+desperadoes, each to have his list of victims, and each himself
+to fall before the weapons of his enemies or to meet the justice
+of the law or the sterner meed of the Vigilantes. It would not be
+wholly pleasant to read even the names of a long list of these;
+perhaps it will be sufficient to select one, the notorious Joseph
+Slade, one of the "picturesque" characters of whom a great deal
+of inaccurate and puerile history has been written. The truth
+about Slade is that he was a good man at first, faithful in the
+discharge of his duties as an agent of the stage company. Needing
+at times to use violence lawfully, he then began to use it
+unlawfully. He drank and soon went from bad to worse. At length
+his outrages became so numerous that the men of the community
+took him out and hanged him. His fate taught many others the risk
+of going too far in defiance of law and decency.
+
+What has been true regarding the camps of Florence, Bannack, and
+Virginia City, had been true in part in earlier camps and was to
+be repeated perhaps a trifle less vividly in other camps yet to
+come. The Black Hills gold rush, for instance, which came after
+the railroad but before the Indians were entirely cleared away,
+made a certain wild history of its own. We had our Deadwood stage
+line then, and our Deadwood City with all its wild life of
+drinking, gambling, and shooting--the place where more than one
+notorious bad man lost his life, and some capable officers of the
+peace shared their fate. To describe in detail the life of this
+stampede and the wild scenes ensuing upon it is perhaps not
+needful here. The main thing is that the great quartz lodes of
+the Black Hills support in the end a steady, thrifty, and
+law-abiding population.
+
+All over that West, once so unspeakably wild and reckless, there
+now rise great cities where recently were scattered only
+mining-camps scarce fit to be called units of any social compact.
+It was but yesterday that these men fought and drank and dug
+their own graves in their own sluices. At the city of Helena, on
+the site of Last Chance Gulch, one recalls that not so long ago
+citizens could show with a certain contemporary pride the old
+dead tree once known as "Hangman's Tree." It marked a spot which
+might be called a focus of the old frontier. Around it, and in
+the country immediately adjoining, was fought out the great
+battle whose issue could not be doubted--that between the new and
+the old days; between law and order and individual lawlessness;
+between the school and the saloon; between the home and the
+dance-hall; between society united and resolved and the
+individual reverted to worse than savagery.
+
+
+
+Chapter VI. The Pathways Of The West
+
+Since we have declared ourselves to be less interested in bald
+chronology than in the naturally connected causes of events which
+make chronology worth while, we may now, perhaps, double back
+upon the path of chronology, and take up the great early highways
+of the West--what we might call the points of attack against the
+frontier.
+
+The story of the Santa Fe Trail, now passing into oblivion, once
+was on the tongue of every man. This old highroad in its heyday
+presented the most romantic and appealing features of the earlier
+frontier life. The Santa Fe Trail was the great path of commerce
+between our frontier and the Spanish towns trading through Santa
+Fe. This commerce began in 1822, when about threescore men
+shipped certain goods across the lower Plains by pack-animals. By
+1826 it was employing a hundred men and was using wagons and
+mules. In 1830, when oxen first were used on the trail, the trade
+amounted to $120,000 annually; and by 1843, when the Spanish
+ports were closed, it had reached the value of $450,000,
+involving the use of 230 wagons and 350 men. It was this great
+wagon trail which first brought us into touch with the Spanish
+civilization of the Southwest. Its commercial totals do not bulk
+large today, but the old trail itself was a thing titanic in its
+historic value.
+
+This was the day not of water but of land transport; yet the
+wheeled vehicles which passed out into the West as common
+carriers of civilization clung to the river valleys--natural
+highways and natural resting places of homebuilding man. This has
+been the story of the advance of civilization from the first
+movements of the world's peoples. The valleys are the cleats of
+civilization's golden sluices.
+
+There lay the great valley of the Arkansas, offering food and
+water, an easy grade and a direct course reaching out into the
+West, even to the edge of the lands of Spain; and here stood
+wheeled vehicles able to traverse it and to carry drygoods and
+hardware, and especially domestic cotton fabrics, which formed
+the great staple of a "Santa Fe assortment." The people of the
+Middle West were now, in short, able to feed and clothe
+themselves and to offer a little of their surplus merchandise to
+some one else in sale. They had begun to export! Out yonder, in a
+strange and unknown land, lay one of the original markets of
+America!
+
+On the heels of Lewis and Clark, who had just explored the
+Missouri River route to the Northwest, Captain Zebulon Pike of
+the Army, long before the first wheeled traffic started West, had
+employed this valley of the Arkansas in his search for the
+southwestern delimitations of the United States. Pike thought he
+had found the head of the Red River when after a toilsome and
+dangerous march he reached the headwaters of the Rio Grande. But
+it was not our river. It belonged to Spain, as he learned to his
+sorrow, when he marched all the way to Chihuahua in old Mexico
+and lay there during certain weary months.
+
+It was Pike's story of the far Southwest that first started the
+idea of the commerce of the Santa Fe Trail. In that day geography
+was a human thing, a thing of vital importance to all men. Men
+did not read the stock markets; they read stories of adventure,
+tales of men returned from lands out yonder in the West.
+Heretofore the swarthy Mexicans, folk of the dry plains and hills
+around the head of the Rio Grande and the Red, had carried their
+cotton goods and many other small and needful things all the way
+from Vera Cruz on the seacoast, over trails that were long,
+tedious, uncertain, and expensive. A far shorter and more natural
+trade route went west along the Arkansas, which would bring the
+American goods to the doors of the Spanish settlements. After
+Pike and one or two others had returned with reports of the
+country, the possibilities of this trade were clear to any one
+with the merchant's imagination.
+
+There is rivalry for the title of "Father of the Santa Fe Trail."
+As early as 1812, when the United States was at war with England,
+a party of men on horseback trading into the West, commonly
+called the McKnight, Baird, and Chambers party, made their way
+west to Santa Fe. There, however, they met with disaster. All
+their goods were confiscated and they themselves lay in Mexican
+jails for nine years. Eventually the returning survivors of this
+party told their stories, and those stories, far from chilling,
+only inflamed the ardor of other adventurous traders. In 1821
+more than one American trader reached Santa Fe; and, now that the
+Spanish yoke had been thrown off by the Mexicans, the goods,
+instead of being confiscated, were purchased eagerly.
+
+It is to be remembered, of course, that trading of this sort to
+Mexico was not altogether a new thing. Sutlers of the old fur
+traders and trappers already had found the way to New Spain from
+the valley of the Platte, south along the eastern edge of the
+Rockies, through Wyoming and Colorado. By some such route as that
+at least one trader, a French creole, agent of the firm of Bryant
+& Morrison at Kaskaskia, had penetrated to the Spanish lands as
+early as 1804, while Lewis and Clark were still absent in the
+upper wilderness. Each year the great mountain rendezvous of the
+trappers--now at Bent's Fort on the Arkansas, now at Horse Creek
+in Wyoming, now on Green River in Utah, or even farther beyond
+the mountains--demanded supplies of food and traps and ammunition
+to enable the hunters to continue their work for another year.
+Perhaps many of the pack-trains which regularly supplied this
+shifting mountain market already had traded in the Spanish
+country.
+
+It is not necessary to go into further details regarding this
+primitive commerce of the prairies. It yielded a certain profit;
+it shaped the character of the men who carried it on. But what is
+yet more important, it greatly influenced the country which lay
+back of the border on the Missouri River. It called yet more men
+from the eastern settlements to those portions which lay upon the
+edge of the Great Plains. There crowded yet more thickly, up to
+the line between the certain and the uncertain, the restless
+westbound population of all the country.
+
+If on the south the valley of the Arkansas led outward to New
+Spain, yet other pathways made out from the Mississippi River
+into the unknown lands. The Missouri was the first and last of
+our great natural frontier roads. Its lower course swept along
+the eastern edge of the Plains, far to the south, down to the
+very doors of the most adventurous settlements in the Mississippi
+Valley. Those who dared its stained and turbulent current had to
+push up, onward, northward, past the mouth of the Platte, far to
+the north across degrees of latitude, steadily forward through a
+vast virgin land. Then the river bent boldly and strongly off to
+the west, across another empire. Its great falls indicated that
+it headed high; beyond the great falls its steady sweep westward
+and at last southward, led into yet other kingdoms.
+
+When we travel by horse or by modern motor car in that now
+accessible region and look about us, we should not fail to
+reflect on the long trail of the upbound boats which Manuel Lisa
+and other traders sent out almost immediately upon the return of
+the Lewis and Clark expedition. We should see them struggling up
+against that tremendous current before steam was known, driven by
+their lust for new lands. We may then understand fully what we
+have read of the enterprises of the old American Fur Company, and
+bring to mind the forgotten names of Campbell and Sublette, of
+General Ashley and of Wyeth--names to be followed by others
+really of less importance, as those of Bonneville and Fremont.
+That there could be farms, that there ever might be homes, in
+this strange wild country, was, to these early adventurers,
+unthinkable.
+
+Then we should picture the millions of buffalo which once covered
+these plains and think of the waste and folly of their
+slaughtering. We should see the long streams of the Mackinaw
+boats swimming down the Missouri, bound for St. Louis, laden with
+bales of buffalo and beaver peltry, every pound of which would be
+worth ten dollars at the capital of the fur trade; and we should
+restore to our minds the old pictures of savage tribesmen, decked
+in fur-trimmed war-shirts and plumed bonnets, armed with lance
+and sinewed bow and bull-neck shield, not forgetting whence they
+got their horses and how they got their food.
+
+The great early mid-continental highway, known as the Oregon
+Trail or the Overland Trail, was by way of the Missouri up the
+Platte Valley, thence across the mountains. We know more of this
+route because it was not discontinued, but came steadily more and
+more into use, for one reason after another. The fur traders used
+it, the Forty-Niners used it, the cattlemen used it in part, the
+railroads used it; and, lastly, the settlers and farmers used it
+most of all.
+
+In physical features the Platte River route was similar to that
+of the Arkansas Valley. Each at its eastern extremity, for a few
+days' travel, passed over the rolling grass-covered and
+flower-besprinkled prairies ere it broke into the high and dry
+lands of the Plains, with their green or grey or brown covering
+of practically flowerless short grasses. But between the two
+trails of the Arkansas and the Platte there existed certain wide
+differences. At the middle of the nineteenth century the two
+trails were quite distinct in personnel, if that word may be
+used. The Santa Fe Trail showed Spanish influences; that of the
+Platte Valley remained far more nearly American.
+
+Thus far the frontier had always been altering the man who came
+to it; and, indirectly, always altering those who dwelt back of
+the frontier, nearer to the Appalachians or the Atlantic. A new
+people now was in process of formation--a people born of a new
+environment. America and the American were conceiving. There was
+soon to be born, soon swiftly to grow, a new and lasting type of
+man. Man changes an environment only by bringing into it new or
+better transportation. Environment changes man. Here in the
+midcontinent, at the mid-century, the frontier and the ways of
+the frontier were writing their imprint on the human product of
+our land.
+
+The first great caravans of the Platte Valley, when the
+wagon-trains went out hundreds strong, were not the same as the
+scattering cavalcade of the fur hunters, not the same as the
+ox-trains and mule-trains of the Santa Fe traffic. The men who
+wore deepest the wheel marks of the Oregon Trail were neither
+trading nor trapping men, but homebuilding men--the first real
+emigrants to go West with the intent of making homes beyond the
+Rockies.
+
+The Oregon Trail had been laid out by the explorers of the fur
+trade. Zealous missionaries had made their way over the trail in
+the thirties. The Argonauts of '49 passed over it and left it
+only after crossing the Rockies. But, before gold in California
+was dreamed of, there had come back to the States reports of
+lands rich in resources other than gold, lying in the far
+Northwest, beyond the great mountain ranges and, before the
+Forty-Niners were heard of, farmers, homebuilders, emigrants, men
+with their families, men with their household goods, were
+steadily passing out for the far-off and unknown country of
+Oregon.
+
+The Oregon Trail was the pathway for Fremont in 1842, perhaps the
+most overvalued explorer of all the West; albeit this comment may
+to some seem harsh. Kit Carson and Bill Williams led Fremont
+across the Rockies almost by the hand. Carson and Williams
+themselves had been taken across by the Indian tribes. But
+Fremont could write; and the story which he set down of his first
+expedition inflamed the zeal of all. Men began to head out for
+that far-away country beyond the Rockies. Not a few scattered
+bands, but very many, passed up the valley of the Platte. There
+began a tremendous trek of thousands of men who wanted homes
+somewhere out beyond the frontier. And that was more than ten
+years before the Civil War. The cow trade was not dreamed of; the
+coming cow country was overleaped and ignored.
+
+Our national horizon extended immeasurably along that dusty way.
+In the use of the Oregon Trail we first began to be great. The
+chief figure of the American West, the figure of the ages, is not
+the long-haired, fringed-legging man riding a raw-boned pony, but
+the gaunt and sadfaced woman sitting on the front seat of the
+wagon, following her lord where he might lead, her face hidden in
+the same ragged sunbonnet which had crossed the Appalachians and
+the Missouri long before. That was America, my brethren! There
+was the seed of America's wealth. There was the great romance of
+all America--the woman in the sunbonnet; and not, after all, the
+hero with the rifle across his saddle horn. Who has written her
+story? Who has painted her picture?
+
+They were large days, those of the great Oregon Trail, not always
+pleasingly dramatic, but oftentimes tragic and terrible. We speak
+of the Oregon Trail, but it means little to us today; nor will
+any mere generalities ever make it mean much to us. But what did
+it mean to the men and women of that day? What and who were those
+men and women? What did it mean to take the Overland Trail in the
+great adventure of abandoning forever the known and the safe and
+setting out for Oregon or California at a time when everything in
+the far West was new and unknown? How did those good folk travel?
+Why and whither did they travel?
+
+There is a book done by C. F. McGlashan, a resident of Truckee,
+California, known as "The History of the Donner Party," holding a
+great deal of actual history. McGlashan, living close to Donner
+Lake, wrote in 1879, describing scenes with which he was
+perfectly familiar, and recounting facts which he had from direct
+association with participants in the ill-fated Donner Party. He
+chronicles events which happened in 1846--a date before the
+discovery of gold in California. The Donner Party was one of the
+typical American caravans of homeseekers who started for the
+Pacific Slope with no other purpose than that of founding homes
+there, and with no expectation of sudden wealth to be gained in
+the mines. I desire therefore to quote largely from the pages of
+this book, believing that, in this fashion, we shall come upon
+history of a fundamental sort, which shall make us acquainted
+with the men and women of that day, with the purposes and the
+ambitions which animated them, and with the hardships which they
+encountered.
+
+"The States along the Mississippi were but sparsely settled in
+1846, yet the fame of the fruitfulness, the healthfulness, and
+the almost tropical beauty of the land bordering the Pacific,
+tempted the members of the Donner Party to leave their homes.
+These homes were situated in Illinois, Iowa, Tennessee, Missouri,
+and Ohio. Families from each of these States joined the train and
+participated in its terrible fate; yet the party proper was
+organized in Sangamon County, Illinois, by George and Jacob
+Donner and James F. Reed. Early in April, 1846, the party set out
+from Springfield, Illinois, and by the first week in May reached
+Independence, Missouri. Here the party was increased by
+additional members, and the train comprised about one hundred
+persons.... "In the party were aged fathers with their trusting
+families about them, mothers whose very lives were wrapped up in
+their children, men in the prime and vigor of manhood, maidens in
+all the sweetness and freshness of budding womanhood, children
+full of glee and mirthfulness, and babes nestling on maternal
+breasts. Lovers there were, to whom the journey was tinged with
+rainbow hues of joy and happiness, and strong, manly hearts whose
+constant support and encouragement was the memory of dear ones
+left behind in homeland.
+
+"The wonderment which all experience in viewing the scenery along
+the line of the old emigrant road was peculiarly vivid to these
+people. Few descriptions had been given of the route, and all was
+novel and unexpected. In later years the road was broadly and
+deeply marked, and good camping grounds were distinctly
+indicated. The bleaching bones of cattle that had perished, or
+the broken fragments of wagons or castaway articles, were thickly
+strewn on either side of the highway. But in 1846 the way was
+through almost trackless valleys waving with grass, along rivers
+where few paths were visible, save those made by the feet of
+buffalo and antelope, and over mountains and plains where little
+more than the westward course of the sun guided the travelers.
+Trading-posts were stationed at only a few widely distant points,
+and rarely did the party meet with any human beings, save
+wandering bands of Indians. Yet these first days are spoken of by
+all of the survivors as being crowned with peaceful enjoyment and
+pleasant anticipations. There were beautiful flowers by the
+roadside, an abundance of game in the meadows and mountains, and
+at night there were singing, dancing, and innocent plays. Several
+musical instruments, and many excellent voices, were in the
+party, and the kindliest feeling and goodfellowship prevailed
+among the members.
+
+"The formation of the company known as the Donner Party was
+purely accidental. The union of so many emigrants into one train
+was not occasioned by any preconcerted arrangement. Many
+composing the Donner Party were not aware, at the outset, that
+such a tide of emigration was sweeping to California. In many
+instances small parties would hear of the mammoth train just
+ahead of them or just behind them, and by hastening their pace,
+or halting for a few days, joined themselves to the party. Many
+were with the train during a portion of the journey, but from
+some cause or other became parted from the Donner company before
+reaching Donner Lake. Soon after the train left Independence it
+contained between two and three hundred wagons, and when in
+motion was two miles in length. The members of the party proper
+numbered ninety."
+
+This caravan, like many others of the great assemblage westbound
+at that time, had great extremes in personnel. Some were out for
+mere adventure; some were single men looking for a location. Most
+of them were fathers of families, among them several persons of
+considerable means and of good standing in the community which
+they were leaving. While we may suppose that most of them were
+folk of no extraordinary sort, certainly some were persons of
+education and intelligence. Among these was the wife of George
+Donner--Tamsen Dormer; a woman of education, a musician, a
+linguist, a botanist, and of the most sublime heroism.
+
+Tamsen Donner sent back now and then along the route some story
+of the daily doings of the caravan; and such letters as these are
+of the utmost interest to any who desire precise information of
+that time. It would seem that the emigrants themselves for a
+great part of their route met with no great adventures, nor
+indeed, appeared to be undertaking any unusual affair. They
+followed a route up the Platte Valley already long known to those
+of the eastern settlements.
+
+"Near the Junction of the North
+and South Platte, June 16, 1846.
+
+"My Old Friend: We are now on the Platte, two hundred miles from
+Fort Laramie. Our journey so far has been pleasant, the roads
+have been good, and food plentiful. The water for part of the way
+has been indifferent, but at no time have our cattle suffered for
+it. Wood is now very scarce, but "buffalo chips" are excellent;
+they kindle quickly and retain heat surprisingly. We had this
+morning buffalo steaks broiled upon them that had the same flavor
+they would have had upon hickory coals.
+
+"We feel no fear of Indians; our cattle graze quietly around our
+encampment unmolested. Two or three men will go hunting twenty
+miles from camp; and last night two of our men lay out in the
+wilderness rather than ride their horses after a hard chase.
+
+"Indeed, if I do not experience something far worse than I have
+yet done, I shall say the trouble is all in getting started. Our
+wagons have not needed much repair, and I can not yet tell in
+what respects they could be improved. Certain it is, they can not
+be too strong. Our preparations for the journey might have been
+in some respects bettered.
+
+"Bread has been the principal article of food in our camp. We
+laid in one hundred and fifty pounds of flour and seventy-five
+pounds of meat for each individual, and I fear bread will be
+scarce. Meat is abundant. Rice and beans are good articles on the
+road; cornmeal too, is acceptable. Linsey dresses are the most
+suitable for children. Indeed, if I had one, it would be
+acceptable. There is so cool a breeze at all times on the Plains
+that the sun does not feel so hot as one would suppose.
+
+"We are now four hundred and fifty miles from Independence. Our
+route at first was rough, and through a timbered country, which
+appeared to be fertile. After striking the prairie, we found a
+firstrate road, and the only difficulty we have had, has been in
+crossing the creeks. In that, however, there has been no danger.
+
+"I never could have believed we could have traveled so far with
+so little difficulty. The prairie between the Blue and the Platte
+Rivers is beautiful beyond description. Never have I seen so
+varied a country, so suitable for cultivation. Everything is
+new and pleasing; the Indians frequently come to see us, and the
+chiefs of a tribe breakfasted at our tent this morning. All are
+so friendly that I can not help feeling sympathy and friendship
+for them. But on one sheet what can I say?
+
+"Since we have been on the Platte, we have had the river on one
+side and the ever varying mounds on the other, and have traveled
+through the bottom lands from one to two miles wide, with little
+or no timber. The soil is sandy, and last year, on account of the
+dry season, the emigrants found grass here scarce. Our cattle are
+in good order, and when proper care has been taken, none have
+been lost. Our milch cows have been of great service, indeed.
+They have been of more advantage than our meat. We have plenty of
+butter and milk.
+
+"We are commanded by Captain Russell, an amiable man. George
+Donner is himself yet. He crows in the morning and shouts out,
+"Chain up, boys--chain up," with as much authority as though he
+was "something in particular." John Denton is still with us. We
+find him useful in the camp. Hiram Miller and Noah James are in
+good health and doing well. We have of the best people in our
+company, and some, too, that are not so good.
+
+"Buffalo show themselves frequently. We have found the wild
+tulip, the primrose, the lupine, the eardrop, the larkspur, and
+creeping hollyhock, and a beautiful flower resembling the bloom
+of the beech tree, but in bunches as large as a small sugarloaf,
+and of every variety of shade, to red and green.
+
+"I botanize, and read some, but cook "heaps" more. There are four
+hundred and twenty wagons, as far as we have heard, on the road
+between here and Oregon and California.
+
+"Give our love to all inquiring friends. God bless them.
+
+"Yours truly,
+Mrs. George Donner."
+
+By the Fourth of July the Donner Party had reached Fort Laramie.
+They pushed on west over the old trail up the Sweetwater River
+and across the South Pass, the easiest of all the mountain passes
+known to the early travelers. Without much adventure they reached
+Fort Bridger, then only a trading-post. Here occurred the fatal
+mistake of the Donner Party.
+
+Some one at the fort strongly advised them to take a new route, a
+cut-off said to shorten the distance by about three hundred
+miles. This cut-off passed along the south shore of Great Salt
+Lake and caught up the old California Trail from Fort Hall--then
+well established and well known-along the Humboldt River. The
+great Donner caravan delayed for some days at Fort Bridger,
+hesitating over the decision of which route to follow. The party
+divided. All those who took the old road north of Salt Lake by
+way of Fort Hall reached California in complete safety. Of the
+original Donner Party there remained eighty-seven persons. All of
+these took the cut-off, being eager to save time in their travel.
+They reached Salt Lake after unspeakable difficulties. Farther
+west, in the deserts of Nevada, they lost many of their cattle.
+
+Now began among the party dissensions and grumblings. The story
+is a long one. It reached its tragic denouement just below the
+summit of the Sierras, on the shores of Donner Lake. The words of
+McGlashan may now best serve our purpose.
+
+"Generally, the ascent of the Sierra brought joy and gladness to
+weary overland emigrants. To the Donner Party it brought terror
+and dismay. The company had hardly obtained a glimpse of the
+mountains, ere the winter storm clouds began to assemble their
+hosts around the loftier crests. Every day the weather appeared
+more ominous and threatening. The delay at the Truckee Meadows
+had been brief, but every day ultimately cost a dozen lives. On
+the twenty-third of October, they became thoroughly alarmed at
+the angry heralds of the gathering storm, and with all haste
+resumed the journey. It was too late! At Prosser Creek, three
+miles below Truckee, they found themselves encompassed with six
+inches of snow. On the summits, the snow was from two to five
+feet in depth. This was October 28, 1846. Almost a month earlier
+than usual, the Sierra had donned its mantle of ice and snow. The
+party were prisoners!
+
+"All was consternation. The wildest confusion prevailed. In their
+eagerness, many went far in advance of the main train. There was
+little concert of action or harmony of plan. All did not arrive
+at Donner Lake the same day. Some wagons and families did not
+reach the lake until the thirty-first day of October, some never
+went farther than Prosser Creek, while others, on the evening of
+the twenty-ninth, struggled through the snow, and reached the
+foot of the precipitous cliffs between the summit and the upper
+end of the lake. Here, baffled, wearied, disheartened, they
+turned back to the foot of the lake."
+
+These emigrants did not lack in health, strength, or resolution,
+but here they were in surroundings absolutely new to them. A sort
+of panic seized them now. They scattered; their organization
+disintegrated. All thought of conjoint action, of a social
+compact, a community of interests, seems to have left them. It
+was a history of every man for himself, or at least every family
+for itself. All track of the road was now lost under the snow. At
+the last pitch up to the summit of the Sierras precipitous cliffs
+abounded. No one knew the way. And now the snows came once again.
+
+"The emigrants suffered a thousand deaths. The pitiless snow came
+down in large, steady masses. All understood that the storm meant
+death. One of the Indians silently wrapped his blanket about him
+and in deepest dejection seated himself beside a tall pine. In
+this position he passed the entire night, only moving
+occasionally to keep from being covered with snow. Mrs. Reed
+spread down a shawl, placed her four children--Virginia, Patty,
+James, and Thomas--thereon, and putting another shawl over them,
+sat by the side of her babies during all the long hours of
+darkness. Every little while she was compelled to lift the upper
+shawl and shake off the rapidly accumulating snow.
+
+"With slight interruptions, the storm continued several days. The
+mules and oxen that had always hovered about camp were blinded
+and bewildered by the storm, and straying away were literally
+buried alive in the drifts. What pen can describe the horror of
+the position in which the emigrants found themselves? It was
+impossible to move through the deep, soft snow without the
+greatest effort. The mules were gone, and were never found. Most
+of the cattle had perished, and were wholly hidden from sight.
+The few oxen which were found were slaughtered for beef."
+
+The travelers knew that the supplies they had could not last
+long. On the 12th of November a relief party essayed to go
+forward, but after struggling a short distance toward the summit,
+came back wearied and broken-hearted, unable to make way through
+the deep, soft snow. Then some one--said to have been F. W.
+Graves of Vermont--bethought himself of making snowshoes out of
+the oxbows and the hides of the slaughtered oxen. With these they
+did better.
+
+Volunteers were called for yet another party to cross the
+mountains into California. Fifteen persons volunteered. Not all
+of them were men--some were mothers, and one was a young woman.
+Their mental condition was little short of desperation. Only, in
+the midst of their intense hardships it seemed to all, somewhere
+to the westward was California, and that there alone lay any
+hope. The party traveled four miles the first day; and their camp
+fires were visible below the summit. The next day they traveled
+six miles and crossed the divide.
+
+They were starving, cold, worn out, their feet frozen to
+bursting, their blood chilled. At times they were caught in some
+of the furious storms of the Sierras. They did not know their
+way. On the 27th of December certain of the party resolved
+themselves to that last recourse which alone might mean life.
+Surrounded by horrors as they were, it seemed they could endure
+the thought of yet an additional horror.... There were the
+dead, the victims who already had perished!...
+
+Seven of the fifteen got through to the Sacramento Valley, among
+these the young girl, Mary Graves, described as "a very beautiful
+girl, of tall and slender build, and, exceptionally graceful
+character." The story brought out by these survivors of the first
+party to cross the Sierras from the starving camp set all
+California aflame. There were no less than three relief
+expeditions formed, which at varying dates crossed the mountains
+to the east. Some men crossed the snow belt five times in all.
+The rescuers were often in as much danger as the victims they
+sought to save.
+
+And they could not save them. Back there in their tents and
+hovels around Donner Lake starvation was doing its work steadily.
+There is contemporary history also covering the details of this.
+Tamsen Donner, heroine that she was, kept a diary which would
+have been valuable for us, but this was lost along with her
+paintings and her botanical collections. The best preserved diary
+is that of Patrick Breen, done in simple and matter-of-fact
+fashion throughout most of the starving winter. Thus:
+
+"Dec. 17. Pleasant; William Murphy returned from the mountain
+party last evening; Baylis Williams died night before last;
+Milton and Noah started for Donner's eight days ago; not returned
+yet; think they are lost in the snow.
+
+"Dec. 21. Milton got back last night from Donner's camp. Sad
+news; Jacob Donner, Samuel Shoemaker, Rhineheart, and Smith are
+dead; the rest of them in a low situation; snowed all night, with
+a strong southwest wind.
+
+"Dec. 23. Clear to-day; Milton took some of his meat away; all
+well at their camp. Began this day to read the "Thirty Days'
+Prayers"; Almighty God, grant the requests of unworthy sinners!
+
+"Jan. 13. Snowing fast; snow higher than the shanty; it must be
+thirteen feet deep. Can not get wood this morning; it is a
+dreadful sight for us to look upon.
+
+"Jan. 27. Commenced snowing yesterday; still continues today.
+Lewis Keseberg, Jr., died three days ago; food growing scarce;
+don't have fire enough to cook our hides.
+
+"Jan. 31. The sun does not shine out brilliant this morning;
+froze hard last night; wind northwest. Landrum Murphy died last
+night about ten o'clock; Mrs. Reed went to Graves's this morning
+to look after goods.
+
+"Feb. 4. Snowed hard until twelve o'clock last night; many uneasy
+for fear we shall all perish with hunger; we have but little meat
+left, and only three hides; Mrs. Reed has nothing but one hide,
+and that is on Graves's house; Milton lives there, and likely
+will keep that. Eddy's child died last night.
+
+"Feb. 7. Ceased to snow at last; today it is quite pleasant.
+McCutchen's child died on the second of this month.
+
+"[This child died and was buried in the Graves's cabin. Mr. W. C.
+Graves helped dig the grave near one side of the cabin, and laid
+the little one to rest. One of the most heart-rending features of
+this Donner tragedy is the number of infants that perished. Mrs.
+Breen, Mrs. Pike, Mrs. Foster, Mrs. McCutchen, Mrs. Eddy, and
+Mrs. Graves each had nursing babes when the fatal camp was
+pitched at Donner Lake.]
+
+"Feb. 8. Fine, clear morning. Spitzer died last night, and we
+will bury him in the snow; Mrs. Eddy died on the night of the
+seventh.
+
+"Feb. 9. Mrs. Pike's child all but dead; Milton is at Murphy's,
+not able to get out of bed; Mrs. Eddy and child buried today;
+wind southeast.
+
+"Feb. 10. Beautiful morning; thawing in the sun; Milton Elliott
+died last night at Murphy's cabin, and Mrs. Reed went there this
+morning to see about his effects. John Denton trying to borrow
+meat for Graves; had none to give; they had nothing but hides;
+all are entirely out of meat, but a little we have; our hides are
+nearly all eat up, but with God's help spring will soon smile
+upon us."
+
+There was one survivor of the camp at Donner Lake, a man named
+Lewis Keseberg, of German descent. That he was guilty of repeated
+cannibalism cannot be doubted. It was in his cabin that, after
+losing all her loved ones, the heroic Tamsen Donner met her end.
+Many thought he killed her for the one horrid purpose.*
+
+* Many years later (1879) Keseberg declared under oath to C. F.
+McGlashan that he did not take her life. See "History of the
+Donner" Party, pp. 212, 213.
+
+
+Such then is the story of one of the great emigrant parties who
+started West on a hazard of new fortunes in the early days of the
+Oregon Trail. Happily there has been no parallel to the
+misadventures of this ill-fated caravan. It is difficult
+--without reading these, bald and awful details-- to realize the
+vast difference between that day and this. Today we may by the
+gentle stages of a pleasant railway journey arrive at Donner
+Lake. Little trace remains, nor does any kindly soul wish for
+more definite traces, of those awful scenes. Only a cross here
+and there with a legend, faint and becoming fainter every year,
+may be seen, marking the more prominent spots of the historic
+starving camp.
+
+Up on the high mountain side, for the most part hid in the
+forest, lie the snowsheds and tunnels of the railway, now
+encountering its stiffest climb up the steep slopes to the summit
+of the Sierras. The author visited this spot of melancholy
+history in company with the vice-president of the great railway
+line which here swings up so steadily and easily over the
+Sierras. Bit by bit we checked out as best we might the fateful
+spots mentioned in the story of the Donner Party. A splendid
+motor highway runs by the lakeside now. While we halted our own
+car there, a motor car drove up from the westward--following that
+practical automobile highway which now exists from the plains of
+California across the Sierras and east over precisely that trail
+where once the weary feet of the oxen dragged the wagons of the
+early emigrants. It was a small car of no expensive type. It was
+loaded down with camping equipment until the wheels scarcely
+could be seen. It carried five human occupants--an Iowa farmer
+and his family. They had been out to California for a season.
+Casually they had left Los Angeles, had traveled north up the
+valleys of California, east across the summit of the Sierras, and
+were here now bound for Iowa over the old emigrant trail!
+
+We hailed this new traveler on the old trail. I do not know
+whether or not he had any idea of the early days of that great
+highway; I suspect that he could tell only of its present
+motoring possibilities. But his wheels were passing over the
+marks left more than half a century ago by the cracked felloes of
+the emigrant wagons going west in search of homes. If we seek
+history, let us ponder that chance pause of the eastbound
+family, traveling by motor for pleasure, here by the side of the
+graves of the travelers of another day, itself so briefly gone.
+What an epoch was spanned in the passing of that frontier!
+
+
+
+Chapter VII. The Indian Wars
+
+It might well be urged against the method employed in these pages
+that, although we undertook to speak of the last American
+frontier, all that we really thus far have done has been to
+describe a series of frontiers from the Missouri westward. In
+part this is true. But it was precisely in this large, loose, and
+irregular fashion that we actually arrived at our last frontier.
+Certainly our westbound civilization never advanced by any steady
+or regular process. It would be a singularly illuminating
+map--and one which I wish we might show--which would depict in
+different colors the great occupied areas of the West, with the
+earliest dates of their final and permanent occupation. Such a
+map as this would show us that the last frontier of America was
+overleaped and left behind not once but a score of times.
+
+The land between the Missouri and the Rockies, along the Great
+Plains and the high foothills, was crossed over and forgotten by
+the men who were forging on into farther countries in search of
+lands where fortune was swift and easy. California, Oregon, all
+the early farming and timbering lands of the distant Northwest--
+these lay far beyond the Plains; and as we have noted, they were
+sought for, even before gold was dreamed of upon the Pacific
+Slope.
+
+So here, somewhere between the Missouri and the Rockies, lay our
+last frontier, wavering, receding, advancing, gaining and losing,
+changing a little more every decade--and at last so rapidly
+changed as to be outworn and abolished in one swift decade all
+its own.
+
+This unsettled land so long held in small repute by the early
+Americans, was, as we have pointed out, the buffalo range and the
+country of the Horse Indians--the Plains tribes who lived upon
+the buffalo. For a long time it was this Indian population which
+held back the white settlements of Kansas, Nebraska, the Dakotas,
+Montana, Wyoming, Colorado. But as men began to work farther and
+farther westward in search of homes in Oregon, or in quest of
+gold in California or Idaho or Montana, the Indian question came
+to be a serious one.
+
+To the Army, soon after the Civil War, fell the task of
+exterminating, or at least evicting, the savage tribes over all
+this unvalued and unknown Middle West. This was a process not
+altogether simple. For a considerable time the Indians themselves
+were able to offer very effective resistance to the enterprise.
+They were accustomed to living upon that country, and did not
+need to bring in their own supplies; hence the Army fought them
+at a certain disadvantage. In sooth, the Army had to learn to
+become half Indian before it could fight the Indians on anything
+like even terms. We seem not so much to have coveted the lands
+in the first Indian-fighting days; we fought rather for the
+trails than for the soil. The Indians themselves had lived there
+all their lives, had conquered their environment, and were happy
+in it. They made a bitter fight; nor are they to be blamed for
+doing so.
+
+The greatest of our Indian wars have taken place since our own
+Civil War; and perhaps the most notable of all the battles are
+those which were fought on the old cow range--in the land of our
+last frontier. We do not lack abundant records of this time of
+our history. Soon after the Civil War the railroads began edging
+out into the plains. They brought, besides many new settlers, an
+abundance of chroniclers and historians and writers of hectic
+fiction or supposed fact. A multitude of books came out at this
+time of our history, most of which were accepted as truth. That
+was the time when we set up as Wild West heroes rough skinclad
+hunters and so-called scouts, each of whom was allowed to tell
+his own story and to have it accepted at par. As a matter of
+fact, at about the time the Army had succeeded in subduing the
+last of the Indian tribes on the buffalo-range, the most of our
+Wild West history, at least so far as concerned the boldest
+adventure, was a thing of the past. It was easy to write of a
+past which every one now was too new, too ignorant, or too busy
+critically to remember.
+
+Even as early as 1866, Colonel Marcy, an experienced army officer
+and Indian-fighter, took the attitude of writing about a
+vanishing phase of American life. In his Army "Life on the
+Border," he says:
+
+"I have been persuaded by many friends that the contents of the
+book which is herewith presented to the public are not without
+value as records of a fast-vanishing age, and as truthful
+sketches of men of various races whose memory will shortly depend
+only on romance, unless some one who knew them shall undertake to
+leave outlines of their peculiar characteristics.... I am
+persuaded that excuse may be found in the simple fact that all
+these peoples of my description--men, conditions of life, races
+of
+aboriginal inhabitants and adventurous hunters and pioneers--are
+passing away. A few years more and the prairie will be
+transformed into farms. The mountain ravines will be the abodes
+of busy manufacturers, and the gigantic power of American
+civilization will have taken possession of the land from the
+great river of the West to the very shores of the Pacific....
+The world is fast filling up. I trust I am not in error when I
+venture to place some value, however small, on everything which
+goes to form the truthful history of a condition of men incident
+to the advances of civilization over the continent--a condition
+which forms peculiar types of character, breeds remarkable
+developments of human nature--a condition also which can hardly
+again exist on this or any other continent, and which has,
+therefore, a special value in the sum of human history."
+
+Such words as the foregoing bespeak a large and dignified point
+of view. No one who follows Marcy's pages can close them with
+anything but respect and admiration. It is in books such as this,
+then, that we may find something about the last stages of the
+clearing of the frontier.
+
+Even in Marcy's times the question of our Government's Indian
+policy was a mooted one. He himself as an Army officer looked at
+the matter philosophically, but his estimate of conditions was
+exact. Long ago as he wrote, his conclusions were such as might
+have been given forty years later.
+
+"The limits of their accustomed range are rapidly contracting,
+and their means of subsistence undergoing a corresponding
+diminution. The white man is advancing with rapid strides upon
+all sides of them, and they are forced to give way to his
+encroachments. The time is not far distant when the buffalo will
+become extinct, and they will then be compelled to adopt some
+other mode of life than the chase for a subsistence.... No
+man will quietly submit to starvation when food is within his
+reach, and if he cannot obtain it honestly he will steal it or
+take it by force. If, therefore, we do not induce them to engage
+in agricultural avocations we shall in a few years have before us
+the alternative of exterminating them or fighting them
+perpetually. That they are destined ultimately to extinction does
+not in my mind admit of a doubt. For the reasons above mentioned
+it may at first be necessary for our government to assert its
+authority over them by a prompt and vigorous exercise of the
+military arm.... The tendency of the policy I have indicated
+will be to assemble these people in communities where they will
+be more readily controlled; and I predict from it the most
+gratifying results." Another well-informed army officer, Colonel
+Richard Dodge, himself a hunter, a trailer, and a rider able to
+compete with the savages in their own fields, penetrated to the
+heart of the Indian problem when he wrote:
+
+"The conception of Indian character is almost impossible to a man
+who has passed the greater portion of his life surrounded by the
+influences of a cultivated, refined, and moral society....
+The truth is simply too shocking, and the revolted mind takes
+refuge in disbelief as the less painful horn of the dilemma. As a
+first step toward an understanding of his character we must get
+at his standpoint of morality. As a child he is not brought
+up....From the dawn of intelligence his own will is his law.
+There is no right and no wrong to him.... No dread of
+punishment restrains him from any act that boyish fun or fury may
+prompt. No lessons inculcating the beauty and sure reward of
+goodness or the hideousness and certain punishment of vice are
+ever wasted on him. The men by whom he is surrounded, and to whom
+he looks as models for his future life, are great and renowned
+just in proportion to their ferocity, to the scalps they have
+taken, or the thefts they have committed. His earliest boyish
+memory is probably a dance of rejoicing over the scalps of
+strangers, all of whom he is taught to regard as enemies. The
+lessons of his mother awaken only a desire to take his place as
+soon as possible in fight and foray. The instruction of his
+father is only such as is calculated to fit him best to act a
+prominent part in the chase, in theft, and in murder....
+Virtue, morality, generosity, honor, are words not only
+absolutely without significance to him, but are not accurately
+translatable, into any Indian language on the Plains."
+
+These are sterner, less kindly, less philosophic words than
+Marcy's, but they keenly outline the duty of the Army on the
+frontier. We made treaties with the Indians and broke them. In
+turn men such as these ignorant savages might well be expected to
+break their treaties also; and they did. Unhappily our Indian
+policy at that time was one of mingled ferocity and wheedling.
+The Indians did not understand us any more than we did them. When
+we withdrew some of the old frontier posts from the old
+hunting-range, the action was construed by the tribesmen as an
+admission that we feared them, and they acted upon that idea. In
+one point of view they had right with them, for now we were
+moving out into the last of the great buffalo country. Their war
+was one of desperation, whereas ours was one of conquest, no
+better and no worse than all the wars of conquest by which the
+strong have taken the possessions of the weak.
+
+Our Army at the close of the Civil War and at the beginning of
+the wars with the Plains tribes was in better condition than it
+has ever been since that day. It was made up of the soundest and
+best-seasoned soldiers that ever fought under our flag; and at
+that time it represented a greater proportion of our fighting
+strength than it ever has before or since. In 1860 the Regular
+Army, not counting the volunteer forces, was 16,000. In 1870 it
+was 37,000--one soldier to each one thousand of our population.
+
+Against this force, pioneers of the vaster advancing army of
+peaceful settlers now surging West, there was arrayed practically
+all the population of fighting tribes such as the Sioux, the two
+bands of the Cheyennes, the Piegans, the Assiniboines, the
+Arapahoes, the Kiowas, the Comanches, and the Apaches. These were
+the leaders of many other tribes in savage campaigns which set
+the land aflame from the Rio Grande to our northern line. The
+Sioux and Cheyennes were more especially the leaders, and they
+always did what they could to enlist the aid of the less warlike
+tribes such as the Crows, the Snakes, the Bannacks, the
+Utes--indeed all of the savage or semi-civilized tribes which had
+hung on the flanks of the traffic of the westbound trail.
+
+The Sioux, then at the height of their power, were distinguished
+by many warlike qualities. They fought hard and were quick to
+seize upon any signs of weakness in their enemies. When we, in
+the course of our Civil War, had withdrawn some of the upper
+posts, the Sioux edged in at once and pressed back the whites
+quite to the eastern confines of the Plains. When we were locked
+in the death grip of internecine war in 1862, they rose in one
+savage wave of rebellion of their own and massacred with the most
+horrible ferocity not less than six hundred and forty-four whites
+in Minnesota and South Dakota. When General Sibley went out among
+them on his later punitive campaign he had his hands full for
+many a long and weary day.
+
+Events following the close of the Civil War did not mend matters
+in the Indian situation. The railroads had large land grants
+given to them along their lines, and they began to offer these
+lands for sale to settlers. Soldier scrip entitling the holder to
+locate on public lands now began to float about. Some of the
+engineers, even some of the laborers, upon the railroads, seeing
+how really feasible was the settlement of these Plains, began to
+edge out and to set up their homes, usually not far from the
+railway lines. All this increase in the numbers of the white
+population not only infuriated the Indians the more, but gave
+them the better chance to inflict damage upon our people. Our
+Army therefore became very little more than a vast body of
+police, and it was always afoot with the purpose of punishing
+these offending tribesmen, who knew nothing of the higher laws of
+war and who committed atrocities that have never been equalled in
+history; unless it be by one of the belligerents of the Great War
+in Europe, with whom we are at this writing engaged--once more in
+the interest of a sane and human civilization. The last great
+struggle for the occupation of the frontier was on. It involved
+the ownership of the last of our open lands; and hence may be
+called the war of our last frontier.
+
+The settler who pushed West continued to be the man who shared
+his time between his rifle and his plough. The numerous buffalo
+were butchered with an endless avidity by the men who now
+appeared upon the range. As the great herds regularly migrated
+southward with each winter's snows, they were met by the settlers
+along the lower railway lines and in a brutal commerce were
+killed in thousands and in millions. The Indians saw this sudden
+and appalling shrinkage of their means of livelihood. It meant
+death to them. To their minds, especially when they thought we
+feared them, there was but one answer to all this--the whites
+must all be killed.
+
+Red Cloud, Crazy Horse, Roman Nose, American Horse, Black
+Kettle--these were names of great Indian generals who proved
+their ability to fight. At times they brought into the open
+country, which as yet remained unoccupied by the great pastoral
+movement from the south, as many as five thousand mounted
+warriors in one body, and they were well armed and well supplied
+with ammunition. Those were the days when the Indian agents were
+carrying on their lists twice as many Indians as actually
+existed--and receiving twice as many supplies as really were
+issued to the tribes. The curse of politics was ours even at that
+time, and it cost us then, as now, unestimated millions of our
+nation's dearest treasures. As to the reservations which the
+Indians were urged to occupy, they left them when they Iced. In
+the end, when they were beaten, all they were asked to do was to
+return to these reservations and be fed.
+
+There were fought in the West from 1869 to 1875 more than two
+hundred pitched actions between the Army and the Indians. In most
+cases the white men were heavily outnumbered. The account which
+the Army gave of itself on scores of unremembered minor
+fields--which meant life or death to all engaged--would make one
+of the best pages of our history, could it be written today. The
+enlisted men of the frontier Army were riding and shooting men,
+able to live as the Indians did and able to beat them at their
+own game. They were led by Army officers whose type has never
+been improved upon in any later stage of our Army itself, or of
+any army in the world.
+
+There are certain great battles which may at least receive
+notice, although it would be impossible to mention more than a
+few of the encounters of the great Indian wars on the
+buffalo-range at about the time of the buffalo's disappearance.
+The Fetterman Massacre in 1866, near Fort Phil Kearney, a post
+located at the edge of the Big Horn Mountains, was a blow which
+the Army never has forgotten. "In a place of fifty feet square
+lay the bodies of Colonel Fetterman, Captain Brown, and
+sixty-five enlisted men. Each man was stripped naked and hacked
+and scalped, the skulls beaten in with war clubs and the bodies
+gashed with knives almost beyond recognition, with other ghastly
+mutilations that the civilized pen hesitates to record."
+
+This tragedy brought the Indian problem before the country as
+never before. The hand of the Western rancher and trader was
+implacably against the tribesmen of the plains; the city-dweller
+of the East, with hazy notions of the Indian character, was
+disposed to urge lenient methods upon those responsible for
+governmental policy. While the Sioux and Cheyenne wars dragged
+on, Congress created, by act of July 20, 1867, a peace commission
+of four civilians and three army officers to deal with the
+hostile tribes. For more than a year, with scant sympathy from
+the military members, this commission endeavored to remove the
+causes of friction by amicable conference with the Indian chiefs.
+The attitude of the Army is reflected in a letter of General
+Sherman to his brother. "We have now selected and provided
+reservations for all, off the great roads. All who cling to their
+old hunting-grounds are hostile and will remain so till killed
+off. We will have a sort of predatory war for years--every now
+and then be shocked by the indiscriminate murder of travelers and
+settlers, but the country is so large, and the advantage of the
+Indians so great, that we cannot make a single war and end it.
+From the nature of things we must take chances and clean out
+Indians as we encounter them."
+
+Segregation of the Indian tribes upon reservations seemed to the
+commission the only solution of the vexing problem. Various
+treaties were made and others were projected looking toward the
+removal of the tribesmen from the highways of continental travel.
+The result was misgiving and increased unrest among the Indians.
+
+In midsummer of 1868 forays occurred at many points along the
+border of the Indian Territory. General Sheridan, who now
+commanded the Department of the Missouri, believed that a general
+war was imminent. He determined to teach the southern tribesmen a
+lesson they would not forget. In the dead of winter our troops
+marched against the Cheyennes, then in their encampments below
+the Kansas line. The Indians did not believe that white men could
+march in weather forty below zero, during which they themselves
+sat in their tepees around their fires; but our cavalrymen did
+march in such weather, and under conditions such as our cavalry
+perhaps could not endure today. Among these troops was the
+Seventh Cavalry, Custer's Regiment, formed after the Civil War,
+and it was led by Lieutenant-Colonel George A. Custer himself,
+that gallant officer whose name was to go into further and more
+melancholy history of the Plains.
+
+Custer marched until he got in touch with the trails of the
+Cheyennes, whom he knew to belong to Black Kettle's band. He did
+not at the time know that below them, in the same valley of the
+Washita, were also the winter encampments of the Kiowas, the
+Comanches, the Arapahoes, and even a few Apaches. He attacked at
+dawn of a bleak winter morning, November 27, 1868, after taking
+the precaution of surrounding the camp, and killed Black Kettle,
+and another chief, Little Rock, and over a hundred of their
+warriors. Many women and children also were killed in this
+attack. The result was one which sank deep into the Indian mind.
+They began to respect the men who could outmarch them and outlive
+them on the range. Surely, they thought, these were not the same
+men who had abandoned Forts Phil Kearney, C. F. Smith, and Reno.
+There had been some mistake about this matter. The Indians began
+to think it over. The result was a pacifying of all the country
+south of the Platte. The lower Indians began to come in and give
+themselves up to the reservation life.
+
+One of the hardest of pitched battles ever fought with an Indian
+tribe occurred in September, 1868, on the Arickaree or South Fork
+of the Republican River, where General "Sandy" Forsyth, and his
+scouts, for nine days fought over six hundred Cheyennes and
+Arapahoes. These savages had been committing atrocities upon the
+settlers of the Saline, the Solomon, and the Republican valleys,
+and were known to have killed some sixty-four men and women at
+the time General Sheridan resolved to punish them. Forsyth had no
+chance to get a command of troops, but he was allowed to enlist
+fifty scouts, all "first-class, hardened frontiersmen," and with
+this body of fighting men he carried out the most dramatic battle
+perhaps ever waged on the Plains.
+
+Forsyth ran into the trail of two or three large Indian villages,
+but none the less he followed on until he came to the valley of
+the South Fork. Here the Cheyennes under the redoubtable Roman
+Nose surrounded him on the 17th of September. The small band of
+scouts took refuge on a brushy island some sixty yards from
+shore, and hastily dug themselves in under fire.
+
+They stood at bay outnumbered ten to one, with small prospect of
+escape, for the little island offered no protection of itself,
+and was in pointblank range from the banks of the river. All
+their horses soon were shot down, and the men lay in the rifle
+pits with no hope of escape. Roman Nose, enraged at the
+resistance put up by Forsyth's men, led a band of some four
+hundred of his warriors in the most desperate charge that has
+been recorded in all our Indian fighting annals. It was rarely
+that the Indian would charge at all; but these tribesmen,
+stripped naked for the encounter, and led at first by that giant
+warrior, who came on shouting his defiance, charged in full view
+not only once but three times in one day, and got within a
+hundred feet of the foot of the island where the scouts were
+lying.
+
+According to Forsyth's report, the Indians came on in regular
+ranks like the cavalry of the white men, more than four hundred
+strong. They were met by the fire of repeating carbines and
+revolvers, and they stood for the first, second, third, fourth,
+and fifth fire of repeating weapons, and still charged in! Roman
+Nose was killed at last within touch of the rifle pits against
+which he was leading his men. The second charge was less
+desperate, for the savages lost heart after the loss of their
+leader. The third one, delivered towards the evening of that same
+day, was desultory. By that time the bed of the shallow stream
+was well filled with fallen horses and dead warriors.
+
+Forsyth ordered meat cut from the bodies of his dead horses and
+buried in the wet sand so that it might keep as long as possible.
+Lieutenant Beecher, his chief of scouts, was killed, as also were
+Surgeon Mooers, and Scouts Smith, Chalmers, Wilson, Farley, and
+Day. Seventeen others of the party were wounded, some severely.
+Forsyth himself was shot three times, once in the head. His left
+leg was broken below the knee, and his right thigh was ripped up
+by a rifle ball, which caused him extreme pain. Later he cut the
+bullet out of his own leg, and was relieved from some part of the
+pain. After his rescue, when his broken leg was set it did not
+suit him, and he had the leg broken twice in the hospital and
+reset until it knitted properly.
+
+Forsyth's men lay under fire under a blazing sun in their holes
+on the sandbar for nine days. But the savages never dislodged
+them, and at last they made off, their women and children beating
+the death drums, and the entire village mourning the unreturning
+brave. On the second day of the fighting Forsyth had got out
+messengers at extreme risk, and at length the party was rescued
+by a detachment of the Tenth Cavalry. The Indians later said that
+they had in all over six hundred warriors in this fight. Their
+losses, though variously estimated, were undoubtedly heavy.
+
+It was encounters such as this which gradually were teaching the
+Indians that they could not beat the white men, so that after a
+time they began to yield to the inevitable.
+
+What is known as the Baker Massacre was the turning-point in the
+half-century of warfare with the Blackfeet, the savage tribe
+which had preyed upon the men of the fur trade in a
+long-continued series of robberies and murders. On January 22,
+1870, Major E. M. Baker, led by half-breeds who knew the country,
+surprised the Piegans in their winter camp on the Marias River,
+just below the border. He, like Custer, attacked at dawn, opening
+the encounter with a general fire into the tepees. He killed a
+hundred and seventy-three of the Piegans, including very many
+women and children, as was unhappily the case so often in these
+surprise attacks. It was deplorable warfare. But it ended the
+resistance of the savage Blackfeet. They have been disposed for
+peace from that day to this.
+
+The terrible revenge which the Sioux and Cheyennes took in the
+battle which annihilated Custer and his men on the Little Big
+Horn in the summer of 1876; the Homeric running fight made by
+Chief Joseph of the Nez Perces--a flight which baffled our best
+generals and their men for a hundred and ten days over more than
+fourteen hundred miles of wilderness--these are events so well
+known that it seems needless to do more than to refer to them.
+The Nez Perces in turn went down forever when Joseph came out and
+surrendered, saying, "From where the sun now stands I fight
+against the white man no more forever." His surrender to fate did
+not lack its dignity. Indeed, a mournful interest attached to the
+inevitable destiny of all these savage leaders, who, no doubt,
+according to their standards, were doing what men should do and
+all that men could do.
+
+The main difficulty in administering full punishment to such
+bands was that after a defeat they scattered, so that they could
+not be overtaken in any detailed fashion. After the Custer fight
+many of the tribe went north of the Canadian line and remained
+there for some time. The writer himself has seen along the
+Qu'Appelle River in Saskatchewan some of the wheels taken out of
+the watches of Custer's men. The savages broke them up and used
+the wheels for jewelry. They even offered the Canadians for trade
+boots, hats, and clothing taken from the bodies of Custer's men.
+
+The Modoc war against the warriors of Captain Jack in 1873 was
+waged in the lava beds of Oregon, and it had the distinction of
+being one of the first Indian wars to be well reported in the
+newspapers. We heard a great deal of the long and trying
+campaigns waged by the Army in revenge for the murder of General
+Canby in his council tent. We got small glory out of that war,
+perhaps, but at last we hanged the ringleader of the murderers;
+and the extreme Northwest remained free from that time on.
+
+Far in the dry Southwest, where home-building man did not as yet
+essay a general occupation of the soil, the blood-thirsty Apache
+long waged a warfare which tried the mettle of our Army as
+perhaps no other tribes ever have done. The Spaniards had fought
+these Apaches for nearly three hundred years, and had not beaten
+them. They offered three hundred dollars each for Apache scalps,
+and took a certain number of them. But they left all the
+remaining braves sworn to an eternal enmity. The Apaches became
+mountain outlaws, whose blood-mad thirst for revenge never died.
+No tribe ever fought more bitterly. Hemmed in and surrounded,
+with no hope of escape, in some instances they perished literally
+to the last man. General George Crook finished the work of
+cleaning up the Apache outlaws only by use of the trailers of
+their own people who sided with the whites for pay. Without the
+Pima scouts he never could have run down the Apaches as he did.
+Perhaps these were the hardest of all the Plains Indians to find
+and to fight. But in 1872 Crook subdued them and concentrated
+them in reservations in Arizona. Ten years later, under Geronimo,
+a tribe of the Apaches broke loose and yielded to General Crook
+only after a prolonged war. Once again they raided New Mexico and
+Arizona in 1885-6. This was the last raid of Geronimo. He was
+forced by General Miles to surrender and, together with his chief
+warriors, was deported to Fort Pickens in Florida.
+In all these savage pitched battles and bloody skirmishes, the
+surprises and murderous assaults all over the old range, there
+were hundreds of settlers killed, hundreds also of our army men,
+including some splendid officers. In the Custer fight alone, on
+the Little Big Horn, the Army lost Custer himself, thirteen
+commissioned officers, and two hundred and fifty-six enlisted men
+killed, with two officers and fifty-one men wounded; a total of
+three hundred and twenty-three killed and wounded in one battle.
+Custer had in his full column about seven hundred men. The number
+of the Indians has been variously estimated. They had perhaps
+five thousand men in their villages when they met Custer in this,
+the most historic and most ghastly battle of the Plains. It would
+be bootless to revive any of the old discussions regarding Custer
+and his rash courage. Whether in error or in wisdom, he died, and
+gallantly. He and his men helped clear the frontier for those who
+were to follow, and the task took its toll. Thus, slowly but
+steadily, even though handicapped by a vacillating governmental
+policy regarding the Indians, we muddled through these great
+Indian wars of the frontier, our soldiers doing their work
+splendidly and uncomplainingly, such work as no other body of
+civilized troops has ever been asked to do or could have done if
+asked. At the close of the Civil War we ourselves were a nation
+of fighting men. We were fit and we were prepared. The average of
+our warlike qualities never has been so high as then. The
+frontier produced its own pathfinders, its own saviors, its own
+fighting men.
+
+So now the frontier lay ready, waiting for the man with the
+plough. The dawn of that last day was at hand.
+
+
+
+Chapter VIII. The Cattle Kings
+
+It is proper now to look back yet again over the scenes with
+which we hitherto have had to do. It is after the railways have
+come to the Plains. The Indians now are vanishing. The buffalo
+have not yet gone, but are soon to pass.
+
+Until the closing days of the Civil War the northern range was a
+wide, open domain, the greatest ever offered for the use of a
+people. None claimed it then in fee; none wanted it in fee. The
+grasses and the sweet waters offered accessible and profitable
+chemistry for all men who had cows to range. The land laws still
+were vague and inexact in application, and each man could
+construe them much as he liked. The excellent homestead law of
+1862, one of the few really good land laws that have been put on
+our national statute books, worked well enough so long as we had
+good farming lands for homesteading--lands of which a quarter
+section would support a home and a family. This same homestead
+law was the only one available for use on the cattle-range. In
+practice it was violated thousands of times--in fact, of
+necessity violated by any cattle man who wished to acquire
+sufficient range to run a considerable herd. Our great timber
+kings, our great cattle kings, made their fortunes out of their
+open contempt for the homestead law, which was designed to give
+all the people an even chance for a home and a farm. It made, and
+lost, America.
+
+Swiftly enough, here and there along all the great waterways of
+the northern range, ranchers and their men filed claims on the
+water fronts. The dry land thus lay tributary to them. For the
+most part the open lands were held practically under squatter
+right; the first cowman in any valley usually had his rights
+respected, at least for a time. These were the days of the open
+range. Fences had not come, nor had farms been staked out.
+
+From the South now appeared that tremendous and elemental
+force--most revolutionary of all the great changes we have noted
+in the swiftly changing West--the bringing in of thousands of
+horned kine along the northbound trails. The trails were hurrying
+from the Rio Grande to the upper plains of Texas and northward,
+along the north and south line of the Frontier--that land which
+now we have been seeking less to define and to mark precisely
+than fundamentally to understand.
+
+The Indian wars had much to do with the cow trade. The Indians
+were crowded upon the reservations, and they had to be fed, and
+fed on beef. Corrupt Indian agents made fortunes, and the Beef
+Ring at Washington, one of the most despicable lobbies which ever
+fattened there, now wrote its brief and unworthy history. In a
+strange way corrupt politics and corrupt business affected the
+phases of the cattle industry as they had affected our relations
+with the Indians. More than once a herd of some thousand beeves
+driven up from Texas on contract, and arriving late in autumn,
+was not accepted on its arrival at the army post--some pet of
+Washington perhaps had his own herd to sell! All that could be
+done then would be to seek out a "holding range." In this way,
+more and more, the capacity of the northern Plains to nourish and
+improve cattle became established.
+
+Naturally, the price of cows began to rise; and naturally, also,
+the demand for open range steadily increased. There now began the
+whole complex story of leased lands and fenced lands. The
+frontier still was offering opportunity for the bold man to reap
+where he had not sown. Lands leased to the Indians of the
+civilized tribes began to cut large figure in the cow trade--as
+well as some figure in politics--until at length the thorny
+situation was handled by a firm hand at Washington. The methods
+of the East were swiftly overrunning those of the West. Politics
+and graft and pull, things hitherto unknown, soon wrote their
+hurrying story also over all this newly won region from which the
+rifle-smoke had scarcely yet cleared away.
+
+But every herd which passed north for delivery of one sort or the
+other advanced the education of the cowman, whether of the
+northern or the southern ranges. Some of the southern men began
+to start feeding ranges in the North, retaining their breeding
+ranges in the South. The demand of the great upper range for
+cattle seemed for the time insatiable.
+
+To the vision of the railroad builders a tremendous potential
+freightage now appeared. The railroad builders began to calculate
+that one day they would parallel the northbound cow trail with
+iron trails of their own and compete with nature for the carrying
+of this beef. The whole swift story of all that development,
+while the westbound rails were crossing and crisscrossing the
+newly won frontier, scarce lasted twenty years. Presently we
+began to hear in the East of the Chisholm Trail and of the
+Western Trail which lay beyond it, and of many smaller and
+intermingling branches. We heard of Ogallalla, in Nebraska, the
+"Gomorrah of the Range," the first great upper marketplace for
+distribution of cattle to the swiftly forming northern ranches.
+The names of new rivers came upon our maps; and beyond the first
+railroads we began to hear of the Yellowstone, the Powder, the
+Musselshell, the Tongue, the Big Horn, the Little Missouri.
+
+The wild life, bold and carefree, coming up from the South now in
+a mighty surging wave, spread all over that new West which
+offered to the people of older lands a strange and fascinating
+interest. Every one on the range had money; every one was
+independent. Once more it seemed that man had been able to
+overleap the confining limitations of his life, and to attain
+independence, self-indulgence, ease and liberty. A chorus of
+Homeric, riotous mirth, as of a land in laughter, rose up all
+over the great range. After all, it seemed that we had a new
+world left, a land not yet used. We still were young! The cry
+arose that there was land enough for all out West. And at first
+the trains of white-topped wagons rivaled the crowded coaches
+westbound on the rails.
+
+In consequence there came an entire readjustment of values. This
+country, but yesterday barren and worthless, now was covered with
+gold, deeper than the gold of California or any of the old
+placers. New securities and new values appeared. Banks did not
+care much for the land as security--it was practically worthless
+without the cattle--but they would lend money on cattle at rates
+which did not then seem usurious. A new system of finance came
+into use. Side by side with the expansion of credits went the
+expansion of the cattle business. Literally in hundreds of
+thousands the cows came north from the exhaustless ranges of the
+lower country.
+
+It was a wild, strange day. But withal it was the kindliest and
+most generous time, alike the most contented and the boldest
+time, in all the history of our frontiers. There never was a
+better life than that of the cowman who had a good range on the
+Plains and cattle enough to stock his range. There never will be
+found a better man's country in all the world than that which ran
+from the Missouri up to the low foothills of the Rockies.
+
+The lower cities took their tribute of the northbound cattle for
+quite a time. Wichita, Coffeyville, and other towns of lower
+Kansas in turn made bids for prominence as cattle marts. Agents
+of the Chicago stockyards would come down along the trails into
+the Indian Nations to meet the northbound herds and to try to
+divert them to this or that market as a shipping-point. The
+Kiowas and Comanches, not yet wholly confined to their
+reservations, sometimes took tribute, whether in theft or in open
+extortion, of the herds laboring upward through the long slow
+season. Trail-cutters and herd-combers, licensed or unlicensed
+hangers-on to the northbound throngs of cattle, appeared along
+the lower trails--with some reason, occasionally; for in a great
+northbound herd there might be many cows included under brands
+other than those of the road brands registered for the drovers of
+that particular herd. Cattle thieving became an industry of
+certain value, rivaling in some localities the operations of the
+bandits of the placer camps. There was great wealth suddenly to
+be seen. The weak and the lawless, as well as the strong and the
+unscrupulous, set out to reap after their own fashion where they
+had not sown. If a grave here or there appeared along the trail
+or at the edge of the straggling town, it mattered little. If the
+gamblers and the desperadoes of the cow towns such as Newton,
+Ellsworth, Abilene, Dodge, furnished a man for breakfast day
+after day, it mattered little, for plenty of men, remained, as
+good or better. The life was large and careless, and bloodshed
+was but an incident.
+
+During the early and unregulated days of the cattle industry, the
+frontier insisted on its own creed, its own standards. But all
+the time, coming out from the East, were scores and hundreds of
+men of exacter notions of trade and business. The enormous waste
+of the cattle range could not long endure. The toll taken by the
+thievery of the men who came to be called range-rustlers made an
+element of loss which could not long be sustained by thinking
+men. As the Vigilantes regulated things in the mining camps, so
+now in slightly different fashion the new property owners on the
+upper range established their own ideas, their own sense of
+proportion as to law and order. The cattle associations, the
+banding together of many owners of vast herds, for mutual
+protection and mutual gain were a natural and logical
+development. Outside of these there was for a time a highly
+efficient corps of cattle-range Vigilantes, who shot and hanged
+some scores of rustlers.
+
+It was a frenzied life while it lasted--this lurid outburst, the
+last flare of the frontier. Such towns as Dodge and Ogallalla
+offered extraordinary phenomena of unrestraint. But fortunately
+into the worst of these capitals of license came the best men of
+the new regime, and the new officers of the law, the agents of
+the Vigilantes, the advance-guard of civilization now crowding on
+the heels of the wild men of the West. In time the lights of the
+dance-halls and the saloons and the gambling parlors went out one
+by one all along the frontier. By 1885 Dodge City, a famed
+capital of the cow trade, which will live as long as the history
+of that industry is known, resigned its eminence and declared
+that from where the sun then stood it would be a cow camp no
+more! The men of Dodge knew that another day had dawned. But this
+was after the homesteaders had arrived and put up their wire
+fences, cutting off from the town the holding grounds of the
+northbound herds.
+
+This innovation of barb-wire fences in the seventies had caused a
+tremendous alteration of conditions over all the country. It had
+enabled men to fence in their own water-fronts, their own
+homesteads. Casually, and at first without any objection filed by
+any one, they had included in their fences many hundreds of
+thousands of acres of range land to which they had no title
+whatever. These men--like the large-handed cow barons of the
+Indian Nations, who had things much as they willed in a little
+unnoted realm all their own--had money and political influence.
+And there seemed still range enough for all. If a man wished to
+throw a drift fence here or there, what mattered it?
+
+Up to this time not much attention had been paid to the Little
+Fellow, the man of small capital who registered a brand of his
+own, and who with a Maverick* here and there and the natural
+increase, and perhaps a trifle of unnatural increase here and
+there--had proved able to accumulate with more or less rapidity a
+herd of his own. Now the cattle associations passed rules that no
+foreman should be allowed to have or register a brand of his own.
+Not that any foreman could be suspected--not at all!--but the
+foreman who insisted on his old right to own a running iron and a
+registered brand was politely asked to find his employment
+somewhere else.
+
+ * In the early days a rancher by the name of Maverick, a Texas
+man, had made himself rich simply by riding out on the open range
+and branding loose and unmarked occupants of the free lands.
+Hence the term "Maverick" was applied to any unbranded animal
+running loose on the range. No one cared to interfere with these
+early activities in collecting unclaimed cattle. Many a
+foundation for a great fortune was laid in precisely that way. It
+was not until the more canny days in the North that Mavericks
+were regarded with jealous eyes.
+
+
+The large-handed and once generous methods of the old range now
+began to narrow themselves. Even if the Little Fellow were able
+to throw a fence around his own land, very often he did not have
+land enough to support his herd with profit. A certain antipathy
+now began to arise between the great cattle owners and the small
+ones, especially on the upper range, where some rather bitter
+wars were fought--the cow kings accusing their smaller rivals of
+rustling cows; the small man accusing the larger operators of
+having for years done the same thing, and of having grown rich at
+it.
+
+The cattle associations, thrifty and shifty, sending their brand
+inspectors as far east as the stockyards of Kansas City and
+Chicago, naturally had the whip hand of the smaller men. They
+employed detectives who regularly combed out the country in
+search of men who had loose ideas of mine and thine. All the time
+the cow game was becoming stricter and harder. Easterners brought
+on the East's idea of property, of low interest, sure returns,
+and good security. In short, there was set on once more--as there
+had been in every great movement across the entire West-- the old
+contest between property rights and human independence in
+action. It was now once more the Frontier against the States, and
+the States were foredoomed to win.
+
+The barb-wire fence, which was at first used extensively by the
+great operators, came at last to be the greatest friend of the
+Little Fellow on the range. The Little Fellow, who under the
+provisions of the homestead act began to push West arid, to
+depart farther and farther from the protecting lines of the
+railways, could locate land and water for himself and fence in
+both. "I've got the law back of me," was what he said; and what
+he said was true. Around the old cow camps of the trails, and
+around the young settlements which did not aspire to be called
+cow camps, the homesteaders fenced in land--so much land that
+there came to be no place near any of the shipping-points where a
+big herd from the South could be held. Along the southern range
+artificial barriers to the long drive began to be raised. It
+would be hard to say whether fear of Texas competition or of
+Texas cattle fever was the more powerful motive in the minds of
+ranchers in Colorado and Kansas. But the cattle quarantine laws
+of 1885 nearly broke up the long drive of that year. Men began to
+talk of fencing off the trails, and keeping the northbound herds
+within the fences--a thing obviously impossible.
+
+The railroads soon rendered this discussion needless. Their
+agents went down to Texas and convinced the shippers that it
+would be cheaper and safer to put their cows on cattle trains and
+ship them directly to the ranges where they were to be delivered.
+And in time the rails running north and south across the Staked
+Plains into the heart of the lower range began to carry most of
+the cattle. So ended the old cattle trails.
+
+What date shall we fix for the setting of the sun of that last
+frontier? Perhaps the year 1885 is as accurate as any--the time
+when the cattle trails practically ceased to bring north their
+vast tribute. But, in fact, there is no exact date for the
+passing of the frontier. Its decline set in on what day the first
+lank "nester" from the States outspanned his sun-burned team as
+he pulled up beside some sweet water on the rolling lands,
+somewhere in the West, and looked about him, and looked again at
+the land map held in his hand.
+
+"I reckon this is our land, Mother," said he.
+
+When he said that, he pronounced the doom of the old frontier.
+
+
+
+Chapter IX. The Homesteader
+
+His name was usually Nester or Little Fellow. It was the old
+story of the tortoise and the hare. The Little Fellow was from
+the first destined to win. His steady advance, now on this flank,
+now on that, just back of the vanguard pushing westward, had
+marked the end of all our earlier frontiers. The same story now
+was being written on the frontier of the Plains.
+
+But in the passing of this last frontier the type of the
+land-seeking man, the type of the American, began to alter
+distinctly. The million dead of our cruel Civil War left a great
+gap in the American population which otherwise would have
+occupied the West and Northwest after the clearing 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 Northwest became largely foreign. Each German or Scandinavian
+who found himself prospering in this rich new country was himself
+an immigration agency. He sent back word to his friends and
+relatives in the Old World and these came to swell the steadily
+thickening population of the New.
+
+We have seen that the enterprising cattlemen had not been slow to
+reach out for such resources as they might. Perhaps at one time
+between 1885 and 1890 there were over ten million acres of land
+illegally fenced in on the upper range by 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 first." For the Nester who wanted a way through
+these fences out into the open public lands, he cherished a
+bitter resentment. And yet the Nester must in time win through,
+must eventually find the little piece of land which he was
+seeking.
+
+The government at Washington was finally obliged to take action.
+In the summer of 1885, acting under authorization of Congress,
+President Cleveland ordered the removal of all illegal enclosures
+and forbade any person or association to prevent the peaceful
+occupation 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 Dawes Act of 1887 allotted the tribal
+lands to the Indians in severalty and threw open the remainder to
+the impatient homeseekers. Waiting thousands were ready at the
+Kansas line, eager for the starting gun which was to let loose a
+mad stampede of crazed human beings.
+
+It always was contended by the cowman that these settlers coming
+in on the semi-arid range could not make a living there, that all
+they could do was legally to starve 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 of that time. The western Canadian farmer of today
+is a cherished, almost a petted being. But no one ever showed any
+mercy to the American farmer who moved out West.
+
+As always has been the case, a certain number of wagons might be
+seen passing back East, as well as the somewhat larger number
+steadily moving westward. There were lean years and dry years,
+hot years, yellow years here and there upon the range. The phrase
+written on one disheartened farmer's wagon top, "Going back to my
+wife's folks," became historic.
+
+The railways were finding profit in carrying human beings out to
+the cow-range just as once they had in transporting cattle.
+Indeed, it did not take the wiser railroad men long to see that
+they could afford to set down a farmer, at almost no cost for
+transportation, in any part of the new West. He would after that
+be dependent upon the railroad in every way. The railroads
+deliberately devised the 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-stock free on
+request. The same road, and others also, preached steadily the
+doctrine of diversified farming. In short, the railroads, in
+their own interests, did all they could to make prosperous the
+farms or ranches of the West. The usual Western homestead now was
+part ranch and part farm, although the term "ranch" continued for
+many years to cover all the meanings of the farm of whatever
+sort.
+
+There appeared now in the new country yet another figure of the
+Western civilization, the land-boomer, with his irresponsible and
+unregulated statements in regard to the values of these Western
+lands. These men were not always desirable citizens, although of
+course no industry 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 world. In any one of these towns
+the main industry was that of selling lands or "real estate."
+During the Kansas boom of 1886 the land-boomers had their desks
+in the lobbies of banks, the windows of hardware stores--any
+place and every place offering room for a desk and chair.
+
+Now also flourished apace the industry of mortgage loans. Eastern
+money began to flood the western Plains, attracted by the high
+rates of interest. In 1886 the customary 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 town lots far out in the cornfields, and of
+buying unimproved subdivision property with borrowed money at
+usurious rates of interest, was one riding for its own fall.
+
+None the less the Little Fellow kept on going out into the West.
+We did not change our land laws for his sake, and for a time he
+needed no sympathy. 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 of land. The foundations of many
+comfortable fortunes were laid in precisely this way by thrifty
+men who were willing to work and willing to wait.
+
+It was not until 1917 that the old homestead law limiting the
+settler to a hundred and sixty acres of land was modified for the
+benefit of the stock-raiser. The stockraising homestead law, as
+it is called, permits a man to make entry for not more than six
+hundred and forty acres of unappropriated land which shall have
+been designated by the Secretary of the Interior as "stockraising
+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 stroll down to the
+land office and swear solemnly that he had lived the legal length
+of time on his homestead, whereas perhaps he had never seen it or
+had no more than ridden across it. Today matters perhaps will be
+administered somewhat more strictly; for of all those millions of
+acres of open land once in the West there is almost none left
+worth the holding for farm purposes.
+
+Such dishonest practices were, however, indignantly denied by
+those who fostered the irrigation and dryfarming booms which made
+the last phase of exploitation of the old range. A vast amount of
+disaster was worked by the failure of number less irrigation
+companies, each of them offering lands to the settlers through
+the medium of most alluring advertising. In almost every case the
+engineers underestimated 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, purporting to assure sudden wealth in apples,
+pears, celery, garden truck, cherries, small fruits, alfalfa,
+pecans, eucalyptus or catalpa trees-anything you liked--went to
+the wall. Sometimes whole communities became straitened by the
+collapse of these overblown enterprises. The recovery was slow,
+though usually the result of that recovery was a far healthier
+and more stable condition of society.
+
+This whole question of irrigation and dry farming, this or that
+phase of the last scrambling, feverish settling on the last
+lands, was sorely wasteful of human enterprise and human
+happiness. It was much like the spawning rush of the salmon 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 went out to the dry country
+to farm under the ditch, or to take up that still more hazardous
+occupation--successful sometimes, though always hard and always
+risky--dry farming on the benches which cannot be reached with
+irrigating waters.
+
+Strangely changed was all the face of the cattle range by these
+successive and startling innovations. The smoke of many little
+homes rose now, scattered over all that tremendous country from
+the Rockies to the edge of the short grass country, from Texas to
+the Canadian line. The cattle 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 Westerner who knew
+the inside and out of local politics to pick up permanently
+considerable tracts of land. Some of these ranches held together
+as late as 1916; indeed, there are some such oldtime holdings
+still existent in the West, although far more rare than formerly
+was the case.
+
+Under all these conditions the price of land went up steadily.
+Land was taken eagerly which would have been refused with
+contempt a decade earlier. The parings and scraps and crumbs of
+the Old West now were fought for avidly.
+
+The need of capital became more and more important in many of the
+great land operations. Even the government reclamation
+enterprises could not open lands to the settler on anything like
+the old homestead basis. The water right cost money--sometimes
+twenty-five or thirty dollars an acre; in some of the private
+reclamation enterprises, fifty dollars an acre, or even more.
+Very frequently when 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. Naturally, when the new farmers were
+starved out and in one way or another had made other plans, the
+country itself went to pieces. That part of it was wisest which
+did not kill the goose of the golden egg. But be these things as
+they may be and as they were, the whole readjustment in
+agricultural values over the once measureless and valueless cow
+country was a stupendous and staggering thing.
+
+Now appeared yet another agency of change. The high dry lands of
+many of the Rocky Mountain States had long been regarded
+covetously by an industry even more cordially disliked by the
+cattleman than the industry of farming. The sheepman began to
+raise his head and to plan certain things for himself in turn.
+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 the feud
+between the sheepmen and the cowmen was bitter and implacable.
+The issues in those quarrels rarely got into the courts but were
+fought out on the ground. The old Wyoming deadline of the cowmen
+against intruding bands of Green River sheep made a considerable
+amount of history which was never recorded.
+
+The sheepmen at length began to succeed in their plans.
+Themselves not paying many taxes, not supporting the civilization
+of the country, not building the schools or roads or bridges,
+they none the less claimed the earth and the fullness thereof.
+
+After the establishment of the great forest reserves, the
+sheepmen coveted the range thus included. It has been the
+governmental policy to sell range privileges in the forest
+reserves for sheep, on 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 course the issue even in this ancient
+contest is foregone--as the cowman has had to raise his cows
+under fence, so ultimately must the sheepman also buy his range
+in fee and raise his product under fence.
+
+The wandering bands of sheep belong nowhere. They ruin a country.
+It is a pathetic spectacle to see parts of the Old West in which
+sheep steadily 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 surface of the earth. The denuded
+soil crumbles under their countless hoofs, becomes dust, and
+blows away. They leave a waste, a desert, an abomination.
+
+There were yet other phases of change which followed hard upon
+the heels of our soldiers after they had completed their task of
+subjugating the tribes of the buffalo Indians. After the
+homesteads had been proved up in some of the Northwestern States,
+such as Montana and the Dakotas, large bodies of land were
+acquired by certain capitalistic farmers. All this new land had
+been proved to be exceedingly 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
+selfbinders, twenty, thirty, forty, or fifty machines, one after
+the other, advancing through the golden grain--the pictures of
+their innumerable stacks of wheat--the figures of the vast
+mileage of their fencing--the yet more stupendous figures of the
+outlay required to operate these farms, and the splendid totals
+of the receipts from such operations--these at one time were
+familiar and proudly presented features of boom advertising in
+the upper portions of our black land belt, which day just at the
+eastern edge of the old Plains.
+
+There was to be repeated in this country something of the history
+of California. In the great valleys, such as the San Joaquin, the
+first interests were pastoral, and the cowmen found a vast realm
+which seemed to be theirs forever. There came to them, however,
+the bonanza wheat farmers, who flourished there about 1875 and
+through the next decade. Their highly specialized industry
+boasted that it could bake a loaf of bread out of a wheat field
+between the hours of sunrise and sunset. The outlay 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 turned over to the bank
+owning the mortgages on his lands and plant. He turned in also
+all his mules and horses, and retired worse than broke from an
+industry in which he had once made his hundreds of thousands.
+Something of this same story was to follow in the Dakotas.
+Presently we heard no more of the bonanza wheat farms; and a
+little later they were not. The one-crop country is never one of
+sound investing values; and a land boom is something of which to
+beware--always and always to beware.
+
+The prairie had passed; the range had passed; the illegal fences
+had passed; and presently the cattle themselves were to
+pass--that is to say, the great herds. As recently as five years
+ago (1912) it was my fortune to be in the town of Belle Fourche,
+near the Black Hills--a region long accustomed to vivid history,
+whether of Indians, mines, or cows--at the time when the last of
+the great herds of the old industry thereabouts were breaking up;
+and to see, coming down to the cattle chutes to be shipped to the
+Eastern stockyards, the last hundreds of 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, men grown gray in range work. Alongside the
+herds, after the ancient fashion of trailing cattle, rode cowboys
+who handled their charges with the same old skill. But even the
+cowboys had changed. These were without exception men from the
+East who had learned their trade here in the West. Here indeed
+was one of the last acts of the great drama of the Plains. To
+many an observer there it was a tragic thing. I saw many a cowman
+there the gravity on whose face had nothing to do with commercial
+loss. It was the Old West he mourned. I mourned with him.
+Naturally the growth of the great stockyards of the Middle West
+had an effect upon all the cattle-producing country of the West,
+whether those cattle were bred in large or in small numbers. The
+dealers of the stockyards, let us say, gradually evolved a
+perfect understanding among 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; and their
+industry, since the invention of refrigerator cars and the
+shipment of dressed beef in tins, has been one which has extended
+to all the corners of the world. The great packers would rather
+talk of "by-products" than of these things. Always they have been
+poor, so very poor!
+
+For a time the railroads east of the stockyard cities of Kansas
+City and Chicago divided up pro rata the dressed beef traffic.
+Investigation after investigation has been made of the methods of
+the stockyard firms, but thus far the law has not laid its hands
+successfully upon them. Naturally 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
+range. Where once a half ton of hay might have been sufficient to
+tide a cow over the bad part of the winter, the Little Fellow who
+fences his own range of a few hundred acres is obliged to figure
+on two or three tons, for he must feed his herd on hay through
+the long months of the winter.
+
+The ultimate consumer, of course, is the one who pays the freight
+and stands the cost of all this. Hence we have the swift growth
+of American discontent 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 man's country. We have
+arrived all too swiftly upon the ways of the Old World. And
+today, in spite of our love of peace, we are in an Old World's
+war!
+
+The insatiable demand of Americans for cheap lands assumed a
+certain international phase at the period lying between 1900 and
+1913 or later--the years of the last great boom in Canadian
+lands. The Dominion Government, represented by shrewd and
+enterprising men able to handle large undertakings, saw with a
+certain satisfaction of 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 industry in Alberta and
+Saskatchewan. The Canadian Government went into the publicity
+business on its own part. To a certain extent European
+immigration was encouraged, but the United States really was the
+country most combed out for settlers for these Canadian lands. As
+by magic, millions of acres in western Canada were settled.
+
+The young American farmers of our near Northwest were especially
+coveted as settlers, because they knew how to farm these upper
+lands far better than any Europeans, and because each of them was
+able 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 farmers, resolved to live under another flag. In one year
+the State of Iowa lost over fifteen million dollars of money
+withdrawn from bank deposits by farmers moving across the line
+into Canada.
+
+The story of these land rushes was much the same there as it had
+been with us. Not all succeeded. The climatic conditions were far
+more severe than any which we had endured, and if the soil for 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. But
+the great Canadian land booms, carefully fostered and well
+developed, offered a curious illustration of the tremendous
+pressure of all the populations of the world for land and yet
+more land.
+
+In the year 1911 the writer saw, all through the Peace River
+Valley and even in the neighborhood of the Little Slave Lake, the
+advance-guard of wheat farmers crowding out even beyond the
+Canadian frontier in the covetous search for yet more cheap 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 homestead land under the
+regulations of the Dominion Government! In the year 1913 I saw an
+active business done in town lots at Fort McMurray, five hundred
+miles north of the last railroad of Alberta, on the ancient
+Athabasca waterway of the fur trade!
+
+Who shall state the limit of all this expansion? The farmer has
+ever found more and more land on which he could make a living; he
+is always taking land which his predecessor has scornfully
+refused. If presently there shall come the news that the land
+boomer has reached the mouth of the Mackenzie River--as long ago
+he reached certain 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 may take us easily where I have stood,
+somewhat wearied, at that spot on the Little Bell tributary of
+the Porcupine, where a slab on a post said, "Portage Road to Ft.
+McPherson"--a "road" which is not even a trail, but which crosses
+the most northerly of all the passes of the Rockies, within a
+hundred miles of the Arctic Ocean.
+
+Land, land, more land! It is the cry of the ages, more imperative
+and clamorous now than ever in the history of the world and only
+arrested for the time by the cataclysm of the Great War. The
+earth is well-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 land left in Europe; but, unbelievably
+soon, the Great War will have been forgotten; and then the march
+of the people will be resumed toward such frontiers of the world
+as yet may remain. Land, land, more land!
+
+Always in America we have occupied the land as fast as it was
+feasible to do so. We have survived incredible hardships on the
+mining frontier, have lived through desperate social conditions
+in the cow country, have fought many of 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 failing, hoping and despairing--but steadily
+advancing in the net result--has come that portion of the
+population which builds homes and lives in them, and which is not
+content with a blanket for a bed and the sky for a roof above.
+
+We had a frontier once. It was our most priceless possession. It
+has not been possible to eliminate from the blood of the American
+West, diluted though it has 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 the United
+States. It was there we showed our fighting edge, our
+unconquerable resolution, our undying faith. There, for a time at
+least, we were Americans.
+
+We had our frontier. We shall do ill indeed if we forget and
+abandon its strong lessons, its great hopes, its splendid human
+dreams.
+
+
+
+BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
+
+ANDY ADAMS, "The Log of a Cowboy," 1903. "The Outlet," 1905.
+Homely but excellently informing books done by a man rarely
+qualified for his task by long experience in the cattle business
+and on the trail. Nothing better exists than Adams's several
+books for the man who wishes trustworthy information on the early
+American cattle business.
+
+GEORGE A. FORSYTH, "The Story of the Soldier," 1900.
+
+GEORGE BIRD GRINNELL, "The Story of the Indian," 1895.
+
+EMERSON HOUGH, "The Story of the Cowboy," 1897.
+
+CHARLES HOWARD SHINN, "The Story of the Mine," 1901.
+
+CY WARMAN, "The Story of the Railroad," 1898. The foregoing books
+of Appleton's interesting series known as "The Story of the West"
+are valuable as containing much detailed information, done by
+contemporaries of wide experience.
+
+FRANCIS PARKMAN, "The Oregon Trail," 1901, with preface by the
+author to the edition of 18991. This is a reprint of the edition
+published in 1857 under the title "Prairie and Rocky Mountain
+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 the
+middle of the last century. The original title is more accurate
+than the more usual one "The Oregon Trail," as the book itself is
+in no sense an exclusive study of that historic highway.
+
+COLONEL R. B. MARCY, U. S. A., "Thirty Years of Army Life on the
+Border," 1866. An admirable and very informing book done by an
+Army officer who was also a sportsman and a close observer of the
+conditions of the life about him. One of the standard books for
+any library of early Western literature.
+
+EMERSON HOUGH, "The Story of the Outlaw," 1907. A study of the
+Western desperado, with historical narratives of famous outlaws,
+stories of noted border movements, Vigilante activities, and
+armed conflicts on the border.
+
+NATHANIEL PITT LANGFORD, "Vigilante Days and Ways," 1893. A
+storehouse of information done in graphic anecdotal fashion of
+the scenes in the early mining camps of Idaho and Montana.
+Valuable as the work of a contemporary writer who took part in
+the scenes he describes.
+
+JOHN C. VAN TRAMP, "Prairie and Rocky Mountain Adventures or Life
+in the West," 1870. A study of the States and territorial regions
+of our Western empire, embracing history, statistics, and
+geography, with descriptions of the chief cities of the West. In
+large part a compilation of earlier Western literature.
+
+SAMUEL BOWLES, "Our New West," 1869. Records of travel between
+the Mississippi River and the Pacific Ocean, with details
+regarding scenery, agriculture, mines, business, social life,
+etc., including a full description of the Pacific States and
+studies of the "Mormons, Indians, and Chinese" at that time.
+
+HIRAM MARTIN CHITTENDEN, "The American Fur Trade of the Far
+West," 1902. The work of a distinguished Army officer. Done with
+the exact care of an Army engineer. An extraordinary collection
+of facts and a general view of the picturesque early industry of
+the fur trade, which did so much toward developing the American
+West. See also his "History of Steamboat Navigation on the
+Missouri River" (1903).
+
+A. J. SOWELL, "Early Settlers and Indian Fighters of Southwest
+Texas," 1900. A local book, but done with contemporary accuracy
+by a man who also studied the Texas Rangers and who was familiar
+with some of the earlier frontier characters of the Southwest.
+
+The foregoing volumes are of course but a few among the many
+scores or hundreds which will have been read avidly by every man
+concerned with frontier life or with the expansion of the
+American people to the West. Space lacks for a fuller list, but
+the foregoing readings will serve to put upon the trail of wider
+information any one interested in these and kindred themes.
+
+Let especial stress again be laid upon the preeminent value of
+books done by contemporaries, men who wrote, upon the ground, of
+things which they actually saw and actually understood. It is not
+always, or perhaps often, that these contemporary books achieve
+the place which they ought to have and hold.
+
+Among the many books dealing with the Indians and Indian Wars,
+the following may be mentioned: J. P. DUNN, "Massacres of the
+Mountains, A History of the Indian Wars of the Far West," 1886.
+
+L. E. TEXTOR, "Official Relations between the United States and
+the Sioux Indians," 1896.
+
+G. W. MANYPENNY, "Our Indian Wards," 1880.
+
+There is an extensive bibliography appended to Frederic L.
+Paxson's "The Last American Frontier" (1910), the first book to
+bring together the many aspects of the Far West.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Passing of the Frontier
+by Emerson Hough
+
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