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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Passing of the Frontier
+by Emerson Hough
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+Title: The Passing of the Frontier
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+Author: Emerson Hough
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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of 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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