The Development Of The Great West

At the close of the Civil War, Kansas and Texas were sentinel states on

the middle border. Beyond the Rockies, California, Oregon, and Nevada

stood guard, the last of them having been just admitted to furnish

another vote for the fifteenth amendment abolishing slavery. Between the

near and far frontiers lay a vast reach of plain, desert, plateau, and

mountain, almost wholly undeveloped. A broad domain, extending from

C nada to Mexico, and embracing the regions now included in Washington,

Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, the Dakotas, and

Oklahoma, had fewer than half a million inhabitants. It was laid out

into territories, each administered under a governor appointed by the

President and Senate and, as soon as there was the requisite number of

inhabitants, a legislature elected by the voters. No railway line

stretched across the desert. St. Joseph on the Missouri was the terminus

of the Eastern lines. It required twenty-five days for a passenger to

make the overland journey to California by the stagecoach system,

established in 1858, and more than ten days for the swift pony express,

organized in 1860, to carry a letter to San Francisco. Indians still

roamed the plain and desert and more than one powerful tribe disputed

the white man's title to the soil.





THE RAILWAYS AS TRAIL BLAZERS



Opening Railways to the Pacific



A decade before the Civil War the

importance of rail connection between the East and the Pacific Coast had

been recognized. Pressure had already been brought to bear on Congress

to authorize the construction of a line and to grant land and money in

its aid. Both the Democrats and Republicans approved the idea, but it

was involved in the slavery controversy. Indeed it was submerged in it.

Southern statesmen wanted connections between the Gulf and the Pacific

through Texas, while Northerners stood out for a central route.



The North had its way during the war. Congress, by legislation initiated

in 1862, provided for the immediate organization of companies to build a

line from the Missouri River to California and made grants of land and

loans of money to aid in the enterprise. The Western end, the Central

Pacific, was laid out under the supervision of Leland Stanford. It was

heavily financed by the Mormons of Utah and also by the state

government, the ranchmen, miners, and business men of California; and it

was built principally by Chinese labor. The Eastern end, the Union

Pacific, starting at Omaha, was constructed mainly by veterans of the

Civil War and immigrants from Ireland and Germany. In 1869 the two

companies met near Ogden in Utah and the driving of the last spike,

uniting the Atlantic and the Pacific, was the occasion of a great

demonstration.



Other lines to the Pacific were projected at the same time; but the

panic of 1873 checked railway enterprise for a while. With the revival

of prosperity at the end of that decade, construction was renewed with

vigor and the year 1883 marked a series of railway triumphs. In February

trains were running from New Orleans through Houston, San Antonio, and

Yuma to San Francisco, as a result of a union of the Texas Pacific with

the Southern Pacific and its subsidiary corporations. In September the

last spike was driven in the Northern Pacific at Helena, Montana. Lake

Superior was connected with Puget Sound. The waters explored by Joliet

and Marquette were joined to the waters plowed by Sir Francis Drake

while he was searching for a route around the world. That same year also

a third line was opened to the Pacific by way of the Atchison, Topeka

and Santa Fe, making connections through Albuquerque and Needles with

San Francisco. The fondest hopes of railway promoters seemed to be

realized.






Western Railways Precede Settlement



In the Old World and on our

Atlantic seaboard, railways followed population and markets. In the Far

West, railways usually preceded the people. Railway builders planned

cities on paper before they laid tracks connecting them. They sent

missionaries to spread the gospel of "Western opportunity" to people in

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

they carried their enthusiastic converts bag and baggage in long trains

to the distant Dakotas and still farther afield. So the development of

the Far West was not left to the tedious processes of time. It was

pushed by men of imagination--adventurers who made a romance of

money-making and who had dreams of empire unequaled by many kings of the

past.



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

from the government; they overcame every obstacle of canon, mountain,

and stream with the aid of science; they built cities according to the

plans made by the engineers. Having the towns ready and railway and

steamboat connections formed with the rest of the world, they carried

out the people to use the railways, the steamships, the houses, and the

land. It was in this way that "the frontier speculator paved the way for

the frontier agriculturalist who had to be near a market before he could

farm." The spirit of this imaginative enterprise, which laid out

railways and towns in advance of the people, is seen in an advertisement

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

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

towns. The stations on the line will be well equipped with elevators and

will be constructed and ready for operation at the commencement of the

grain season. Prospective merchants have been active in securing

desirable locations at the different towns on the line. There are still

opportunities for hotels, general merchandise, hardware, furniture, and

drug stores, etc."






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

of the Great Northern and allied lines, was one of the most forceful

figures. He knew that tracks and trains were useless without passengers

and freight; without a population of farmers and town dwellers. He

therefore organized publicity in the Virginias, Iowa, Ohio, Indiana,

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

the story of Western opportunity in this vein: "You see your children

come out of school with no chance to get farms of their own because the

cost of land in your older part of the country is so high that you can't

afford to buy land to start your sons out in life around you. They have

to go to the cities to make a living or become laborers in the mills or

hire out as farm hands. There is no future for them there. If you are

doing well where you are and can safeguard the future of your children

and see them prosper around you, don't leave here. But if you want

independence, if you are renting your land, if the money-lender is

carrying you along and you are running behind year after year, you can

do no worse by moving.... You farmers talk of free trade and protection

and what this or that political party will do for you. Why don't you

vote a homestead for yourself? That is the only thing Uncle Sam will

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

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

failure of it because the rates at which we haul you and your goods make

the first transaction a loss.... We must have landless men for a manless

land."



Unlike steamship companies stimulating immigration to get the fares,

Hill was seeking permanent settlers who would produce, manufacture, and

use the railways as the means of exchange. Consequently he fixed low

rates and let his passengers take a good deal of live stock and

household furniture free. By doing this he made an appeal that was

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

Indiana in fourteen passenger coaches, filled with men, women, and

children, and forty-eight freight cars carrying their household goods

and live stock. In the ten years that followed, 100,000 people from the

Middle West and the South, responding to his call, went to the Western

country where they brought eight million acres of prairie land under

cultivation.



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

that increased the productivity of their labor. Was the output of food

for his freight cars limited by bad drainage on the farms? Hill then

interested himself in practical ways of ditching and tiling. Were

farmers hampered in hauling their goods to his trains by bad roads? In

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

traffic slacken because the food shipped was not of the best quality?

Then live stock must be improved and scientific farming promoted. Did

the farmers need credit? Banks must be established close at hand to

advance it. In all conferences on scientific farm management,

conservation of natural resources, banking and credit in relation to

agriculture and industry, Hill was an active participant. His was the

long vision, seeing in conservation and permanent improvements the

foundation of prosperity for the railways and the people.



Indeed, he neglected no opportunity to increase the traffic on the

lines. He wanted no empty cars running in either direction and no wheat

stored in warehouses for the lack of markets. So he looked to the Orient

as well as to Europe as an outlet for the surplus of the farms. He sent

agents to China and Japan to discover what American goods and produce

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

Americans in exchange. To open the Pacific trade he bought two ocean

monsters, the Minnesota and the Dakota, thus preparing for

emergencies West as well as East. When some Japanese came to the United

States on their way to Europe to buy steel rails, Hill showed them how

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

way of American railways and American vessels. So the railway builder

and promoter, who helped to break the virgin soil of the prairies, lived

through the pioneer epoch and into the age of great finance. Before he

died he saw the wheat fields of North Dakota linked with the spinning

jennies of Manchester and the docks of Yokohama.





THE EVOLUTION OF GRAZING AND AGRICULTURE



The Removal of the Indians



Unlike the frontier of New England in

colonial days or that of Kentucky later, the advancing lines of home

builders in the Far West had little difficulty with warlike natives.

Indian attacks were made on the railway construction gangs; General

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

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

practice of treating with the Indians as independent nations was

abandoned in 1871 and most of them were concentrated in reservations

where they were mainly supported by the government. The supervision of

their affairs was vested in a board of commissioners created in 1869 and

instructed to treat them as wards of the nation--a trust which

unfortunately was often betrayed. A further step in Indian policy was

taken in 1887 when provision was made for issuing lands to individual

Indians, thus permitting them to become citizens and settle down among

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

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

more tractable and more willing to surrender the freedom of the hunter

for the routine of the reservation, ranch, or wheat field.



The Cowboy and Cattle Ranger



Between the frontier of farms and the

mountains were plains and semi-arid regions in vast reaches suitable for

grazing. As soon as the railways were open into the Missouri Valley,

affording an outlet for stock, there sprang up to the westward cattle

and sheep raising on an immense scale. The far-famed American cowboy was

the hero in this scene. Great herds of cattle were bred in Texas; with

the advancing spring and summer seasons, they were driven northward

across the plains and over the buffalo trails. In a single year, 1884,

it is estimated that nearly one million head of cattle were moved out of

Texas to the North by four thousand cowboys, supplied with 30,000

horses and ponies.



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

sheep raisers had an almost free run of the plains, using public lands

without paying for the privilege and waging war on one another over the

possession of ranges. At length, however, both had to go, as the

homesteaders and land companies came and fenced in the plain and desert

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

with the frontier lamented the passing of the picturesque days: "The

unique position of the cowboys among the Americans is jeopardized in a

thousand ways. Towns are growing up on their pasture lands; irrigation

schemes of a dozen sorts threaten to turn bunch-grass scenery into

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

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

done mainly in small herds, with winter corrals, and then the cowboy's

days will end. Even now his condition disappoints those who knew him

only half a dozen years ago. His breed seems to have deteriorated and

his ranks are filling with men who work for wages rather than for the

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

that calling. Splendid Cheyenne saddles are less and less numerous in

the outfits; the distinctive hat that made its way up from Mexico may or

may not be worn; all the civil authorities in nearly all towns in the

grazing country forbid the wearing of side arms; nobody shoots up these

towns any more. The fact is the old simon-pure cowboy days are gone

already."



Settlement under the Homestead Act of 1862



Two factors gave a

special stimulus to the rapid settlement of Western lands which swept

away the Indians and the cattle rangers. The first was the policy of the

railway companies in selling large blocks of land received from the

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

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

closed the long controversy over the disposition of the public domain

that was suitable for agriculture. It provided for granting, without any

cost save a small registration fee, public lands in lots of 160 acres

each to citizens and aliens who declared their intention of becoming

citizens. The one important condition attached was that the settler

should occupy the farm for five years before his title was finally

confirmed. Even this stipulation was waived in the case of the Civil War

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

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

Revolutionary and Mexican wars had advanced in great numbers to the

frontier in earlier days, so now veterans led in the settlement of the

middle border. Along with them went thousands of German, Irish, and

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

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

twenty years (1860-80), the population of Nebraska leaped from 28,000 to

almost half a million; Kansas from 100,000 to a million; Iowa from

600,000 to 1,600,000; and the Dakotas from 5000 to 140,000.



The Diversity of Western Agriculture



In soil, produce, and

management, Western agriculture presented many contrasts to that of the

East and South. In the region of arable and watered lands the typical

American unit--the small farm tilled by the owner--appeared as usual;

but by the side of it many a huge domain owned by foreign or Eastern

companies and tilled by hired labor. Sometimes the great estate took the

shape of the "bonanza farm" devoted mainly to wheat and corn and

cultivated on a large scale by machinery. Again it assumed the form of

the cattle ranch embracing tens of thousands of acres. Again it was a

vast holding of diversified interest, such as the Santa Anita ranch near

Los Angeles, a domain of 60,000 acres "cultivated in a glorious sweep of

vineyards and orange and olive orchards, rich sheep and cattle pastures

and horse ranches, their life and customs handed down from the Spanish

owners of the various ranches which were swept into one estate."



Irrigation



In one respect agriculture in the Far West was unique. In

a large area spreading through eight states, Montana, Idaho, Wyoming,

Utah, Colorado, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, and parts of adjoining

states, the rainfall was so slight that the ordinary crops to which the

American farmer was accustomed could not be grown at all. The Mormons

were the first Anglo-Saxons to encounter aridity, and they were baffled

at first; but they studied it and mastered it by magnificent irrigation

systems. As other settlers poured into the West the problem of the

desert was attacked with a will, some of them replying to the

commiseration of Eastern farmers by saying that it was easier to scoop

out an irrigation ditch than to cut forests and wrestle with stumps and

stones. Private companies bought immense areas at low prices, built

irrigation works, and disposed of their lands in small plots. Some

ranchers with an instinct for water, like that of the miner for metal,

sank wells into the dry sand and were rewarded with gushers that "soused

the thirsty desert and turned its good-for-nothing sand into

good-for-anything loam." The federal government came to the aid of the

arid regions in 1894 by granting lands to the states to be used for

irrigation purposes. In this work Wyoming took the lead with a law which

induced capitalists to invest in irrigation and at the same time

provided for the sale of the redeemed lands to actual settlers. Finally

in 1902 the federal government by its liberal Reclamation Act added its

strength to that of individuals, companies, and states in conquering

"arid America."



"Nowhere," writes Powell, a historian of the West, in his picturesque

End of the Trail, "has the white man fought a more courageous fight or

won a more brilliant victory than in Arizona. His weapons have been the

transit and the level, the drill and the dredge, the pick and the spade;

and the enemy which he has conquered has been the most stubborn of all

foes--the hostile forces of Nature.... The story of how the white man

within the space of less than thirty years penetrated, explored, and

mapped this almost unknown region; of how he carried law, order, and

justice into a section which had never had so much as a speaking

acquaintance with any one of the three before; of how, realizing the

necessity for means of communication, he built highways of steel across

this territory from east to west and from north to south; of how,

undismayed by the savageness of the countenance which the desert turned

upon him, he laughed and rolled up his sleeves, and spat upon his hands,

and slashed the face of the desert with canals and irrigating ditches,

and filled those ditches with water brought from deep in the earth or

high in the mountains; and of how, in the conquered and submissive soil,

he replaced the aloe with alfalfa, the mesquite with maize, the cactus

with cotton, forms one of the most inspiring chapters in our history. It

is one of the epics of civilization, this reclamation of the Southwest,

and its heroes, thank God, are Americans.



"Other desert regions have been redeemed by irrigation--Egypt, for

example, and Mesopotamia and parts of the Sudan--but the people of all

those regions lay stretched out in the shade of a convenient palm,

metaphorically speaking, and waited for some one with more energy than

themselves to come along and do the work. But the Arizonians, mindful of

the fact that God, the government, and Carnegie help those who help

themselves, spent their days wielding the pick and shovel, and their

evenings in writing letters to Washington with toil-hardened hands.

After a time the government was prodded into action and the great dams

at Laguna and Roosevelt are the result. Then the people, organizing

themselves into cooeperative leagues and water-users' associations, took

up the work of reclamation where the government left off; it is to these

energetic, persevering men who have drilled wells, plowed fields, and

dug ditches through the length and breadth of that great region which

stretches from Yuma to Tucson, that the metamorphosis of Arizona is

due."



The effect of irrigation wherever introduced was amazing. Stretches of

sand and sagebrush gave way to fertile fields bearing crops of wheat,

corn, fruits, vegetables, and grass. Huge ranches grazed by browsing

sheep were broken up into small plots. The cowboy and ranchman vanished.

In their place rose the prosperous community--a community unlike the

township of Iowa or the industrial center of the East. Its intensive

tillage left little room for hired labor. Its small holdings drew

families together in village life rather than dispersing them on the

lonely plain. Often the development of water power in connection with

irrigation afforded electricity for labor-saving devices and lifted many

a burden that in other days fell heavily upon the shoulders of the

farmer and his family.





MINING AND MANUFACTURING IN THE WEST



Mineral Resources



In another important particular the Far West

differed from the Mississippi Valley states. That was in the

predominance of mining over agriculture throughout a vast section.

Indeed it was the minerals rather than the land that attracted the

pioneers who first opened the country. The discovery of gold in

California in 1848 was the signal for the great rush of prospectors,

miners, and promoters who explored the valleys, climbed the hills,

washed the sands, and dug up the soil in their feverish search for gold,

silver, copper, coal, and other minerals. In Nevada and Montana the

development of mineral resources went on all during the Civil War. Alder

Gulch became Virginia City in 1863; Last Chance Gulch was named Helena

in 1864; and Confederate Gulch was christened Diamond City in 1865. At

Butte the miners began operations in 1864 and within five years had

washed out eight million dollars' worth of gold. Under the gold they

found silver; under silver they found copper.



Even at the end of the nineteenth century, after agriculture was well

advanced and stock and sheep raising introduced on a large scale,

minerals continued to be the chief source of wealth in a number of

states. This was revealed by the figures for 1910. The gold, silver,

iron, and copper of Colorado were worth more than the wheat, corn, and

oats combined; the copper of Montana sold for more than all the cereals

and four times the price of the wheat. The interest of Nevada was also

mainly mining, the receipts from the mineral output being $43,000,000 or

more than one-half the national debt of Hamilton's day. The yield of the

mines of Utah was worth four or five times the wheat crop; the coal of

Wyoming brought twice as much as the great wool clip; the minerals of

Arizona were totaled at $43,000,000 as against a wool clip reckoned at

$1,200,000; while in Idaho alone of this group of states did the wheat

crop exceed in value the output of the mines.






Timber Resources



The forests of the great West, unlike those of the

Ohio Valley, proved a boon to the pioneers rather than a foe to be

attacked. In Ohio and Indiana, for example, the frontier line of

homemakers had to cut, roll, and burn thousands of trees before they

could put out a crop of any size. Beyond the Mississippi, however,

there were all ready for the breaking plow great reaches of almost

treeless prairie, where every stick of timber was precious. In the other

parts, often rough and mountainous, where stood primeval forests of the

finest woods, the railroads made good use of the timber. They consumed

acres of forests themselves in making ties, bridge timbers, and

telegraph poles, and they laid a heavy tribute upon the forests for

their annual upkeep. The surplus trees, such as had burdened the

pioneers of the Northwest Territory a hundred years before, they carried

off to markets on the east and west coasts.



Western Industries



The peculiar conditions of the Far West

stimulated a rise of industries more rapid than is usual in new country.

The mining activities which in many sections preceded agriculture called

for sawmills to furnish timber for the mines and smelters to reduce and

refine ores. The ranches supplied sheep and cattle for the packing

houses of Kansas City as well as Chicago. The waters of the Northwest

afforded salmon for 4000 cases in 1866 and for 1,400,000 cases in 1916.

The fruits and vegetables of California brought into existence

innumerable canneries. The lumber industry, starting with crude sawmills

to furnish rough timbers for railways and mines, ended in specialized

factories for paper, boxes, and furniture. As the railways preceded

settlement and furnished a ready outlet for local manufactures, so they

encouraged the early establishment of varied industries, thus creating a

state of affairs quite unlike that which obtained in the Ohio Valley in

the early days before the opening of the Erie Canal.



Social Effects of Economic Activities



In many respects the social

life of the Far West also differed from that of the Ohio Valley. The

treeless prairies, though open to homesteads, favored the great estate

tilled in part by tenant labor and in part by migratory seasonal labor,

summoned from all sections of the country for the harvests. The mineral

resources created hundreds of huge fortunes which made the accumulations

of eastern mercantile families look trivial by comparison. Other

millionaires won their fortunes in the railway business and still more

from the cattle and sheep ranges. In many sections the "cattle king," as

he was called, was as dominant as the planter had been in the old South.

Everywhere in the grazing country he was a conspicuous and important

person. He "sometimes invested money in banks, in railroad stocks, or in

city property.... He had his rating in the commercial reviews and could

hobnob with bankers, railroad presidents, and metropolitan merchants....

He attended party caucuses and conventions, ran for the state

legislature, and sometimes defeated a lawyer or metropolitan 'business

man' in the race for a seat in Congress. In proportion to their numbers,

the ranchers ... have constituted a highly impressive class."



Although many of the early capitalists of the great West, especially

from Nevada, spent their money principally in the East, others took

leadership in promoting the sections in which they had made their

fortunes. A railroad pioneer, General Palmer, built his home at Colorado

Springs, founded the town, and encouraged local improvements. Denver

owed its first impressive buildings to the civic patriotism of Horace

Tabor, a wealthy mine owner. Leland Stanford paid his tribute to

California in the endowment of a large university. Colonel W.F. Cody,

better known as "Buffalo Bill," started his career by building a "boom

town" which collapsed, and made a large sum of money supplying buffalo

meat to construction hands (hence his popular name). By his famous Wild

West Show, he increased it to a fortune which he devoted mainly to the

promotion of a western reclamation scheme.



While the Far West was developing this vigorous, aggressive leadership

in business, a considerable industrial population was springing up. Even

the cattle ranges and hundreds of farms were conducted like factories in

that they were managed through overseers who hired plowmen, harvesters,

and cattlemen at regular wages. At the same time there appeared other

peculiar features which made a lasting impression on western economic

life. Mining, lumbering, and fruit growing, for instance, employed

thousands of workers during the rush months and turned them out at other

times. The inevitable result was an army of migratory laborers wandering

from camp to camp, from town to town, and from ranch to ranch, without

fixed homes or established habits of life. From this extraordinary

condition there issued many a long and lawless conflict between capital

and labor, giving a distinct color to the labor movement in whole

sections of the mountain and coast states.





THE ADMISSION OF NEW STATES



The Spirit of Self-Government



The instinct of self-government was

strong in the western communities. In the very beginning, it led to the

organization of volunteer committees, known as "vigilantes," to suppress

crime and punish criminals. As soon as enough people were settled

permanently in a region, they took care to form a more stable kind of

government. An illustration of this process is found in the Oregon

compact made by the pioneers in 1843, the spirit of which is reflected

in an editorial in an old copy of the Rocky Mountain News: "We claim

that any body or community of American citizens which from any cause or

under any circumstances is cut off from or from isolation is so situated

as not to be under any active and protecting branch of the central

government, have a right, if on American soil, to frame a government and

enact such laws and regulations as may be necessary for their own

safety, protection, and happiness, always with the condition precedent,

that they shall, at the earliest moment when the central government

shall extend an effective organization and laws over them, give it their

unqualified support and obedience."



People who turned so naturally to the organization of local

administration were equally eager for admission to the union as soon as

any shadow of a claim to statehood could be advanced. As long as a

region was merely one of the territories of the United States, the

appointment of the governor and other officers was controlled by

politics at Washington. Moreover the disposition of land, mineral

rights, forests, and water power was also in the hands of national

leaders. Thus practical considerations were united with the spirit of

independence in the quest for local autonomy.



Nebraska and Colorado



Two states, Nebraska and Colorado, had little

difficulty in securing admission to the union. The first, Nebraska, had

been organized as a territory by the famous Kansas-Nebraska bill which

did so much to precipitate the Civil War. Lying to the north of Kansas,

which had been admitted in 1861, it escaped the invasion of slave owners

from Missouri and was settled mainly by farmers from the North. Though

it claimed a population of only 67,000, it was regarded with kindly

interest by the Republican Congress at Washington and, reduced to its

present boundaries, it received the coveted statehood in 1867.



This was hardly accomplished before the people of Colorado to the

southwest began to make known their demands. They had been organized

under territorial government in 1861 when they numbered only a handful;

but within ten years the aspect of their affairs had completely changed.

The silver and gold deposits of the Leadville and Cripple Creek regions

had attracted an army of miners and prospectors. The city of Denver,

founded in 1858 and named after the governor of Kansas whence came many

of the early settlers, had grown from a straggling camp of log huts into

a prosperous center of trade. By 1875 it was reckoned that the

population of the territory was not less than one hundred thousand; the

following year Congress, yielding to the popular appeal, made Colorado a

member of the American union.



Six New States (1889-1890)



For many years there was a deadlock in

Congress over the admission of new states. The spell was broken in 1889

under the leadership of the Dakotas. For a long time the Dakota

territory, organized in 1861, had been looked upon as the home of the

powerful Sioux Indians whose enormous reservation blocked the advance of

the frontier. The discovery of gold in the Black Hills, however, marked

their doom. Even before Congress could open their lands to prospectors,

pioneers were swarming over the country. Farmers from the adjoining

Minnesota and the Eastern states, Scandinavians, Germans, and Canadians,

came in swelling waves to occupy the fertile Dakota lands, now famous

even as far away as the fjords of Norway. Seldom had the plow of man cut

through richer soil than was found in the bottoms of the Red River

Valley, and it became all the more precious when the opening of the

Northern Pacific in 1883 afforded a means of transportation east and

west. The population, which had numbered 135,000 in 1880, passed the

half million mark before ten years had elapsed.



Remembering that Nebraska had been admitted with only 67,000

inhabitants, the Dakotans could not see why they should be kept under

federal tutelage. At the same time Washington, far away on the Pacific

Coast, Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming, boasting of their populations and

their riches, put in their own eloquent pleas. But the members of

Congress were busy with politics. The Democrats saw no good reason for

admitting new Republican states until after their defeat in 1888. Near

the end of their term the next year they opened the door for North and

South Dakota, Washington, and Montana. In 1890, a Republican Congress

brought Idaho and Wyoming into the union, the latter with woman

suffrage, which had been granted twenty-one years before.



Utah



Although Utah had long presented all the elements of a

well-settled and industrious community, its admission to the union was

delayed on account of popular hostility to the practice of polygamy. The

custom, it is true, had been prohibited by act of Congress in 1862; but

the law had been systematically evaded. In 1882 Congress made another

and more effective effort to stamp out polygamy. Five years later it

even went so far as to authorize the confiscation of the property of the

Mormon Church in case the practice of plural marriages was not stopped.

Meanwhile the Gentile or non-Mormon population was steadily increasing

and the leaders in the Church became convinced that the battle

against the sentiment of the country was futile. At last in 1896 Utah

was admitted as a state under a constitution which forbade plural

marriages absolutely and forever. Horace Greeley, who visited Utah in

1859, had prophesied that the Pacific Railroad would work a revolution

in the land of Brigham Young. His prophecy had come true.






Rounding out the Continent



Three more territories now remained out

of the Union. Oklahoma, long an Indian reservation, had been opened for

settlement to white men in 1889. The rush upon the fertile lands of this

region, the last in the history of America, was marked by all the frenzy

of the final, desperate chance. At a signal from a bugle an army of men

with families in wagons, men and women on horseback and on foot, burst

into the territory. During the first night a city of tents was raised at

Guthrie and Oklahoma City. In ten days wooden houses rose on the plains.

In a single year there were schools, churches, business blocks, and

newspapers. Within fifteen years there was a population of more than

half a million. To the west, Arizona with a population of about 125,000

and New Mexico with 200,000 inhabitants joined Oklahoma in asking for

statehood. Congress, then Republican, looked with reluctance upon the

addition of more Democratic states; but in 1907 it was literally

compelled by public sentiment and a sense of justice to admit Oklahoma.

In 1910 the House of Representatives went to the Democrats and within

two years Arizona and New Mexico were "under the roof." So the

continental domain was rounded out.





THE INFLUENCE OF THE FAR WEST ON NATIONAL LIFE



The Last of the Frontier



When Horace Greeley made his trip west in

1859 he thus recorded the progress of civilization in his journal:



"May 12th, Chicago.--Chocolate and morning journals last

seen on the hotel breakfast table.



23rd, Leavenworth (Kansas).--Room bells and bath tubs make

their final appearance.



26th, Manhattan.--Potatoes and eggs last recognized among

the blessings that 'brighten as they take their flight.'



27th, Junction City.--Last visitation of a boot-black, with

dissolving views of a board bedroom. Beds bid us good-by."






Within thirty years travelers were riding across that country in Pullman

cars and enjoying at the hotels all the comforts of a standardized

civilization. The "wild west" was gone, and with it that frontier of

pioneers and settlers who had long given such a bent and tone to

American life and had "poured in upon the floor of Congress" such a long

line of "backwoods politicians," as they were scornfully styled.



Free Land and Eastern Labor



It was not only the picturesque features

of the frontier that were gone. Of far more consequence was the

disappearance of free lands with all that meant for American labor. For

more than a hundred years, any man of even moderate means had been able

to secure a homestead of his own and an independent livelihood. For a

hundred years America had been able to supply farms to as many

immigrants as cared to till the soil. Every new pair of strong arms

meant more farms and more wealth. Workmen in Eastern factories, mines,

or mills who did not like their hours, wages, or conditions of labor,

could readily find an outlet to the land. Now all that was over. By

about 1890 most of the desirable land available under the Homestead act

had disappeared. American industrial workers confronted a new situation.



Grain Supplants King Cotton



In the meantime a revolution was taking

place in agriculture. Until 1860 the chief staples sold by America were

cotton and tobacco. With the advance of the frontier, corn and wheat

supplanted them both in agrarian economy. The West became the granary of

the East and of Western Europe. The scoop shovel once used to handle

grain was superseded by the towering elevator, loading and unloading

thousands of bushels every hour. The refrigerator car and ship made the

packing industry as stable as the production of cotton or corn, and gave

an immense impetus to cattle raising and sheep farming. So the meat of

the West took its place on the English dinner table by the side of bread

baked from Dakotan wheat.



Aid in American Economic Independence



The effects of this economic

movement were manifold and striking. Billions of dollars' worth of

American grain, dairy produce, and meat were poured into European

markets where they paid off debts due money lenders and acquired

capital to develop American resources. Thus they accelerated the

progress of American financiers toward national independence. The

country, which had timidly turned to the Old World for capital in

Hamilton's day and had borrowed at high rates of interest in London in

Lincoln's day, moved swiftly toward the time when it would be among the

world's first bankers and money lenders itself. Every grain of wheat and

corn pulled the balance down on the American side of the scale.



Eastern Agriculture Affected



In the East as well as abroad the

opening of the western granary produced momentous results. The

agricultural economy of that part of the country was changed in many

respects. Whole sections of the poorest land went almost out of

cultivation, the abandoned farms of the New England hills bearing solemn

witness to the competing power of western wheat fields. Sheep and cattle

raising, as well as wheat and corn production, suffered at least a

relative decline. Thousands of farmers cultivating land of the lower

grade were forced to go West or were driven to the margin of

subsistence. Even the herds that supplied Eastern cities with milk were

fed upon grain brought halfway across the continent.



The Expansion of the American Market



Upon industry as well as

agriculture, the opening of vast food-producing regions told in a

thousand ways. The demand for farm machinery, clothing, boots, shoes,

and other manufactures gave to American industries such a market as even

Hamilton had never foreseen. Moreover it helped to expand far into the

Mississippi Valley the industrial area once confined to the Northern

seaboard states and to transform the region of the Great Lakes into an

industrial empire. Herein lies the explanation of the growth of

mid-western cities after 1865. Chicago, with its thirty-five railways,

tapped every locality of the West and South. To the railways were added

the water routes of the Lakes, thus creating a strategic center for

industries. Long foresight carried the McCormick reaper works to

Chicago before 1860. From Troy, New York, went a large stove plant. That

was followed by a shoe factory from Massachusetts. The packing industry

rose as a matter of course at a point so advantageous for cattle raisers

and shippers and so well connected with Eastern markets.



To the opening of the Far West also the Lake region was indebted for a

large part of that water-borne traffic which made it "the Mediterranean

basin of North America." The produce of the West and the manufactures of

the East poured through it in an endless stream. The swift growth of

shipbuilding on the Great Lakes helped to compensate for the decline of

the American marine on the high seas. In response to this stimulus

Detroit could boast that her shipwrights were able to turn out a ten

thousand ton Leviathan for ore or grain about "as quickly as carpenters

could put up an eight-room house." Thus in relation to the Far West the

old Northwest territory--the wilderness of Jefferson's time--had taken

the position formerly occupied by New England alone. It was supplying

capital and manufactures for a vast agricultural empire West and South.



America on the Pacific



It has been said that the Mediterranean Sea

was the center of ancient civilization; that modern civilization has

developed on the shores of the Atlantic; and that the future belongs to

the Pacific. At any rate, the sweep of the United States to the shores

of the Pacific quickly exercised a powerful influence on world affairs

and it undoubtedly has a still greater significance for the future.



Very early regular traffic sprang up between the Pacific ports and the

Hawaiian Islands, China, and Japan. Two years before the adjustment of

the Oregon controversy with England, namely in 1844, the United States

had established official and trading relations with China. Ten years

later, four years after the admission of California to the union, the

barred door of Japan was forced open by Commodore Perry. The commerce

which had long before developed between the Pacific ports and Hawaii,

China, and Japan now flourished under official care. In 1865 a ship

from Honolulu carried sugar, molasses, and fruits from Hawaii to the

Oregon port of Astoria. The next year a vessel from Hongkong brought

rice, mats, and tea from China. An era of lucrative trade was opened.

The annexation of Hawaii in 1898, the addition of the Philippines at the

same time, and the participation of American troops in the suppression

of the Boxer rebellion in Peking in 1900, were but signs and symbols of

American power on the Pacific.



Conservation and the Land Problem



The disappearance of the frontier

also brought new and serious problems to the governments of the states

and the nation. The people of the whole United States suddenly were

forced to realize that there was a limit to the rich, new land to

exploit and to the forests and minerals awaiting the ax and the pick.

Then arose in America the questions which had long perplexed the

countries of the Old World--the scientific use of the soils and

conservation of natural resources. Hitherto the government had followed

the easy path of giving away arable land and selling forest and mineral

lands at low prices. Now it had to face far more difficult and complex

problems. It also had to consider questions of land tenure again,

especially if the ideal of a nation of home-owning farmers was to be

maintained. While there was plenty of land for every man or woman who

wanted a home on the soil, it made little difference if single landlords

or companies got possession of millions of acres, if a hundred men in

one western river valley owned 17,000,000 acres; but when the good land

for small homesteads was all gone, then was raised the real issue. At

the opening of the twentieth century the nation, which a hundred years

before had land and natural resources apparently without limit, was

compelled to enact law after law conserving its forests and minerals.

Then it was that the great state of California, on the very border of

the continent, felt constrained to enact a land settlement measure

providing government assistance in an effort to break up large holdings

into small lots and to make it easy for actual settlers to acquire small

farms. America was passing into a new epoch.