The Passing of the Frontier ................................................................................................................................1

Emerson Hough.......................................................................................................................................1

Chapter I. The Frontier In History...........................................................................................................1

Chapter II. The Range ..............................................................................................................................3

Chapter III. The Cattle Trails ...................................................................................................................8

Chapter IV. The Cowboy .......................................................................................................................11

Chapter V. The Mines ............................................................................................................................15

Chapter VI. The Pathways Of The West...............................................................................................22

Chapter VII. The Indian Wars...............................................................................................................31

Chapter VIII. The Cattle Kings ..............................................................................................................37

Chapter IX. The Homesteader...............................................................................................................41

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

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, hardihoodqualities beloved in men since the world beganqualities 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 meltingpot for character, before we came to know that odious appellation which classifies us as

The frontier was the place and the time of the strong man, of the selfsufficient but restless individual. It was

the home of the rebel, the protestant, the unreconciled, the intolerant, the ardentand 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

seadogs, 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 qualitychildlike, 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

halfsavage civilization of the farther West was roaring on its way across the continentwhile the day of the

keelboatman and the plainsman, of the Indianfighter and the miner, even the day of the cowboy, was

dawning and settingthere 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 Cumberlandthe only remaining part of

America which is all American. There we may find trace of the Elizabethan Ageidioms 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 muzzleloading rifle of an earlier day. We may

see the spinningwheel 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 halfreligious 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

There exists, too, yet another Saxon frontier in a faroff 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

seventyfive 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 Westbetter, 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 semipaternal encouragement in their adventures. The same is true in part of the governmentfostered

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

Our frontier crawled west from the first seaport settlements, afoot, on horseback, in barges, or with slow

wagontrains. 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 swiftso 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 Westthe high plains

and the lower foothills running from the Rio Grande to the northern boundary. The still more ancient

cattlerange 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 Rockiesbefore

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

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 cowrange 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,

Missouridaughters of Old Virginia in her glorycontributed 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 heroesbowing 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 countrynaturally came from those nearest Elizabethan countries which lay abandoned

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.

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 saltlicks 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 seenthe region

later to become the great cattlerange 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 "Fiftyfour forty," indeed, would have made nice measurements

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

huntingground 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 worthlesssince land which could not raise a tree certainly could not

raise cropsthese first occupants of the Middle West spent a generation or more, axe in hand, along the

heavily timbered riverbottoms. 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

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

On the buffalorangethat is to say, on the cattlerange which was to beLewis and Clark met several

bands of the Siouxthe 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

It was nearly half a century after the journey of Lewis and Clark that the FortyNiners 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

cowrange was overleaped. But, in the early fifties, when the placer fields of California began to be less

numerous and less rich, the halfsavage 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 cowrange 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 anglesfrom the north, from the east, from the west and northwest, and

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,

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 bulltrain or by

packtrain, was an industry sui generic, very highly specialized, and pursued by men of great business ability

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 postjust as at an earlier

date there had appeared Fort Hall, one of the old furtrading posts beyond the Rockies, Bent's Fort on the

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

wagontrains, 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 muchindeed, 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

Something was known of the Spanish lands to the south through the explorations of Pike, but more through

the commerce of the prairiesthe 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 riflemenruthless and savage, yet strangely statesmanlikethough 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 themselvesleagues 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 worthlessand 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 Riverthat 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 cattlerange at its

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 homestaying 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

We have now to note some fundamental facts and principles of the cattle industry which our American

The Mexicans in Texas had an abundance of small, hardy horses of African and Spanish breed, which Spain

had brought into the New Worldthe same horses that the Moors had brought into Spaina 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 "elkdog," as they first called the

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

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 waterholes more or less regularly, where they

might be roughly collected or estimated. This coming of the cattle to the wateringplaces made it

unnecessary for owners of cattle to acquire ranch land. It was enough to secure the waterfront 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

wateringplaces, and with them calves, he knew that all before him were his propertyor, at least, he

Still, this was loosefooted 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 trademark, 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

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 roundup.

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 cowsno one who wished to buy them. If one tendered a

Mexican cinquo pesos for a yearling or a twoyearold, 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

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 bestknown 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

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 eartha 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 graysided and whitetopped

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 sweetWilliam, 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 outofdoors 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,

In great bands, in long lines, slowly, towheaded, sorefooted, 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

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

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 vividnessthese 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

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

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

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 selltheir

greatest natural product, cattle on the hoof. This was the primary cause of the great northbound drives already

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

Now the trail of the great cattle drivesthe Long Trailwas 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

* "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 wellflowered 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 cattlerange. 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 cattlerange.

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 kineprocessions 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

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 largehanded 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

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 AngloSaxon 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 welldefined channels deepened in the year of

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,

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

The Long Trail of the cattlerange 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

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.

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 mountainfronts 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 eyesfor 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 productnot 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 dryfarmer'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 roundup 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 wintertime 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

The cowboy's boots were of fine leather and fitted tightly, with light narrow soles, extremely small and high

heels. Surely a more irrational footcovering 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 tighttoed 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 brightcolored leather. The Lone Star of Texas was not

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

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

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 wouldbe cowpunchers do not willingly let this old kerchief die, and right often they overplay it.

For the cowboy of the "movies," however, let us register an unqualified contempt. The real range would

A peculiar and distinctive feature of the cowboy's costume was his "chaps" (chaparejos). The chaps were two

very wide and fulllength trouserlegs 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

oldtime 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 44caliber was

tolerated on the range, the solid framed 45caliber 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 bluntended 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

An essential part of the cowpuncher's outfit was his "rope." This was carried in a close coil at the side of the

saddlehorn, 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 wellmade threequarterinch 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

His bridlefor, since the cowboy and his mount are inseparable, we may as well speak of his horse's dress

alsowas 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 roundup 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

sideshifting 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 weightfrom thirty to forty

poundswas 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

cowsaddle 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," steelforged 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 saddletree 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 cowsaddle

has changed but little, although today one sees a shorter seat and smaller horn, a "swell front" or roll, and a

The roundup was the harvest of the range. The time of the calf roundup 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 roundup districts. Under an elected roundup captain were

all the bosses in charge of the different ranch outfits sent by men having cattle in the roundup. Let us briefly

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 cowpuncher 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 cowpuncher 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 sharpeyed 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 cowpunchers 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

We have spoken in terms of the past. There is no calf roundup 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

After the calf roundup came the beef roundup, 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 roundup 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

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

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 cowpunchers, reared in the free life of the open

air, under circumstances of the utmost freedom of individual action, perhaps came off the drive or roundup

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

The amusements of the cowboy were like the features of his daily surroundings and occupationthey 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

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 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

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,"

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 goldfields 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 oncefamous 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 shortlived 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.

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

The mad treasurehunters 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

So the flood of goldseekerspassing north into the Fraser River country, south again into Oregon and

Washington, and across the great desert plains into Nevada and Idahomade 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 packtrains 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 unheardof 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 bulltrains 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

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 (185960) 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

All the camps were very much alike. A straggling row of log cabins or huts of motley construction; a few

stores socalled, sometimes of logs, or, if a sawmill was at hand, of rude sawn boards; a number of saloons,

each of which customarily also supported a dancehall; a series of cabins or huts where dwelt individual

men, each doing his own cooking and washing; and outside these huts the uptorn earthsuch 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

If we look for causes contributory to the history of the miningcamp, we shall find one which ordinarily is

overlookedthe 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 sixshooter of the placer days was of the old capandball type, heavy, longbarreled, and

usually woodenhandled. 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,

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 goldfields. The first discovery of gold in

Montana was made on Gold Creek by a halfbreed trapper named Francois, better known as Benetsee.

This was in 1852, but the news seems to have lain dormant for a timenaturally 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

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 goldseekers, 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 wagontrain 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 tryand promptly to hangStillman 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

wellorganized band of desperadoes operating in Idaho might be expected to begin at any time in Montana, a

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 fifththis 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 wagontrain. While Captain Fisk and his expedition pushed on to Walla Walla, nearly half of

the immigrants stayed to try their luck at placermining. 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

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 oldtime 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 lawabiding, 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

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

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

twentyseven 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

selfdefense. 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

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 1862Antietam, Fredericksburg,

Second Bull Runall the exciting debates of Congress, and the more exciting combats at sea, first became

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

* 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.

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 illadvised

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

Passamari...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.... Hurdygurdy dancehouses 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

"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. Horseracing 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

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 safekeeping? 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 seventyfive 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

Practically every man in the new goldfields was aware of the existence of a secret band of wellorganized

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 wagontrain, 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 campsalthough 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,

archhypocrite 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 silvermine 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 lawandorder men to undertake his

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 selfreliant, 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 whitehot 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

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,

councilroom 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 himasked

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

"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 shootingthe 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

All over that West, once so unspeakably wild and reckless, there now rise great cities where recently were

scattered only miningcamps 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 doubtedthat 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 dancehall; between society

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 Westwhat we might call the points of attack

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 packanimals. 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

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 valleysnatural highways and natural resting places of

homebuilding man. This has been the story of the advance of civilization from the first movements of the

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

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

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 trappersnow at Bent's Fort on the Arkansas, now at Horse Creek in Wyoming,

now on Green River in Utah, or even farther beyond the mountainsdemanded supplies of food and traps

and ammunition to enable the hunters to continue their work for another year. Perhaps many of the

packtrains which regularly supplied this shifting mountain market already had traded in the Spanish

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

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

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 Wyethnames 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 furtrimmed warshirts and plumed bonnets, armed with lance and sinewed bow and

bullneck shield, not forgetting whence they got their horses and how they got their food.

The great early midcontinental 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 FortyNiners used it, the cattlemen used it in part, the railroads used it; and, lastly, the settlers and

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 grasscovered and flowerbesprinkled 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

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 formationa 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

midcentury, the frontier and the ways of the frontier were writing their imprint on the human product of our

The first great caravans of the Platte Valley, when the wagontrains went out hundreds strong, were not the

same as the scattering cavalcade of the fur hunters, not the same as the oxtrains and muletrains 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 menthe first real emigrants to go West with the intent of making homes beyond the

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

FortyNiners were heard of, farmers, homebuilders, emigrants, men with their families, men with their

household goods, were steadily passing out for the faroff 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 faraway 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

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 longhaired,

fringedlegging man riding a rawboned 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 Americathe 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

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 illfated Donner Party. He chronicles events which happened in 1846a

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

"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

"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. Tradingposts 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

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

DonnerTamsen Dormer; a woman of education, a musician, a linguist, a botanist, and of the most sublime

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

"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

"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

"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

"Bread has been the principal article of food in our camp. We laid in one hundred and fifty pounds of flour

and seventyfive 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

"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

"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, boyschain 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

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 tradingpost. Here occurred the

Some one at the fort strongly advised them to take a new route, a cutoff said to shorten the distance by about

three hundred miles. This cutoff passed along the south shore of Great Salt Lake and caught up the old

California Trail from Fort Hallthen well established and well knownalong 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 eightyseven persons. All of these took the

cutoff, being eager to save time in their travel. They reached Salt Lake after unspeakable difficulties.

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

"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 twentythird 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

"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 thirtyfirst day of October, some never went

farther than Prosser Creek, while others, on the evening of the twentyninth, struggled through the snow, and

reached the foot of the precipitous cliffs between the summit and the upper end of the lake. Here, baffled,

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 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

childrenVirginia, Patty, James, and Thomasthereon, 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

"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

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

brokenhearted, unable to make way through the deep, soft snow. Then some onesaid to have been F. W.

Graves of Vermontbethought himself of making snowshoes out of the oxbows and the hides of the

Volunteers were called for yet another party to cross the mountains into California. Fifteen persons

volunteered. Not all of them were mensome 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

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

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

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

"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

"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

"Dec. 23. Clear today; Milton took some of his meat away; all well at their camp. Began this day to read the

"Jan. 13. Snowing fast; snow higher than the shanty; it must be thirteen feet deep. Can not get wood this

"Jan. 27. Commenced snowing yesterday; still continues today. Lewis Keseberg, Jr., died three days ago;

"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

"[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 heartrending 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

"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

"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

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

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 illfated

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

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 vicepresident 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 westwardfollowing 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 occupantsan 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

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.

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 mapand one which I wish we might showwhich

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

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

So here, somewhere between the Missouri and the Rockies, lay our last frontier, wavering, receding,

advancing, gaining and losing, changing a little more every decadeand at last so rapidly changed as to be

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 Indiansthe 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

Indianfighting 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

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 rangein 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

socalled 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

buffalorange, 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

Even as early as 1866, Colonel Marcy, an experienced army officer and Indianfighter, 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 fastvanishing 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 descriptionmen, conditions of life, races of aboriginal inhabitants and

adventurous hunters and pioneersare 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 continenta condition which forms peculiar types of character, breeds

remarkable developments of human naturea 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

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

"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 wellinformed 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

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 huntingrange, 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

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 bestseasoned 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

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

Utesindeed all of the savage or semicivilized tribes which had hung on the flanks of the traffic of the

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 fortyfour 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 engagedonce 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 thisthe whites must all be

Red Cloud, Crazy Horse, Roman Nose, American Horse, Black Kettlethese 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 existedand 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

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 fieldswhich meant life or death to all engagedwould 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

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 buffalorange 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 sixtyfive 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 citydweller 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 huntinggrounds are hostile and will remain so till killed off. We will have a sort of

predatory war for yearsevery 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 LieutenantColonel 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

sixtyfour 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 "firstclass, 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,

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

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

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

It was encounters such as this which gradually were teaching the Indians that they could not beat the white

What is known as the Baker Massacre was the turningpoint in the halfcentury of warfare with the

Blackfeet, the savage tribe which had preyed upon the men of the fur trade in a longcontinued series of

robberies and murders. On January 22, 1870, Major E. M. Baker, led by halfbreeds 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

seventythree 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

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

Percesa flight which baffled our best generals and their men for a hundred and ten days over more than

fourteen hundred miles of wildernessthese 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

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

Far in the dry Southwest, where homebuilding man did not as yet essay a general occupation of the soil, the

bloodthirsty 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

bloodmad 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 18856. 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 fiftysix enlisted men killed, with two officers and fiftyone men wounded; a total of three

hundred and twentythree 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.

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

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 homesteadinglands 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

cattlerange. In practice it was violated thousands of timesin 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

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 forcemost revolutionary of all the great

changes we have noted in the swiftly changing Westthe 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 Frontierthat land which now we have been seeking less to define and

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 postsome 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

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 tradeas well as some figure in politicsuntil 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 riflesmoke 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

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

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, selfindulgence, 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 whitetopped wagons rivaled the crowded coaches westbound on the

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 securityit was practically

worthless without the cattlebut 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

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 shippingpoint. 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. Trailcutters and herdcombers, licensed or unlicensed hangerson to the

northbound throngs of cattle, appeared along the lower trailswith 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 rangerustlers 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 cattlerange Vigilantes, who shot and hanged some scores of rustlers.

It was a frenzied life while it lastedthis 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 advanceguard of civilization now crowding on the heels of the wild men of the West. In time the lights

of the dancehalls 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 barbwire fences in the seventies had caused a tremendous alteration of conditions over

all the country. It had enabled men to fence in their own waterfronts, 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 menlike the largehanded cow barons of the

Indian Nations, who had things much as they willed in a little unnoted realm all their ownhad money and

political influence. And there seemed still range enough for all. If a man wished to throw a drift fence here or

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 therehad 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 suspectednot 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

The largehanded 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 foughtthe cow kings

accusing their smaller rivals of rustling cows; the small man accusing the larger operators of having for years

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 moreas 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 barbwire 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 landso much land that there came to be

no place near any of the shippingpoints 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 fencesa 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

anythe 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 sunburned 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.

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

But in the passing of this last frontier the type of the landseeking 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

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

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 evenhanded 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

It always was contended by the cowman that these settlers coming in on the semiarid 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

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

The railways were finding profit in carrying human beings out to the cowrange 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 breedingstock 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

There appeared now in the new country yet another figure of the Western civilization, the landboomer, 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 cowrange, 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 landboomers had their desks in the lobbies of banks, the windows of hardware

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

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

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 stockraiser. 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 twentyfive cents an

acre, and at least onehalf 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

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 bondswhich were offered broadcast

by Eastern banks to their small investorswere 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 treesanything you likedwent 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

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 soberminded 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 occupationsuccessful sometimes, though always hard and always

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

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 moneysometimes twentyfive 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 semiarid

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 landboomer 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

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 foregoneas the cowman has had to raise his cows under fence, so ultimately must the sheepman also buy

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

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 newland 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 Northwestthe

pictures of their long lines of reapers or selfbinders, twenty, thirty, forty, or fifty machines, one after the

other, advancing through the golden grainthe pictures of their innumerable stacks of wheatthe figures of

the vast mileage of their fencingthe yet more stupendous figures of the outlay required to operate these

farms, and the splendid totals of the receipts from such operationsthese 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

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 onecrop country is never

one of sound investing values; and a land boom is something of which to bewarealways and always to

The prairie had passed; the range had passed; the illegal fences had passed; and presently the cattle

themselves were to passthat 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 Hillsa region long accustomed to vivid history,

whether of Indians, mines, or cowsat 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 blueedged 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, wellfed animals, heavy and stocky, even of type, all either whitefaces or

shorthorns. With them were some oldtime 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 cattleproducing 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 turnover 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 "byproducts" than of

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

The insatiable demand of Americans for cheap lands assumed a certain international phase at the period lying

between 1900 and 1913 or laterthe 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

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

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 onecrop 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

In the year 1911 the writer saw, all through the Peace River Valley and even in the neighborhood of the Little

Slave Lake, the advanceguard 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 Montanaonce sacred to cowsand 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 Riveras long ago he

reached certain portions of the Yukon and Tanana countryif it shall be said that men are now selling town

lots under the Midnight Sunwhat 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 subArctic 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

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 wellnigh

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 despairingbut steadily advancing in the net resulthas come that

portion of the population which builds homes and lives in them, and which is not content with a blanket for a

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

homebred 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.

We had our frontier. We shall do ill indeed if we forget and abandon its strong lessons, its great hopes, its

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

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

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

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

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

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"

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

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

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.

There is an extensive bibliography appended to Frederic L. Paxson's "The Last American Frontier" (1910),