His name was usually Nester or Little Fellow.It was the old story of the tortoise and the hare.The Little Fellow was from the first destined to win.His steady advance, now on this flank, now on that, just back of the vanguard pushing westward, had marked the end of all our earlier frontiers.The same story now was being written on the frontier of the Plains.
But in the passing of this last frontier the type of the land-seeking man, the type of the American, began to alter distinctly.The million dead of our cruel Civil War left a great gap in the American population which otherwise would have occupied the West and Northwest after the clearing away of the Indians.For three decades we had been receiving a strong and valuable immigration from the north of Europe.It was in great part this continuous immigration which occupied the farming lands of upper Iowa, Minnesota, and the Dakotas.Thus the population of the Northwest became largely foreign.Each German or Scandinavian who found himself prospering in this rich new country was himself an immigration agency.He sent back word to his friends and relatives in the Old World and these came to swell the steadily thickening population of the New.
We have seen that the enterprising cattlemen had not been slow to reach out for such resources as they might.Perhaps at one time between 1885 and 1890 there were over ten million acres of land illegally fenced in on the upper range by large cattle companies.
This had been done without any color of law whatever; a man simply threw out his fences as far as he liked, and took in range enough to pasture all the cattle that he owned.His only pretext was "I saw it first." For the Nester who wanted a way through these fences out into the open public lands, he cherished a bitter resentment.And yet the Nester must in time win through, must eventually find the little piece of land which he was seeking.
The government at Washington was finally obliged to take action.
In the summer of 1885, acting under authorization of Congress, President Cleveland ordered the removal of all illegal enclosures and forbade any person or association to prevent the peaceful occupation of the public land by homesteaders.The President had already cancelled the leases by which a great cattle company had occupied grazing lands in the Indian Territory.Yet, with even-handed justice he kept the land boomers also out of these coveted lands, until the Dawes Act of 1887 allotted the tribal lands to the Indians in severalty and threw open the remainder to the impatient homeseekers.Waiting thousands were ready at the Kansas line, eager for the starting gun which was to let loose a mad stampede of crazed human beings.
It always was contended by the cowman that these settlers coming in on the semi-arid range could not make a living there, that all they could do was legally to starve to death some good woman.
True, many of them could not last out in the bitter combined fight with nature and the grasping conditions of commerce and transportation of that time.The western Canadian farmer of today is a cherished, almost a petted being.But no one ever showed any mercy to the American farmer who moved out West.
As always has been the case, a certain number of wagons might be seen passing back East, as well as the somewhat larger number steadily moving westward.There were lean years and dry years, hot years, yellow years here and there upon the range.The phrase written on one disheartened farmer's wagon top, "Going back to my wife's folks," became historic.
The railways were finding profit in carrying human beings out to the cow-range just as once they had in transporting cattle.
Indeed, it did not take the wiser railroad men long to see that they could afford to set down a farmer, at almost no cost for transportation, in any part of the new West.He would after that be dependent upon the railroad in every way.The railroads deliberately devised the great land boom of 1886, which was more especially virulent in the State of Kansas.Many of the roads had lands of their own for sale, but what they wanted most was the traffic of the settlers.They knew the profit to be derived from the industry of a dense population raising products which must be shipped, and requiring imports which also must be shipped.One railroad even offered choice breeding-stock free on request.The same road, and others also, preached steadily the doctrine of diversified farming.In short, the railroads, in their own interests, did all they could to make prosperous the farms or ranches of the West.The usual Western homestead now was part ranch and part farm, although the term "ranch" continued for many years to cover all the meanings of the farm of whatever sort.
There appeared now in the new country yet another figure of the Western civilization, the land-boomer, with his irresponsible and unregulated statements in regard to the values of these Western lands.These men were not always desirable citizens, although of course no industry was more solid or more valuable than that of legitimate handling of the desirable lands."Public spirit"became a phrase now well known in any one of scores of new towns springing up on the old cow-range, each of which laid claims to be the future metropolis of the world.In any one of these towns the main industry was that of selling lands or "real estate."During the Kansas boom of 1886 the land-boomers had their desks in the lobbies of banks, the windows of hardware stores--any place and every place offering room for a desk and chair.
