The prairie had passed; the range had passed; the illegal fences had passed; and presently the cattle themselves were to pass--that is to say, the great herds.As recently as five years ago (1912) it was my fortune to be in the town of Belle Fourche, near the Black Hills--a region long accustomed to vivid history, whether of Indians, mines, or cows--at the time when the last of the great herds of the old industry thereabouts were breaking up;and to see, coming down to the cattle chutes to be shipped to the Eastern stockyards, the last hundreds of the last great Belle Fourche herd, which was once numbered in thousands.They came down out of the blue-edged horizon, threading their way from upper benches down across the dusty valley.The dust of their travel rose as it had twenty years earlier on the same old trail.
But these were not the same cattle.There was not a longhorn among them; there has not been a longhorn on the range for many years.They were sleek, fat, well-fed animals, heavy and stocky, even of type, all either whitefaces or shorthorns.With them were some old-time cowmen, men grown gray in range work.Alongside the herds, after the ancient fashion of trailing cattle, rode cowboys who handled their charges with the same old skill.But even the cowboys had changed.These were without exception men from the East who had learned their trade here in the West.Here indeed was one of the last acts of the great drama of the Plains.To many an observer there it was a tragic thing.I saw many a cowman there the gravity on whose face had nothing to do with commercial loss.It was the Old West he mourned.I mourned with him.
Naturally the growth of the great stockyards of the Middle West had an effect upon all the cattle-producing country of the West, whether those cattle were bred in large or in small numbers.The dealers of the stockyards, let us say, gradually evolved a perfect understanding among themselves as to what cattle prices ought to be at the Eastern end of the rails.They have always pleaded poverty and explained the extremely small margin of profit under which they have operated.Of course, the repeated turn-over in their business has been an enormous thing; and their industry, since the invention of refrigerator cars and the shipment of dressed beef in tins, has been one which has extended to all the corners of the world.The great packers would rather talk of "by-products" than of these things.Always they have been poor, so very poor!
For a time the railroads east of the stockyard cities of Kansas City and Chicago divided up pro rata the dressed beef traffic.
Investigation after investigation has been made of the methods of the stockyard firms, but thus far the law has not laid its hands successfully upon them.Naturally of late years the extremely high price of beef has made greater profit to the cattle raiser;but that man, receiving eight or ten cents a pound on the hoof, is not getting rich so fast as did his predecessor, who got half of it, because he is now obliged to feed hay and to enclose his range.Where once a half ton of hay might have been sufficient to tide a cow over the bad part of the winter, the Little Fellow who fences his own range of a few hundred acres is obliged to figure on two or three tons, for he must feed his herd on hay through the long months of the winter.
The ultimate consumer, of course, is the one who pays the freight and stands the cost of all this.Hence we have the swift growth of American discontent with living conditions.There is no longer land for free homes in America.This is no longer a land of opportunity.It is no longer a poor man's country.We have arrived all too swiftly upon the ways of the Old World.And today, in spite of our love of peace, we are in an Old World's war!
The insatiable demand of Americans for cheap lands assumed a certain international phase at the period lying between 1900 and 1913 or later--the years of the last great boom in Canadian lands.The Dominion Government, represented by shrewd and enterprising men able to handle large undertakings, saw with a certain satisfaction of its own the swift passing from the market of all the cheap lands of the United States.It was proved to the satisfaction of all that very large tracts of the Canadian plains also would raise wheat, quite as well as had the prairies of Montana or Dakota.The Canadian railroads, with lands to sell, began to advertise the wheat industry in Alberta and Saskatchewan.The Canadian Government went into the publicity business on its own part.To a certain extent European immigration was encouraged, but the United States really was the country most combed out for settlers for these Canadian lands.As by magic, millions of acres in western Canada were settled.
The young American farmers of our near Northwest were especially coveted as settlers, because they knew how to farm these upper lands far better than any Europeans, and because each of them was able to bring a little capital of ready money into Canada.The publicity campaign waged by Canadians in our Western States in one season took away more than a hundred and fifty thousand good young farmers, resolved to live under another flag.In one year the State of Iowa lost over fifteen million dollars of money withdrawn from bank deposits by farmers moving across the line into Canada.
The story of these land rushes was much the same there as it had been with us.Not all succeeded.The climatic conditions were far more severe than any which we had endured, and if the soil for a time in some regions seemed better than some of our poorest, at least there waited for the one-crop man the same future which had been discovered for similar methods within our own confines.But the great Canadian land booms, carefully fostered and well developed, offered a curious illustration of the tremendous pressure of all the populations of the world for land and yet more land.
