The Passing of the Frontier | Page 7

in this region much future for Americans. They
were explorers and not industrial investigators.
It was nearly half a century after the journey of Lewis and Clark that
the Forty-Niners were crossing the Plains, whither, meanwhile, the
Mormons had trekked in search of a country where they might live as
they liked. Still the wealth of the Plains remained untouched. California

was in the eyes of the world. The great cow-range was overleaped. But,
in the early fifties, when the placer fields of California began to be less
numerous and less rich, the half-savage population of the mines roared
on northward, even across our northern line. Soon it was to roll back.
Next it worked east and southeast and northeast over the great dry
plains of Washington and Oregon, so that, as readily may be seen, the
cow-range proper was not settled as most of the West was, by a directly
westbound thrust of an eastern population; but, on the contrary, it was
approached from several different angles--from the north, from the east,
from the west and northwest, and finally from the south.
The early, turbulent population of miners and adventurers was crude,
lawless, and aggressive. It cared nothing whatever for the Indian tribes.
War, instant and merciless, where it meant murder for the most part,
was set on foot as soon as white touched red in that far western region.
All these new white men who had crowded into the unknown country
of the Plains, the Rockies, the Sierras, and the Cascades, had to be fed.
They could not employ and remain content with the means by which
the red man there had always fed himself. Hence a new industry sprang
up in the United States, which of itself made certain history in that land.
The business of freighting supplies to the West, whether by bull-train
or by pack-train, was an industry sui generic, very highly specialized,
and pursued by men of great business ability as well as by men of great
hardihood and daring.
Each of these freight trains which went West carried hanging on its
flank more and more of the white men. As the trains returned, more and
more was learned in the States of the new country which lay between
the Missouri and the Rockies, which ran no man knew how far north,
and no man could guess how far south. Now appears in history Fort
Benton, on the Missouri, the great northern supply post--just as at an
earlier date there had appeared Fort Hall, one of the old fur-trading
posts beyond the Rockies, Bent's Fort on the Arkansas, and many other
outposts of the new Saxon civilization in the West.
Later came the pony express and the stage coach which made history
and romance for a generation. Feverishly, boisterously, a strong, rugged,
womanless population crowded westward and formed the wavering,
now advancing, now receding line of the great frontier of American
story.

But for long there was no sign of permanent settlement on the Plains,
and no one thought of this region as the frontier. The men there who
were prospecting and exploiting were classified as no more than
adventurers. No one seems to have taken a lesson from the Indian and
the buffalo. The reports of Fremont long since had called attention to
the nourishing quality of those grasses of the high country, but the day
of the cowboy had not yet dawned. There is a somewhat feeble story
which runs to the effect that in 1866 one of the great wagon-trains,
caught by the early snows of winter, was obliged to abandon its oxen
on the range. It was supposed that, of course, the oxen must perish
during the winter. But next spring the owners were surprised to find
that the oxen, so far from perishing, had flourished very much--indeed,
were fat and in good condition. So runs the story which is often
repeated. It may be true, but to accredit to this incident the beginnings
of the cattle industry in the Indian country would surely be going too
far. The truth is that the cow industry was not a Saxon discovery. It was
a Latin enterprise, flourishing in Mexico long before the first of these
miners and adventurers came on the range.
Something was known of the Spanish lands to the south through the
explorations of Pike, but more through the commerce of the
prairies--the old wagon trade from the Missouri River to the Spanish
cities of Sante Fe and Chihuahua. Now the cow business, south of the
Rio Grande, was already well differentiated and developed at the time
the first adventurers from the United States went into Texas and began
to crowd their Latin neighbors for more room. There it was that our
Saxon frontiersmen first discovered the cattle industry. But these