CHAPTER XI

THE CLOSED FRONTIER

THE American bonanza kings, whose sudden fortunes, derived from the mines of California and Colorado, startled The cattle society after the Civil War, had as later rivals. kings the cattle kings, who entered society with the first great fortunes derived from agricultural pursuits since the cotton planters of the old South. Their appearance and their later disappearance were due to the interplay of forces that began to operate when the continental railroads reached the eastern margin of the great plains and which weakened when the completion of these railroads had destroyed the open range. The cow country, where the cattle kings had their domain, played no part in American life before 1865, and by 1890 it was gone forever, after bringing a new phase of civilization into existence and letting loose new movements in society.

American food supply

The food supply of the United States, ordinarily the least of its troubles, was generally provided by regions near to the place of consumption. A few commodities not produced within the United States or raised there in insufficient amount, like sugar, tea, and coffee, were always imported. The plantation South preferred to devote its attention to its staple crops, cotton and tobacco, and imported flour and wheat from other sections of the Union. Cincinnati became "Porkopolis" before the Civil War, and retained permanently its important trades in fats and their by-products. But most of America raised its own food, ground its wheat in the local mill, and lived on a narrow but sufficient diet of local origin.

One influence of the railroads was to broaden the diet and to introduce direct competition among the farmers. The center of the wheat industry swung toward the northwest, from central New York to the prairies of Illinois and

Iowa, and thence, with the completion of the Northern Pacific Railroad and the Canadian Pacific (1885), to the Red River country and the region beyond the Great Lakes. The water power near the junction of the Minnesota and the Mississippi Rivers provided the basis for the flour industries of St. Paul and Minneapolis, which were aided by the ownership of the patent rights for the roller process, and became a center of world supply before 1880. The refrigerator cars introduced in the later sixties widened the market for the citrus fruits of Florida and California, and made possible an all-year-round traffic in fresh vegetables that relieved the United States from the dominance of seasonal foods and salt meats. The great plains, not yet occupied by farmers, became the basis of a wholesale cattle industry.

About 1866 it was discovered that cattle could winter on the northern plains without shelter and be better fitted for butchering than before the exposure. The wild cattle of the plains of central Texas flourished in the milder climate in huge herds, but were slight and stringy, and were slaughtered chiefly for their hides during the sixties, when the buffalo herd was being extinguished to supply the demand for buffalo robes. But the long-horned, long-enduring Texas cow, though making poor beef, was the mother of sturdy calves, and when the strain was crossed by Hereford or shorthorn sires, the calves could be fattened into prime beef while losing little of the resisting power of the native stock. The Union Pacific Railroad building west across Nebraska reached the open plains in 1866, just as it was discovered that cattle could winter there. One of its stations, Ogallala, was seized by the new industry as a convenient shippingpoint for plains-fed stock. As the trade developed, the cattle were bred upon the Texas plains between Fort Worth and the Rio Grande. They roamed, unfenced and with little care, until each spring they were rounded up at convenient centers by the owners of the several herds, and as the young calves trotted after their mothers toward the great pens, they were seized and branded with the brand of the owner.

The

heifers and the mothers were turned loose again. The young steers were kept together and were sold to Northern cattle

men.

The "long drive" began in central Texas and ran a little west of north through the panhandle of Texas and the CheroThe "long kee country adjoining it into Kansas and thence drive" to Ogallala and the railroad in Nebraska. A little later, when the Northern Pacific had been constructed to the Yellowstone, the stations of Glendive and Miles City on that river lengthened the drive and reduced the importance of Ogallala. The herds of cattle left the round-up camp in the custody of gangs of cowboys, who steered them slowly up the drive. At Dodge City in southwestern Kansas, where the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fé Railroad touched the old Spanish boundary at the one-hundredth meridian, the Southern cowboys often turned their charges over to the crews provided by the Northern buyers, who guarded the herds to their destination.

Every year after 1866 larger herds were bred in Texas and driven north, costing their owners only the trifling charge for stock-tending, living on the public domain, and grazing on Government grass. It was possible to ship the fattened animals to the slaughter-houses at Chicago and Kansas City, and make great profits for the cattle-men at the same time that the beef was distributed to the East and to Europe at prices lower than local beef could be obtained. Fresh meat became a more important item of American food than it had ever been before. The agricultural depression in Europe in the later seventies was intensified by the competition of the cheap American foods.

stockyards

Beef became a new article of commerce and brought into existence new forms of commercial organization that inChicago tensified the cry against monopoly. In every American city of importance the local slaughterhouse had been a problem because it was a necessary evil. Always offensive to the neighborhood, there was no way of doing without it, but its presence was commonly restricted by local ordinances. In Chicago in 1865 the numerous local

stockyards were merged into a single union stockyard on the western margin of the city, and there it was proposed to concentrate the local traffic. Almost immediately there began the endless procession of stock-cars laden with Western steers that were to force the conversion of the butchers' business into a national industry. The stockyards district was of necessity enlarged. To the slaughter-houses there were added a chain of packing-houses, where the meat that could not be refrigerated and shipped fresh was tinned or converted into some other form of preserved meat. The ice machine and the tin-can machine were active agents in the development of the new trade. Around the packinghouses there arose a network of by-product factories that utilized the hides and hair, the horns and hoofs, and even the blood of the animals, and increased in number as industrial chemistry solved the new problems of manufacture. The Chicago stockyards became the center of a world of its own, where the names of Armour, Swift, Hammond, Morris, Libby, and McNeal represented the forces of control, and where unskilled labor of foreign extraction did much of the work.

The invasion of Chicago beef was resented by local butchers, who formed protective associations in all parts of the United States and tried in vain to stay the revolution in their industry. The cry of monopoly was raised against the packers, not only by the butchers who could not meet their competition, but by the stock-men, who believed that illegal combinations held down the price of steers. The railroads welcomed the new industry, which created a demand for transportation, but soon found themselves obliged to meet the dickering propensities of the packers, as they were already obliged to meet those of the oil monopoly. By playing off one road against the other, the larger packers secured for themselves special rates and rebates, and drove from the business many of their less skillful competitors.

The Eastern butchers could only scold against the monopoly. Their trade in its older form was doomed to speedy extinction. The cattle-men on the Western plains were

Cattle ranches

more able to take steps to fight the packers' monopoly, and there arose in Nebraska and Dakota great ranches where the cattle, driven up from the plains, were held for the market. In the first decade of the cow country the cattle were shipped East as soon as stockcars could be had at Ogallala or Glendive to handle them. When the Chicago price was high, the cars were hard to get. When the market broke, the cowmen had no option but to ship their steers and to accept the price fixed by the packers at the Chicago yards. By fencing in a ranch along the Northern Pacific, it was possible to reduce the cost of stocktending and to hold the steers without great loss for a year or more. The fact that the land law provided no means for the acquisition of such ranches did not prevent their growth. Some were bought openly from the railroads, others were acquired in collusion or abuse of the Homestead and Preemption Laws, or were deliberately fenced in without a shadow of right. Eastern capital was drawn into the profitable business, until by 1885 there were more cattle on the plains than the market could absorb, and the industry was threatened by losses due to glutting the market. Most famous among the Northern ranches was that at Chimney Butte on the Little Missouri in Dakota, which Theodore Roosevelt bought while he was in the New York Assembly, and which remained his playground throughout the decade. From its beginning in 1866 the cattle industry on the open plains developed until by 1880 it was world-famous and European capitalists began to invest in ranches of their own. The sympathy with Ireland in her land controversies made these holdings a matter of public concern in the United States, and some observers thought they could detect a danger of alien landlordism in America. The real danger was the destruction of the industry by its own internal processes.

Every year after 1866 the flood of homesteaders washed farther out upon the plains, and the fences of the farmers - or "nesters," as the cowboys called them - narrowed the eastern limits of the range. Every year the enclosures