CHAPTER XXII LETTING IN THE POPULATION 3

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3 This chapter follows, in part, F.L. Paxson, "The Pacific Railroads and the Disappearance of the Frontier in America," in Ann. Rep. of the Am. Hist. Assn., 1907, Vol. I, pp. 105–118.

"Veil them, cover them, wall them round—
Blossom, and creeper, and weed—
Let us forget the sight and the sound,
The smell and the touch of the breed!"

Thus Kipling wrote of "Letting in the Jungle," upon the Indian village. The forces of nature were turned loose upon it. The gentle deer nibbled at the growing crops, the elephant trampled them down, and the wild pig rooted them up. The mud walls of the thatched huts dissolved in the torrents, and "by the end of the Rains there was roaring Jungle in full blast on the spot that had been under plough not six months before." The white man worked the opposite of this on what remained of the American desert in the last fifteen years of the history of the old frontier. In a decade and a half a greater change came over it than the previous fifty years had seen, and before 1890, it is fair to say that the frontier was no more.

The American frontier, the irregular, imaginary line separating the farm lands and the unused West, had become nearly a circle before the compromise of 1850. In the form of a wedge with receding flanks it had come down the Ohio and up the Missouri in the last generation. The flanks had widened out in the thirties as Arkansas, and Missouri, and Iowa had received their population. In the next ten years Texas and the Pacific settlements had carried the line further west until the circular shape of the frontier was clearly apparent by the middle of the century. And thus it stood, with changes only in detail, for a generation more. In whatever sense the word "frontier" is used, the fact is the same. If it be taken as the dividing line, as the area enclosed, or as the domain of the trapper and the rancher, the frontier of 1880 was in most of its aspects the frontier of 1850.

The pressure on the frontier line had increased steadily during these thirty years. Population moved easily and rapidly after the Civil War. The agricultural states abutting on the line had grown in size and wealth, with a recognition of the barrier that became clearer as more citizens settled along it. East and south, it was close to the rainfall line which divides easy farming country from the semi-arid plains; west, it was a mountain range. In either case the country enclosed was too refractory to yield to the piecemeal process which had conquered the wilderness along other frontiers, while its check to expansion and hindrance to communication became of increasing consequence as population grew. Yet the barrier held. By 1850 the agricultural frontier was pressing against it. By 1860 the railway frontier had reached it. The former could not cross it because of the slight temptation to agriculture offered by the lands beyond; the latter was restrained by the prohibitive cost of building railways through an entirely unsettled district. Private initiative had done all it could in reclaiming the continent; the one remaining task called for direct national aid.

The influences operating upon this frontier of the Far West, though not making it less of a barrier, made it better known than any of the earlier frontiers. In the first place, the trails crossed it, with the result that its geography became well known throughout the country. No other frontier had been the site of a thoroughfare for many years before its actual settlement. Again, the mining discoveries of the later fifties and sixties increased general knowledge of the West, and scattered groups of inhabitants here and there, without populating it in any sense. Finally the Indian friction produced the series of Indian wars which again called the wild West to the centre of the stage for many years.

All of these forces served to advertise the existence of this frontier and its barrier character. They had coÖperated to enlarge the railway movement, as it respected the Pacific roads, until the Union Pacific was authorized to meet the new demand; and while the Union Pacific was under construction, other roads to meet the same demands were chartered and promoted. These roads bridged and then dispelled the final barrier.

Congress provided the legal equipment for the annihilation of the entire frontier between 1862 and 1871. The charter acts of the Northern Pacific, the Atlantic and Pacific, the Texas Pacific, and the Southern Pacific at once opened the way for some five new continental lines and closed the period of direct federal aid to railway construction. The Northern Pacific received its charter on the same day that the Union Pacific was given its double subsidy in 1864. It was authorized to join the waters of Lake Superior and Puget Sound, and was to receive a land grant of twenty sections per mile in the states and forty in the territories through which it should run. In the summer of 1866 a third continental route was provided for in the South along the line of the thirty-fifth parallel survey. This, the Atlantic and Pacific, was to build from Springfield, Missouri, by way of Albuquerque, New Mexico, to the Pacific, and to connect, near the eastern line of California, with the Southern Pacific, of California. It likewise was promised twenty sections of land in the states and forty in the territories. The Texas Pacific was chartered March 3, 1871, as the last of the land grant railways. It received the usual grant, which was applicable only west of Texas; within that state, between Texarkana and El Paso, it could receive no federal aid since in Texas there were no public lands. Its charter called for construction to San Diego, but the Southern Pacific, building across Arizona and New Mexico, headed it off at El Paso, and it got no farther.

To these deliberate acts in aid of the Pacific railways, Congress added others in the form of local or state grants in the same years, so that by 1871 all that the companies could ask for the future was lenient interpretation of their contracts. For the first time the federal government had taken an active initiative in providing for the destruction of a frontier. Its resolution, in 1871, to treat no longer with the Indian tribes as independent nations is evidence of a realization of the approaching frontier change.

The new Pacific railways began to build just as the Union Pacific was completed and opened to traffic. In the cases of all, the development was slow, since the investing public had little confidence in the existence of a business large enough to maintain four systems, or in the fertility of the semi-arid desert. The first period of construction of all these roads terminated in 1873, when panic brought transportation projects to an end, and forbade revival for a period of five years.

Jay Cooke, whose Philadelphia house had done much to establish public credit during the war and had created a market of small buyers for investment securities on the strength of United States bonds, popularized the Northern Pacific in 1869 and 1870. Within two years he is said to have raised thirty millions for the construction of the road, making its building a financial possibility. And although he may have distorted the isotherm several degrees in order to picture his farm lands as semi-tropical in their luxuriance, as General Hazen charged, he established Duluth and Tacoma, gave St. Paul her opportunity, and had run the main line of track through Fargo, on the Red, to Bismarck, on the Missouri, more than three hundred and fifty miles from Lake Superior, before his failure in 1873 brought expansion to an end.

For the Northwest, the construction of the Northern Pacific was of fundamental importance. The railway frontier of 1869 left Minnesota, Dakota, and much of Wisconsin beyond its reach. The potential grain fields of the Red River region were virgin forest, and on the main line of the new road, for two thousand miles, hardly a trace of settled habitation existed. The panic of 1873 caught the Union Pacific at Bismarck, with nearly three hundred miles of unprofitable track extending in advance of the railroad frontier. The Atlantic and Pacific and Texas Pacific were less seriously overbuilt, but not less effectively checked. The former, starting from Springfield, had constructed across southwestern Missouri to Vinita, in Indian Territory, where it arrived in the fall of 1871. It had meanwhile acquired some of the old Missouri state-aided roads, so as to get track into St. Louis. The panic forced it to default, Vinita remained its terminus for several years, and when it emerged from the receiver's hands, it bore the new name of St. Louis and San Francisco.

The Texas Pacific represented a consolidation of local lines which expected, through federal incorporation, to reach the dignity of a continental railroad. It began its construction towards El Paso from Shreveport, Louisiana, and Texarkana, on the state line, and reached the vicinity of Dallas and Fort Worth before the panic. It planned to get into St. Louis over the St. Louis, Iron Mountain, and Southern, and into New Orleans over the New Orleans Pacific. The borderland of Texas, Arkansas, and Missouri became through these lines a centre of railway development, while in the near-by grazing country the meat-packing industries shortly found their sources of supply.

The panic which the failure of Jay Cooke precipitated in 1873 could scarcely have been deferred for many years. The waste of the Civil War period, and the enthusiasm for economic development which followed it, invited the retribution that usually follows continued and widespread inflation. Already the completion of a national railway system was foreshadowed. Heretofore the western demand had been for railways at any cost, but the Granger activities following the panic gave warning of an approaching period when this should be changed into a demand for regulation of railroads. But as yet the frontier remained substantially intact, and until its railway system should be completed the Granger demand could not be translated into an effective movement for federal control. It was not until 1879 that the United States recovered from the depression following the crisis. In that year resumption marked the readjustment of national currency, reconstruction was over, and the railways entered upon the last five years of the culminating period in the history of the frontier. When the five years were over, five new continental routes were available for transportation.

The Texas and Pacific had hardly started its progress across Texas when checked by the panic in the vicinity of Fort Worth. When it revived, it pushed its track towards Sierra Blanca and El Paso, aided by a land grant from the state. Beyond Texas it never built. Corporations of California, Arizona, and New Mexico, all bearing the name of Southern Pacific, constructed the line across the Colorado River and along the Gila, through lands acquired by the Gadsden Purchase of 1853. Trains were running over its tracks to St. Louis by January, 1882, and to New Orleans by the following October. In the course of this Southern Pacific construction, connection had been made with the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa FÉ at Deming, New Mexico, in March, 1881, but through lack of harmony between the roads their junction was of little consequence.

The Pacific Railroads, 1884

This map shows only the main lines of the continental railroads in 1884, and omits the branch lines and local roads which existed everywhere and were specially thick in the Mississippi and lower Missouri valleys.

The owners of the Southern Pacific opened an additional line through southern Texas in the beginning of 1883. Around the Galveston, Harrisburg, and San Antonio, of Texas, they had grouped other lines and begun double construction from San Antonio west, and from El Paso, or more accurately Sierra Blanca, east. Between El Paso and Sierra Blanca, a distance of about ninety miles, this new line and the Texas and Pacific used the same track. In later years the line through San Antonio and Houston became the main line of the Southern Pacific.

A third connection of the Southern Pacific across Texas was operated before the end of 1883 over its Mojave extension in California and the Atlantic and Pacific from the Needles to Albuquerque. The old Atlantic and Pacific had built to Vinita, gone into receivership, and come out as St. Louis and San Francisco. But its land grant had remained unused, while the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa FÉ had reached Albuquerque and had exhausted its own land grant, received through the state of Kansas and ceasing at the Colorado line. Entering Colorado, the latter had passed by Las Animas and thrown a branch along the old Santa FÉ trail to Santa FÉ and Albuquerque. Here it came to an agreement with the St. Louis and San Francisco, by which the two roads were to build jointly under the Atlantic and Pacific franchise, from Albuquerque into California. They built rapidly; but the Southern Pacific, not relishing a rival in its state, had made use of its charter privilege to meet the new road on the eastern boundary of California. Hence its Mojave branch was waiting at the Needles when the Atlantic and Pacific arrived there; and the latter built no farther. Upon the completion of bridges over the Colorado and Rio Grande this third eastern connection of the Southern Pacific was completed so that Pullman cars were running through into St. Louis on October 21, 1883.

The names of Billings and Villard are most closely connected with the renascence of the Northern Pacific. The panic had stopped this line at the Missouri River, although it had built a few miles in Washington territory, around its new terminal city of Tacoma. The illumination of crisis times had served to discredit the route as effectively as Jay Cooke had served to boom it with advertisements in his palmy days. The existence of various land grant railways in Washington and Oregon made the revival difficult to finance since its various rivals could offer competition by both water and rail along the Columbia River, below Walla Walla. Under the presidency of Frederick Billings construction revived about 1879, from Mandan, opposite Bismarck on the Missouri, and from Wallula, at the junction of the Columbia and Snake. From these points lines were pushed over the Pend d'Oreille and Missouri divisions towards the continental divide. Below Wallula, the Columbia Valley traffic was shared by agreement with the Oregon Railway and Navigation Company, which, under the presidency of Henry Villard, owned the steamship and railway lines of Oregon. As the time for opening the through lines approached, the question of Columbia River competition increased in serious aspect. Villard solved the problem through the agency of his famous blind pool, which still stands remarkable in railway finance. With the proceeds of the pool he organized the Oregon and Transcontinental as a holding company, and purchased a controlling interest in the rival roads. With harmony of plan thus insured, he assumed the presidency of the Northern Pacific in 1881, in time to complete and celebrate the opening of its main line in 1883. His celebration was elaborate, yet the Nation remarked that the "mere achievement of laying a continuous rail across the continent has long since been taken out of the realm of marvels, and the country can never feel again the thrill which the joining of the Central and Union Pacific lines gave it."

The land grant railways completed these four eastern connections across the frontier in the period of culmination. Private capital added a fifth in the new route through Denver and Ogden, controlled by the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy and the Denver and Rio Grande. The Burlington, built along the old Republican River trail to Denver, had competed with the Union Pacific for the traffic of that point since June, 1882. West of Denver the narrow gauge of the Denver and Rio Grande had been advancing since 1870.

General William J. Palmer and a group of Philadelphia capitalists had, in 1870, secured a Colorado charter for their Denver and Rio Grande. Started in 1871, it had reached the new settlement at Colorado Springs that autumn, and had continued south in later years. Like other roads it had progressed slowly in the panic years. In 1876 it had been met at Pueblo by the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa FÉ. From Pueblo it contested successfully with this rival for the grand caÑon of the Arkansas, and built up that valley through the Gunnison country and across the old Ute reserve, to Grand Junction. From the Utah line it had been continued to Ogden by an allied corporation. A through service to Ogden, inaugurated in the summer of 1883, brought competition to the Union Pacific throughout its whole extent.

The continental frontier, whose isolation the Union Pacific had threatened in 1869, was easily accessible by 1884. Along six different lines between New Orleans and St. Paul it had been made possible to cross the sometime American desert to the Pacific states. No longer could any portion of the republic be considered as beyond the reach of civilization. Instead of a waste that forbade national unity in its presence, a thousand plains stations beckoned for colonists, and through lines of railway iron bound the nation into an economic and political unit. "As the railroads overtook the successive lines of isolated frontier posts, and settlements spread out over country no longer requiring military protection," wrote General P.H. Sheridan in 1882, "the army vacated its temporary shelters and marched on into remote regions beyond, there to repeat and continue its pioneer work. In rear of the advancing line of troops the primitive 'dug-outs' and cabins of the frontiersmen, were steadily replaced by the tasteful houses, thrifty farms, neat villages, and busy towns of a people who knew how best to employ the vast resources of the great West. The civilization from the Atlantic is now reaching out toward that rapidly approaching it from the direction of the Pacific, the long intervening strip of territory, extending from the British possessions to Old Mexico, yearly growing narrower; finally the dividing lines will entirely disappear and the mingling settlements absorb the remnants of the once powerful Indian nations who, fifteen years ago, vainly attempted to forbid the destined progress of the age." The deluge of population realized by Sheridan, and let in by the railways, had, by 1890, blotted the uninhabited frontier off the map. Local spots yet remained unpeopled, but the census of 1890 revealed no clear division between the unsettled West and the rest of the United States.

New states in plains and mountains marked the abolition of the last frontier as they had the earlier. In less than ten years the gap between Minnesota and Oregon was filled in: North Dakota and South Dakota, Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, and Washington. In 1890, for the first time, a solid band of states connected the Atlantic and Pacific. Farther south, the Indian Country succumbed to the new pressure. The Dawes bill released a fertile acreage to be distributed to the land hungry who had banked up around the borders of Kansas, Arkansas, and Texas. Oklahoma, as a territory, appeared in 1890, while in eighteen more years, swallowing up the whole Indian Country, it had taken its place as a member of the Union. Between the northern tier of states and Oklahoma, the middle West had grown as well. Kansas, Nebraska, and Colorado, the last creating eleven new counties in its eastern third in 1889, had seen their population densify under the stimulus of easy transportation. Much of the settlement had been premature, inviting failure, as populism later showed, but it left no area in the United States unreclaimed, inaccessible, and large enough to be regarded as a national frontier. The last frontier, the same that Long had described as the American Desert in 1820, had been won.


                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

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