e railroads were
built to serve and stimulate a traffic that already existed. The
pioneers had done a generation's work before the iron road overtook
them. In the past two decades all has been changed. The railroads have
been the pioneers and colonizers. They have invaded the solitary
wilderness, and the population has followed. Much of the land has
belonged to the roads, through subsidy grants, but the greater part of
the mileage has been laid without the encouragement of land subsidies or
other bonuses, by railway corporations that were willing to look to the
future for their reward.

It would be almost impossible to over-estimate the significance of this
method of colonization. Within a few years it has transformed the
buffalo ranges into the world's most extensive fields of wheat and corn.
A region comprising northern and western Minnesota and the two Dakotas,
which contributed practically nothing to the country's wheat supply
twelve or fifteen years ago, has, by this system of railroad
colonization, reached an annual production of 100,000,000 bushels of
wheat alone--about one-fourth of the crop of the entire country. In like
manner, parts of western Iowa, Nebraska, and Kansas, that produced no
corn before 1875 or 1880, are now the centre of corn-raising, and yield
many hundreds of millions of bushels annually. These regions enter as
totally new factors into the world's supply of foods and raw materials.
A great area of this new territory might be defined that was inhabited
in 1870 by less than a million people, in 1880 by more than three
millions, and in 1899 by from eight to ten millions.

[Illustration: A DISPUTE OVER A BRAND.]

Let us imagine a man from the East who has visited the Northwestern
States and Territories at some time between the years 1870 and 1875, and
who retains a strong impression of what he saw, but who has not been
west of Chicago since that time, until, in the World's Fair year, he
determines upon a new exploration of Iowa, Nebraska, the Datokas,
Minnesota, and Wisconsin. However well informed he had tried to keep
himself through written descriptions and statistical records of Western
progress, he would see what nothing but the evidence of his own eyes
could have made him believe to be possible. Iowa in 1870 was already
producing a large crop of cereals, and was inhabited by a thriving,
though very new, farming population. But the aspect of the country was
bare and uninviting, except in th