mpossible.

The railroads soon rendered this discussion needless. Their agents went
down to Texas and convinced the shippers that it would be cheaper and
safer to put their cows on cattle trains and ship them directly to the
ranges where they were to be delivered. And in time the rails running
north and south across the Staked Plains into the heart of the lower
range began to carry most of the cattle. So ended the old cattle trails.

What date shall we fix for the setting of the sun of that last frontier?
Perhaps the year 1885 is as accurate as any--the time when the cattle
trails practically ceased to bring north their vast tribute. But,
in fact, there is no exact date for the passing of the frontier. Its
decline set in on what day the first lank "nester" from the States
outspanned his sun-burned team as he pulled up beside some sweet water
on the rolling lands, somewhere in the West, and looked about him, and
looked again at the land map held in his hand.

"I reckon this is our land, Mother," said he.

When he said that, he pronounced the doom of the old frontier.

Chapter IX. The Homesteader

His name was usually Nester or Little Fellow. It was the old story of
the tortoise and the hare. The Little Fellow was from the first destined
to win. His steady advance, now on this flank, now on that, just back
of the vanguard pushing westward, had marked the end of all our earlier
frontiers. The same story now was being written on the frontier of the
Plains.

But in the passing of this last frontier the type of the land-seeking
man, the type of the American, began to alter distinctly. The million
dead of our cruel Civil War left a great gap in the American population
which otherwise would have occupied the West and Northwest after the
clearing away of the Indians. For three decades we had been receiving
a strong and valuable immigration from the north of Europe. It was in
great part this continuous immigration which occupied the farming lands
of upper Iowa, Minnesota, and the Dakotas. Thus the population of the
Northwest became largely foreign. Each German or Scandinavian who found
himself prospering in this rich new country was himself an immigration
agency. He sent back word to his friends and relatives in the Old World
and these came to swell the steadily thickening population of the New.

We have seen that the enterprising cattlemen had not been slow to reach
out for such resources as they might. Perhaps at on