own enterprises. The recovery was slow, though usually the result
of that recovery was a far healthier and more stable condition of
society.

This whole question of irrigation and dry farming, this or that phase
of the last scrambling, feverish settling on the last lands, was sorely
wasteful of human enterprise and human happiness. It was much like the
spawning rush of the salmon from the sea. Many perish. A few survive.
Certainly there never was more cruel injustice done than that to the
sober-minded Eastern farmers, some of them young men in search of
cheaper homes, who sold out all they had in the East and went out to
the dry country to farm under the ditch, or to take up that still more
hazardous occupation--successful sometimes, though always hard and
always risky--dry farming on the benches which cannot be reached with
irrigating waters.

Strangely changed was all the face of the cattle range by these
successive and startling innovations. The smoke of many little homes
rose now, scattered over all that tremendous country from the Rockies
to the edge of the short grass country, from Texas to the Canadian line.
The cattle were not banished from the range, for each little farmer
would probably have a few cows of his own; and in some fashion the great
cowmen were managing to get in fee tracts of land sufficient for their
purposes. There were land leases of all sorts which enabled the thrifty
Westerner who knew the inside and out of local politics to pick up
permanently considerable tracts of land. Some of these ranches held
together as late as 1916; indeed, there are some such oldtime holdings
still existent in the West, although far more rare than formerly was the
case.

Under all these conditions the price of land went up steadily. Land
was taken eagerly which would have been refused with contempt a decade
earlier. The parings and scraps and crumbs of the Old West now were
fought for avidly.

The need of capital became more and more important in many of the great
land operations. Even the government reclamation enterprises could not
open lands to the settler on anything like the old homestead basis. The
water right cost money--sometimes twenty-five or thirty dollars an acre;
in some of the private reclamation enterprises, fifty dollars an acre,
or even more. Very frequently when the Eastern farmer came out to settle
on such a tract and to meet the hard, new, and expensive conditions of
life in the semi-arid reg