ed their possessions to secure the capital so
freely offered for their attack on the arid lands. By 1887 the tide of
the pioneer farmers had flowed across the semi-arid plains to the
western boundary of the State. But it was a hopeless effort to conquer a
new province by the forces that had won the prairies. The wave of
settlement dashed itself in vain against the conditions of the Great
Plains. The native American farmer had received his first defeat; farm
products at the same period had depreciated, and he turned to the
national government for reinforcements.

The Populistic movement of the western half of the Middle West is a
complex of many forces. In some respects it is the latest manifestation
of the same forces that brought on the crisis of 1837 in the earlier
region of pioneer exploitation. That era of over-confidence, reckless
internal improvements, and land purchases by borrowed capital, brought a
reaction when it became apparent that the future had been
over-discounted. But, in that time, there were the farther free lands to
which the ruined pioneer could turn. The demand for an expansion of the
currency has marked each area of Western advance. The greenback movement
of Ohio and the eastern part of the Middle West grew into the fiat
money, free silver, and land bank propositions of the Populists across
the Mississippi. Efforts for cheaper transportation also appear in each
stage of Western advance. When the pioneer left the rivers and had to
haul his crops by wagon to a market, the transportation factor
determined both his profits and the extension of settlement. Demands for
national aid to roads and canals had marked the pioneer advance of the
first third of the century. The "Granger" attacks upon the railway
rates, and in favor of governmental regulation, marked a second advance
of Western settlement. The Farmers' Alliance and the Populist demand for
government ownership of the railroad is a phase of the same effort of
the pioneer farmer, on his latest frontier. The proposals have taken
increasing proportions in each region of Western Advance. Taken as a
whole, Populism is a manifestation of the old pioneer ideals of the
native American, with the added element of increasing readiness to
utilize the national government to effect its ends. This is not
unnatural in a section whose lands were originally purchased by the
government and given away to its settlers by the same authority, whose
railroads were built