Fort Worth before the panic of 1873. It now built across Texas
toward El Paso. Subsidiary corporations owned by the Southern Pacific
men built the line between El Paso and Fort Yuma, and enabled a through
service to start to St. Louis in January, and to New Orleans in October,
1882. Yet another Southern Pacific line was opened through San Antonio
and Houston, tapping the commerce of the Gulf shore, and running trains
to New Orleans in February, 1883.

The opening of great lines in the United States in the early eighties
was part of a similar movement throughout the world. In Canada, Sir
Donald Smith, later raised to the peerage as Lord Strathcona, was
beginning the Canadian Pacific from Port Arthur to Vancouver, while on
the Continent of Europe the first train of the "Orient Express" left
Paris for Constantinople in June, 1883. In November, 1883, the American
railroads, realizing that they were a national system, agreed upon a
scheme of standard time by which to run their trains. Heretofore every
road had followed what local time it chose, to the confusion of the
traveling public.

Most of the continental railways had extensive land grants, of from
twenty to forty sections per mile of track, but whether they had lands
to sell or not they were vitally interested in the settlement of the
regions through which they ran. Each encouraged immigration and
colonization. Their literature, scattered over Europe, was one factor in
the heavy drift of population that started after 1878. Six new Western
States were created in the ten years after their completion.

The youngest American Territory in the eighties was Wyoming, created in
1868, and the youngest State was Colorado, admitted in 1876. After
Colorado, the political division of the West embraced eight organized
Territories: Dakota, Montana, Idaho, and Washington along the Canadian
line, Wyoming and Utah in the middle, Arizona and New Mexico on the
Mexican border. Besides these Territories there was the unorganized
remnant of the Indian country known as Indian Territory, and attracting
the covetous glances of frontiersmen in all the near-by Western States.

Agriculture was the main reliance of the wave of pioneers that poured
over the plains along the lines of the railroads. In the valley of the
Red River of the North, wheat-farming was their staple industry. As the
Old South had devoted itself to the staple crop of cotton, so this new
region took up the single crop of whe