ld Brule tore up."

She laughed. "Better not let my sister hear you say that. Look at our
crop coming up."

"I didn't think you'uns would stick it out this winter," he said.

"Most of the settlers stayed," she assured him.

"Looks like the end of the free range," he said. "Cattle business is
going to be different from now on." He smiled wanly and asked for his
mail, which consisted only of a pile of back-number copies of a
newspaper. He took them and rode "off to the southeast," the vague
description he had given us as to where he belonged.

But he had brought news. The stream of immigration was flowing in to the
south and west of us, into country which was talked of as more arid and
more barren than this tall grass country. The barb-wire told the story.

The United States had entered an era of western development when the
homesteaders not only settled the land, but moved together, acted
together, to subdue the land. It was an untried, hazardous venture on
which they staked everything they had, but that is the way empires are
built. And this vast frontier was conquered in the first two decades of
the twentieth century; a victory whose significance has been almost
totally ignored by historical studies of the country, which view the
last frontier as having vanished a generation or more before.

Iron trails pushed through new regions; trails crossing the network of
new civilization broadened into highways, and wagon tracks cut their way
where no trails ever led before. New towns were being built. Industry
and commerce were coming in on the tidal wave. A new America!

No cut-and-dried laws, no enforced projects or programs of a federal
administration could possibly achieve the great solid expansion which
this voluntary land movement by the masses brought about naturally.

It takes almost every commodity to develop a vast dominion that has lain
empty since Genesis. It took steel for railroads, fences, and
plowshares. It took lumber and labor--labor no end, in towns and out on
the land. It took farm machinery, horses, harness, stoves, oil, food and
clothing to build this new world.

I was delighted when one day there came a letter from Halbert Donovan,
the New York broker. It contained great news for _The Wand_. And there
was a little personal touch that was gratifying.

"We are beginning to feel the effect of a business expansion back here,"
he wrote, "which the western land development seems to be bringing
about