er the stage driver rushed into the shop, shouting,
"Say, Printer! She's open! Blowed wide open!"

[Illustration]

IV

THE BIGGEST LOTTERY IN HISTORY

It is an extraordinary fact that one of the most gigantic, and certainly
the most rapid, land settlements in the history of the United States has
been little known and little recognized, either for its vast scope or
its far-reaching importance.

The passing of the frontier, with its profound effects upon American
life, is not a part of our early history. It ended with the World War.
The trek of early settlers in covered wagons, the swift and colorful
growth of the cattle kingdom, the land rush at Cimarron are a part of
our familiar history. But the greatest of all these expansion movements
was at its height within the twentieth century with 100,000,000 acres of
Public Land opened by the government for settlement, waste land which
in a few seasons produced crops, supported villages, towns, and finally
cities, in their lightning growth.

In a sense the United States Government conducted a vast lottery, with
land as stakes, and hundreds of thousands of men and women gambling
their time and strength and hope on the future of the West.

The land so lavishly disposed of was the white man's last raid on the
Indian. The period of bloody warfare was long past. The last struggle
against confiscation of Indian land was over, and the Indians were
segregated, through treaties, on tracts designated by the government,
"like the cattle on the range being driven back to winter pasture or the
buffalo driven off the plains," to which they mournfully compared their
fate. And if there is anything an Indian hates it is boundaries.

The migration and settlement of vast numbers of people has changed world
history time and time again. And the Americans have been a migrating
people. From the early years of their first settlement of the colonies
there had been a steady movement toward the West. Without the West with
its great Public Lands the United States as it has become could hardly
have existed. While there was a frontier to develop, land for the small
owner, there would always be independence.

European theories might influence the East from time to time, but there
was always a means of escape for the man or woman oppressed by labor
conditions, by tendencies to establish class distinctions. Public Land!
On the land men must face primitive conditions as best they could, but
t