The million dead of our cruel Civil War left a great
gap in the American population which otherwise would have
occupied the West and Northwest after the clearing away of the
Indians. For three decades we had been receiving a strong and
valuable immigration from the north of Europe. It was in great
part this continuous immigration which occupied the farming lands
of upper Iowa, Minnesota, and the Dakotas. Thus the population of
the Northwest became largely foreign. Each German or Scandinavian
who found himself prospering in this rich new country was himself
an immigration agency. He sent back word to his friends and
relatives in the Old World and these came to swell the steadily
thickening population of the New.
We have seen that the enterprising cattlemen had not been slow to
reach out for such resources as they might. Perhaps at one time
between 1885 and 1890 there were over ten million acres of land
illegally fenced in on the upper range by large cattle companies.
This had been done without any color of law whatever; a man
simply threw out his fences as far as he liked, and took in range
enough to pasture all the cattle that he owned.
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