This whole question of irrigation and dry farming, this or that
phase of the last scrambling, feverish settling on the last
lands, was sorely wasteful of human enterprise and human
happiness. It was much like the spawning rush of the salmon from
the sea. Many perish. A few survive. Certainly there never was
more cruel injustice done than that to the sober-minded Eastern
farmers, some of them young men in search of cheaper homes, who
sold out all they had in the East and went out to the dry country
to farm under the ditch, or to take up that still more hazardous
occupation--successful sometimes, though always hard and always
risky--dry farming on the benches which cannot be reached with
irrigating waters.
Strangely changed was all the face of the cattle range by these
successive and startling innovations. The smoke of many little
homes rose now, scattered over all that tremendous country from
the Rockies to the edge of the short grass country, from Texas to
the Canadian line. The cattle were not banished from the range,
for each little farmer would probably have a few cows of his own;
and in some fashion the great cowmen were managing to get in fee
tracts of land sufficient for their purposes.
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