The wandering bands of sheep belong nowhere. They ruin a country.
It is a pathetic spectacle to see parts of the Old West in which
sheep steadily have been ranged. They utterly destroy all the
game; they even drive the fish out of the streams and cut the
grasses and weeds down to the surface of the earth. The denuded
soil crumbles under their countless hoofs, becomes dust, and
blows away. They leave a waste, a desert, an abomination.
There were yet other phases of change which followed hard upon
the heels of our soldiers after they had completed their task of
subjugating the tribes of the buffalo Indians. After the
homesteads had been proved up in some of the Northwestern States,
such as Montana and the Dakotas, large bodies of land were
acquired by certain capitalistic farmers. All this new land had
been proved to be exceedingly prolific of wheat, the great
new-land crop. The farmers of the Northwest had not yet learned
that no country long can thrive which depends upon a single crop.
But the once familiar figures of the bonanza farms of the
Northwest--the pictures of their long lines of reapers or
selfbinders, twenty, thirty, forty, or fifty machines, one after
the other, advancing through the golden grain--the pictures of
their innumerable stacks of wheat--the figures of the vast
mileage of their fencing--the yet more stupendous figures of the
outlay required to operate these farms, and the splendid totals
of the receipts from such operations--these at one time were
familiar and proudly presented features of boom advertising in
the upper portions of our black land belt, which day just at the
eastern edge of the old Plains.
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