r,
summoned from all sections of the country for the harvests. The mineral
resources created hundreds of huge fortunes which made the accumulations
of eastern mercantile families look trivial by comparison. Other
millionaires won their fortunes in the railway business and still more
from the cattle and sheep ranges. In many sections the "cattle king," as
he was called, was as dominant as the planter had been in the old South.
Everywhere in the grazing country he was a conspicuous and important
person. He "sometimes invested money in banks, in railroad stocks, or in
city property.... He had his rating in the commercial reviews and could
hobnob with bankers, railroad presidents, and metropolitan merchants....
He attended party caucuses and conventions, ran for the state
legislature, and sometimes defeated a lawyer or metropolitan 'business
man' in the race for a seat in Congress. In proportion to their numbers,
the ranchers ... have constituted a highly impressive class."

Although many of the early capitalists of the great West, especially
from Nevada, spent their money principally in the East, others took
leadership in promoting the sections in which they had made their
fortunes. A railroad pioneer, General Palmer, built his home at Colorado
Springs, founded the town, and encouraged local improvements. Denver
owed its first impressive buildings to the civic patriotism of Horace
Tabor, a wealthy mine owner. Leland Stanford paid his tribute to
California in the endowment of a large university. Colonel W.F. Cody,
better known as "Buffalo Bill," started his career by building a "boom
town" which collapsed, and made a large sum of money supplying buffalo
meat to construction hands (hence his popular name). By his famous Wild
West Show, he increased it to a fortune which he devoted mainly to the
promotion of a western reclamation scheme.

While the Far West was developing this vigorous, aggressive leadership
in business, a considerable industrial population was springing up. Even
the cattle ranges and hundreds of farms were conducted like factories in
that they were managed through overseers who hired plowmen, harvesters,
and cattlemen at regular wages. At the same time there appeared other
peculiar features which made a lasting impression on western economic
life. Mining, lumbering, and fruit growing, for instance, employed
thousands of workers during the rush months and turned them out at other
times. The inevitable result