ation of the mines roared
on northward, even across our northern line. Soon it was to roll back.
Next it worked east and southeast and northeast over the great dry
plains of Washington and Oregon, so that, as readily may be seen, the
cow-range proper was not settled as most of the West was, by a directly
westbound thrust of an eastern population; but, on the contrary, it was
approached from several different angles--from the north, from the east,
from the west and northwest, and finally from the south.

The early, turbulent population of miners and adventurers was crude,
lawless, and aggressive. It cared nothing whatever for the Indian
tribes. War, instant and merciless, where it meant murder for the most
part, was set on foot as soon as white touched red in that far western
region.

All these new white men who had crowded into the unknown country of the
Plains, the Rockies, the Sierras, and the Cascades, had to be fed. They
could not employ and remain content with the means by which the red
man there had always fed himself. Hence a new industry sprang up in the
United States, which of itself made certain history in that land. The
business of freighting supplies to the West, whether by bull-train or
by pack-train, was an industry sui generic, very highly specialized,
and pursued by men of great business ability as well as by men of great
hardihood and daring.

Each of these freight trains which went West carried hanging on its
flank more and more of the white men. As the trains returned, more and
more was learned in the States of the new country which lay between the
Missouri and the Rockies, which ran no man knew how far north, and no
man could guess how far south. Now appears in history Fort Benton, on
the Missouri, the great northern supply post--just as at an earlier date
there had appeared Fort Hall, one of the old fur-trading posts beyond
the Rockies, Bent's Fort on the Arkansas, and many other outposts of the
new Saxon civilization in the West.

Later came the pony express and the stage coach which made history and
romance for a generation. Feverishly, boisterously, a strong, rugged,
womanless population crowded westward and formed the wavering, now
advancing, now receding line of the great frontier of American story.

But for long there was no sign of permanent settlement on the Plains,
and no one thought of this region as the frontier. The men there
who were prospecting and exploiting were classified as no