e 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. His only pretext was "I saw it first." For the Nester who wanted
a way through these fences out into the open public lands, he cherished
a bitter resentment. And yet the Nester must in time win through, must
eventually find the little piece of land which he was seeking.

The government at Washington was finally obliged to take action. In
the summer of 1885, acting under authorization of Congress, President
Cleveland ordered the removal of all illegal enclosures and forbade any
person or association to prevent the peaceful occupation of the public
land by homesteaders. The President had already cancelled the leases by
which a great cattle company had occupied grazing lands in the Indian
Territory. Yet, with even-handed justice he kept the land boomers also
out of these coveted lands, until the Dawes Act of 1887 allotted the
tribal lands to the Indians in severalty and threw open the remainder
to the impatient homeseekers. Waiting thousands were ready at the Kansas
line, eager for the starting gun which was to let loose a mad stampede
of crazed human beings.

It always was contended by the cowman that these settlers coming in on
the semi-arid range could not make a living there, that all they could
do was legally to starve to death some good woman. True, many of them
could not last out in the bitter combined fight with nature and the
grasping conditions of commerce and transportation of that time. The
western Canadian farmer of today is a cherished, almost a petted being.
But no one ever showed any mercy to the American farmer who moved out
West.

As always has been the case, a certain number of wagons might be seen
passing back East, as well as the somewhat larger number steadily moving
westward. There were lean years and dry years, hot years, yellow years
here and there upon the range. The phrase written on one disheartened
farmer's wagon top, "Going back to my wife's folks," became historic.

The railways were finding profit in carrying human beings out to the
cow-range just as once they had in transporting cattle. Indeed, it did
not take the wiser railroad men long to see that they could afford to
set down a