and in the furnishing of these arose the
settlement of the Great Plains and the development of still another kind
of frontier life. Railroads, fostered by land grants, sent an
increasing tide of immigrants into the Far West. The United States Army
fought a series of Indian wars in Minnesota, Dakota, and the Indian
Territory.

By 1880 the settled area had been pushed into northern Michigan,
Wisconsin, and Minnesota, along Dakota rivers, and in the Black Hills
region, and was ascending the rivers of Kansas and Nebraska. The
development of mines in Colorado had drawn isolated frontier settlements
into that region, and Montana and Idaho were receiving settlers. The
frontier was found in these mining camps and the ranches of the Great
Plains. The superintendent of the census for 1890 reports, as previously
stated, that the settlements of the West lie so scattered over the
region that there can no longer be said to be a frontier line.

In these successive frontiers we find natural boundary lines which have
served to mark and to affect the characteristics of the frontiers,
namely: the "fall line;" the Alleghany Mountains; the Mississippi; the
Missouri where its direction approximates north and south; the line of
the arid lands, approximately the ninety-ninth meridian; and the Rocky
Mountains. The fall line marked the frontier of the seventeenth century;
the Alleghanies that of the eighteenth; the Mississippi that of the
first quarter of the nineteenth; the Missouri that of the middle of this
century (omitting the California movement); and the belt of the Rocky
Mountains and the arid tract, the present frontier. Each was won by a
series of Indian wars.

At the Atlantic frontier one can study the germs of processes repeated
at each successive frontier. We have the complex European life sharply
precipitated by the wilderness into the simplicity of primitive
conditions. The first frontier had to meet its Indian question, its
question of the disposition of the public domain, of the means of
intercourse with older settlements, of the extension of political
organization, of religious and educational activity. And the settlement
of these and similar questions for one frontier served as a guide for
the next. The American student needs not to go to the "prim little
townships of Sleswick" for illustrations of the law of continuity and
development. For example, he may study the origin of our land policies
in the colonial land policy; h