ks. Here's your land." He was locating them en
masse at $15 to $25 a head. No hunting up corner stakes. It all looked
alike to these bewildered people, anyhow, drunk as they were with the
intoxication that land lotteries produce.

He turned his weary team and human cargo around and started back to
town. A wholesale locator had no time for sleep. He must collect another
hayrackful of seekers early next morning.

Some of these landseekers tried to analyze the reasons for this great
movement, the factors which had swept them along with this tidal wave of
human migration. "We're concentrated too much in cities," they said,
"crowded and stifled, and our roots are choked. We have to go back to
the land where a man can grow himself the things he needs to live on,
and where his children can grow up with the country--and have a place in
it."

Our attitude toward the land is peculiar to America. The European
conception of a plot of ground on which a family is rooted for
generations has little meaning for people who move by the thousands onto
untamed acres, transform it into plowed fields and settlements and
towns, and move on endlessly to plow new fields.

This constantly renewed search for fresh pastures has kept the country
vital, just as the existence of its Western Public Lands has kept it
democratic. For its endurance the American spirit owes much to its
frontier.

Beside me stood a thin-faced, hollow-chested young man, a newspaper
reporter from Chicago. He ran lean fingers through brown, straggly hair,
looking from the Strip, reaching to the horizon, to the people waiting
to shape it according to their needs. "Great copy," he said lamely, but
he made no entry in his notebook.

Outside another gate, five miles or so beyond the main entrance from
McClure, was a little trading post, Cedar Fork, on the Smith ranch. The
long buildings were said to have been a sort of fort in the Indian war
days. The seekers overflowed even here, and when the swift darkness
settled on the plains, stayed for the night, the women filling the store
and house while the men slept in the barn loft or haystacks, or even in
their vehicles.

They wrapped themselves in heavy coats or blankets against the biting
chill of an October night--after a day so hot the tenderfeet sweltered
and blistered under the midday sun.

The next morning there was frost, with the air sharp and fresh. The
Smiths tried to feed the shivering, hungry seekers. The seekers