By 1890 the railway mileage of the United States had increased to 163,597, extending the railway net over the whole trans-Missouri region, and reinforced by lines in Canada and Mexico.
THE WESTERN RAILROADS AND THE CONTINENTAL FRONTIER, 1870-1890
(Based upon the maps showing density of population in the Eleventh Rand-McNally Official Rail-Census, and upon Appleton's Railway Guide, November, 1871, and the way Guide, August, 1891.)
The Southern Pacific of California met the other continental lines at the Fort Yuma crossing of the Colorado River. The Texas Pacific had got only to Fort Worth before the panic of 1873. It now built across Texas toward El Paso. Subsidiary corporations owned by the Southern Pacific men built the line between El Paso and Fort Yuma, and enabled a through service to start to St. Louis in January, and to New Orleans in October, 1882. Yet another Southern Pacific line was opened through San Antonio and Houston, tapping the commerce of the Gulf shore, and running trains to New Orleans in February, 1883.
The opening of great lines in the United States in the early eighties was part of a similar movement throughout the world. In Canada, Sir Donald Smith, later raised to the peerage as Lord Strathcona, was beginning the Canadian Pacific from Port Arthur to Vancouver, while on the Continent of Europe the first train of the "Orient Express" left Paris for Constantinople in June, 1883. In November, 1883, the American railroads, realizing that they were a national system, agreed upon a scheme of standard time by which to run their trains. Heretofore every road had followed what local time it chose, to the confusion of the traveling public.
Most of the continental railways had extensive land grants, of from twenty to forty sections per mile of track, but whether they had lands to sell or not they were vitally interested in the settlement of the regions through which they ran. Each encouraged immigration and colonization. Their literature, scattered over Europe, was one factor in the heavy drift of population that started after 1878. Six new Western States were created in the ten years after their completion.
The youngest American Territory in the eighties was Wyoming, created in 1868, and the youngest State was Colorado, admitted in 1876. After Colorado, the political division of the West embraced eight organized Territories: Dakota, Montana, Idaho, and Washington along the Canadian line, Wyoming and Utah in the middle, Arizona and New Mexico on the Mexican border. Besides these Territories there was the unorganized remnant of the Indian country known as Indian Territory, and attracting the covetous glances of frontiersmen in all the near-by Western States.
Agriculture was the main reliance of the wave of pioneers that poured over the plains along the lines of the railroads. In the valley of the Red River of the North, wheat-farming was their staple industry. As the Old South had devoted itself to the staple crop of cotton, so this new region took up the single crop of wheat, bringing to its cultivation great machines, white labor, and a modified factory system. South of the wheat country, corn dominated in Kansas, Iowa, and Nebraska, and went to market either as grain or in the converted form of hogs or stock. In Texas the cotton-fields pushed into new areas. The farm lands completely surrounded the Indian Territory, in which a diversified agriculture was known to be both possible and profitable.
Across the United States, from Canada to Mexico, the advance line of farms pushed from the well-watered bottoms of the Mississippi Valley into the plains that rise toward the Rocky Mountains. Near the ninety-seventh meridian the rainfall of this region becomes insufficient for general farming in ordinary years. But the solicitations of land-sellers brought settlers into the sub-humid region, while for a few years in the eighties the rainfall was greater than the average. Permanent climatic changes were imagined by the hopeful. A Governor of Kansas stated, in 1886, "with absolute certainty, that great areas in the Western third of Kansas are becoming more fertile," while an Eastern Senator, who was generally well informed, believed in 1888 that "the whole Territory of Dakota is as capable of sustaining population as Iowa."
Between the farming frontier and the mountains the cattlemen expanded the grazing industry, with profits that were enlarged because of the markets that the railroads brought them. The "long drive" from Texas to Montana became a familiar idea on the border, while the cowboys in their lonely watches developed a folk-song literature that is typically American. Between the cattlemen and the sheepmen there was permanent war, for the sheep injured the grass they grazed over. Although both industries were trespassers on the public lands the herders resented the appearance of the flocks as an intrusion upon their domain.