THE GREAT NORTHWEST IN THE EARLY EIGHTIES
By E. V. Smalley
FURTHER WEST.
The old order of developing new regions in the West was reversed when the railroad era began. Formerly the country was settled first, and the towns grew up to supply the needs of the rural population. Afterwards the towns were created by speculators far in advance of the farming settlement; and by the conveniences they afforded for selling crops, and buying implements, lumber and household supplies, they attracted farmers to their vicinity. Each new frontier town is an advertisement of the surrounding country, upon the settlement of which it must depend for its existence. The towns-folk are untiring in their praises of the soil and climate, and if you believe them the next grade of human felicity to living in their raw little village is to live upon a farm in the neighborhood. Whatever happens in the way of disagreeable weather, they assure you it is good for the crops. If it snows in May or hails in June, they come up smiling, and remark blandly that it is just what the crops need. The creation of a new town on a line of railroad pushing its track out into the vacant, treeless spaces of the far West, is an interesting process to observe. A speculator, or a company of speculators, look over the ground carefully fifty or a hundred miles in advance of the temporary terminus of the railroad, and hit upon a site which they think has special advantages, and is far enough away from the last town. They make a treaty with the railroad company for a section of land, agreeing, perhaps, to share the prospective profits on the sale of lots. Then they "scrip" the adjoining sections of Government land, or take it up with desert land claims. A large amount of land scrip is afloat on the market issued in pursuance of Indian treaties, Agricultural College grants, old Military Bounty Land acts and other peculiar features of our complicated Public Land System. The speculator with his pocket stocked with scrip is able to pick out any choice sections not occupied by homestead or preëmption claimants. Having thus obtained a sufficient body of land to operate with, the founding of the new town is trumpeted in the newspapers, and in all the frontier region for hundreds of miles there is a stir of excitement about the coming city. Billings, on the Yellowstone, is a good example of a town made by this process. In the beginning it had no existence save in the brains of its inventors. The bare prairie was staked out in streets, avenues and parks, on a scale for a city of twenty thousand inhabitants. A map was engraved, and within a few weeks after the place got its name, the "Billings boom" began to be talked of as far east as St. Paul. Billings lots were advertised in every town from St. Paul to Miles City, and whole blocks were sold in Chicago and New York. The purchasers, as a rule, knew no more about the valley of the Yellowstone than about that of the Congo, and few of them could have put their finger on a spot upon a map within a hundred miles of Billings. They heard there was a boom, and were eager to take their chances for profit or loss. It was enough for them to hear the place spoken of as the future metropolis of the Yellowstone Valley. Within sixty days from the time when Billings got a local habitation and a name, lots to the value of $220,000 were sold within its limits, and before thirty days more had elapsed the purchasers had advanced the imaginary value of their holdings from one hundred to three hundred per cent.
Charles Dickens once said that the typical American would hesitate about entering heaven, unless assured that he could go further West. The men who lead the advance of the army of civilization on the frontier skirmish line do not come from the rear. They are always the scouts and pickets. The people of the six-weeks-old town do not come from the East. As a rule they are from the one-year-old and two-year-old towns a little further back. Most of the men I met in the Yellowstone country were from Eastern Dakota, or the Black Hills region, or from Western Minnesota. When asked why they left homes so recently made in a new country, their reply was invariably that they wanted to get further West.
BILLINGS AND COULSON.
We came upon Billings one sunny day in May [about 1882], dropped upon it, I might say; for after a ten miles' drive across a high and windy plateau, the immense dazzling range of the Big Snowy Mountains looming up in front, the ground fell away abruptly and the town lay at our feet in a broad, green valley. The yellow-pine houses, untouched by paint, glistened in the sunlight like gold. The valley, hemmed in by precipitous cliffs on the north, and by black, bare hills beyond the muddy river on the south, stretched away to the west to distant mountain slopes. Under the shadow of a huge sandstone butte lay the little hamlet of Coulson, now quite out of spirits because of the new town a mile further on. Old Coulson, it was called, though its age was only three years. It had made some money buying buffalo robes of the Crow Indians across the river, and selling shirting, groceries, and whisky to a few herdsmen whose cattle graze in the Musselshell Ranges. Now it must abandon its score of "shacks" and shanties or move them up to Billings. The new town, when I visited it, consisted of perhaps fifty cheap structures scattered over a square mile of bottom-land. Many people were living in little A tents or in their canvas-covered wagons, waiting for lumber to arrive with which to build houses. Sixty dollars a thousand was the price of a poor quality of green stuff brought from a mill twenty miles up the Yellowstone. All articles of food, except beef, were frightfully dear. Potatoes were eight cents a pound, flour six dollars a sack. I doubt if one in ten of the inhabitants could tell why he had come. The migrating impulse is the only way to account for the movement of merchants, mechanics, farmers, speculators, gamblers, liquor-sellers, preachers and doctors to a point nearly one hundred and fifty miles from anything that can be called a town—a point, too, in a region inhabited only by Crow Indians and a few scattered herdsmen. At the signal that a town was to be created, all these people, of diverse possessions and ambitions, moved forward and occupied the site as though they were soldiers marching at the word of command. What a wonderful self-organizing thing is society! How did the German baker from St. Paul, the milliner from Minneapolis, the Chinese laundryman from the Pacific slope, the blacksmith, the carpenter, the butcher, the beer-seller, the grocer and all the other constituent parts of a complete community happen to feel the desire, at the same time, to go with their trades and wares to a remote spot in an unknown land?
