66 AGRICULTURAL ECONOMICS 



raise the materials for manufacturing his own clothing. He has the greatest 

 abundance of everything within himself except those articles not naturally 

 congenial to the climate [Timothy Flint, Recollections of the Last Ten 

 Years, pp. 247-49]. 



In Iowa, from 1840 to 1850, very little money was paid out for wages. 

 The amount of money in circulation was small, pioneers were poor and 

 inclined to do their own work, and as farmers exchanged the products of 

 their farms in barter, laborers when hired were largely paid in produce 

 [Bulletin 99, Bureau of Statistics, U.S. Department of Agriculture]. EDITOR. 



15. PASTORAL LIFE ON THE AGRICULTURAL FRONTIER 1 

 BY RAY STANNARD BAKER 



The cattleman followed the hunter, spreading rapidly from Texas, 

 Kansas, and Nebraska, westward and northward over all the range 

 states New Mexico, Arizona, California, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, 

 Wyoming, and the western part of the Dakotas, Montana, Idaho, 

 Oregon, and Washington to each state according to its grassland. 

 In those days of the first invasion it was all a golden land. "Here," 

 said the cattleman, "is food for all the cows in the world." So he 

 began raising vast herds, and they multiplied and spread like locusts, 

 for the grass and the water were both free, and horses were to be had 

 for the catching. He thrived abundantly at first. No restrictions 

 hemmed him in save those conveniently set by his own conscience or 

 inspired by respect for his neighbor's six-shooter. It was a glorious 

 primitive society. 



To be a cowman meant being a small but powerful king, with a 

 princely kingdom. There was no rent and virtually no taxes to pay. 

 A man might own a hundred thousand cattle and not an acre of land, 

 though he claimed "range rights" to fifty thousand acres, and 

 enforced those rights with blood and iron. Apparently this was a 

 new sort of free life in which man had risen above the old slow rules of 

 thrift. It was a simple business: turn the cattle to grass, and when 

 money was needed, round them up and sell them. 



Presently, however, the first real settlers, the "nesters" of Texas, 

 who wished to fence the land for farms, appeared in numbers, and the 

 early comers, the original cowboys, began to chafe. " W'ho's elbowing 

 me ? " they enquired, and there was prompt and effective shooting and 

 the wholesale cutting of the new fences. Likewise, there came the 



1 Adapted from "The Tragedy of the Range," Century, LXIV, 536-41. 

 (Copyright by the Century Co.) 



