=The Removal of the Indians.=—­Unlike the frontier of New England in colonial days or that of Kentucky later, the advancing lines of home builders in the Far West had little difficulty with warlike natives.  Indian attacks were made on the railway construction gangs; General Custer had his fatal battle with the Sioux in 1876 and there were minor brushes; but they were all of relatively slight consequence.  The former practice of treating with the Indians as independent nations was abandoned in 1871 and most of them were concentrated in reservations where they were mainly supported by the government.  The supervision of their affairs was vested in a board of commissioners created in 1869 and instructed to treat them as wards of the nation—­a trust which unfortunately was often betrayed.  A further step in Indian policy was taken in 1887 when provision was made for issuing lands to individual Indians, thus permitting them to become citizens and settle down among their white neighbors as farmers or cattle raisers.  The disappearance of the buffalo, the main food supply of the wild Indians, had made them more tractable and more willing to surrender the freedom of the hunter for the routine of the reservation, ranch, or wheat field.

=The Cowboy and Cattle Ranger.=—­Between the frontier of farms and the mountains were plains and semi-arid regions in vast reaches suitable for grazing.  As soon as the railways were open into the Missouri Valley, affording an outlet for stock, there sprang up to the westward cattle and sheep raising on an immense scale.  The far-famed American cowboy was the hero in this scene.  Great herds of cattle were bred in Texas; with the advancing spring and summer seasons, they were driven northward across the plains and over the buffalo trails.  In a single year, 1884, it is estimated that nearly one million head of cattle were moved out of Texas to the North by four thousand cowboys, supplied with 30,000 horses and ponies.

During the two decades from 1870 to 1890 both the cattle men and the sheep raisers had an almost free run of the plains, using public lands without paying for the privilege and waging war on one another over the possession of ranges.  At length, however, both had to go, as the homesteaders and land companies came and fenced in the plain and desert with endless lines of barbed wire.  Already in 1893 a writer familiar with the frontier lamented the passing of the picturesque days:  “The unique position of the cowboys among the Americans is jeopardized in a thousand ways.  Towns are growing up on their pasture lands; irrigation schemes of a dozen sorts threaten to turn bunch-grass scenery into farm-land views; farmers are pre-empting valleys and the sides of waterways; and the day is not far distant when stock-raising must be done mainly in small herds, with winter corrals, and then the cowboy’s days will end.  Even now his condition disappoints those who knew him only half a dozen years ago.  His