breed seems to have deteriorated and his ranks are filling with men who work for wages rather than for the love of the free life and bold companionship that once tempted men into that calling.  Splendid Cheyenne saddles are less and less numerous in the outfits; the distinctive hat that made its way up from Mexico may or may not be worn; all the civil authorities in nearly all towns in the grazing country forbid the wearing of side arms; nobody shoots up these towns any more.  The fact is the old simon-pure cowboy days are gone already.”

=Settlement under the Homestead Act of 1862.=—­Two factors gave a special stimulus to the rapid settlement of Western lands which swept away the Indians and the cattle rangers.  The first was the policy of the railway companies in selling large blocks of land received from the government at low prices to induce immigration.  The second was the operation of the Homestead law passed in 1862.  This measure practically closed the long controversy over the disposition of the public domain that was suitable for agriculture.  It provided for granting, without any cost save a small registration fee, public lands in lots of 160 acres each to citizens and aliens who declared their intention of becoming citizens.  The one important condition attached was that the settler should occupy the farm for five years before his title was finally confirmed.  Even this stipulation was waived in the case of the Civil War veterans who were allowed to count their term of military service as a part of the five years’ occupancy required.  As the soldiers of the Revolutionary and Mexican wars had advanced in great numbers to the frontier in earlier days, so now veterans led in the settlement of the middle border.  Along with them went thousands of German, Irish, and Scandinavian immigrants, fresh from the Old World.  Between 1867 and 1874, 27,000,000 acres were staked out in quarter-section farms.  In twenty years (1860-80), the population of Nebraska leaped from 28,000 to almost half a million; Kansas from 100,000 to a million; Iowa from 600,000 to 1,600,000; and the Dakotas from 5000 to 140,000.

=The Diversity of Western Agriculture.=—­In soil, produce, and management, Western agriculture presented many contrasts to that of the East and South.  In the region of arable and watered lands the typical American unit—­the small farm tilled by the owner—­appeared as usual; but by the side of it many a huge domain owned by foreign or Eastern companies and tilled by hired labor.  Sometimes the great estate took the shape of the “bonanza farm” devoted mainly to wheat and corn and cultivated on a large scale by machinery.  Again it assumed the form of the cattle ranch embracing tens of thousands of acres.  Again it was a vast holding of diversified interest, such as the Santa Anita ranch near Los Angeles, a domain of 60,000 acres “cultivated in a glorious sweep of vineyards and orange and olive orchards, rich sheep and cattle pastures and horse ranches, their life and customs handed down from the Spanish owners of the various ranches which were swept into one estate.”