=Social Effects of Economic Activities.=—­In many respects the social life of the Far West also differed from that of the Ohio Valley.  The treeless prairies, though open to homesteads, favored the great estate tilled in part by tenant labor and in part by migratory seasonal labor, summoned from all sections of the country for the harvests.  The mineral resources created hundreds of huge fortunes which made the accumulations of eastern mercantile families look trivial by comparison.  Other millionaires won their fortunes in the railway business and still more from the cattle and sheep ranges.  In many sections the “cattle king,” as he was called, was as dominant as the planter had been in the old South.  Everywhere in the grazing country he was a conspicuous and important person.  He “sometimes invested money in banks, in railroad stocks, or in city property....  He had his rating in the commercial reviews and could hobnob with bankers, railroad presidents, and metropolitan merchants....  He attended party caucuses and conventions, ran for the state legislature, and sometimes defeated a lawyer or metropolitan ’business man’ in the race for a seat in Congress.  In proportion to their numbers, the ranchers ... have constituted a highly impressive class.”

Although many of the early capitalists of the great West, especially from Nevada, spent their money principally in the East, others took leadership in promoting the sections in which they had made their fortunes.  A railroad pioneer, General Palmer, built his home at Colorado Springs, founded the town, and encouraged local improvements.  Denver owed its first impressive buildings to the civic patriotism of Horace Tabor, a wealthy mine owner.  Leland Stanford paid his tribute to California in the endowment of a large university.  Colonel W.F.  Cody, better known as “Buffalo Bill,” started his career by building a “boom town” which collapsed, and made a large sum of money supplying buffalo meat to construction hands (hence his popular name).  By his famous Wild West Show, he increased it to a fortune which he devoted mainly to the promotion of a western reclamation scheme.

While the Far West was developing this vigorous, aggressive leadership in business, a considerable industrial population was springing up.  Even the cattle ranges and hundreds of farms were conducted like factories in that they were managed through overseers who hired plowmen, harvesters, and cattlemen at regular wages.  At the same time there appeared other peculiar features which made a lasting impression on western economic life.  Mining, lumbering, and fruit growing, for instance, employed thousands of workers during the rush months and turned them out at other times.  The inevitable result was an army of migratory laborers wandering from camp to camp, from town to town, and from ranch to ranch, without fixed homes or established habits of life.  From this extraordinary condition there issued many a long and lawless conflict between capital and labor, giving a distinct color to the labor movement in whole sections of the mountain and coast states.