drive" restricted the freedom of the "long drive." The wire fences broke up the unity of the grazing lands, and the End of efforts of the cowmen to safeguard themselves the "long by these made it more difficult to drive their stock. As the open drive was restricted, experiments were made in shipping the cattle north, but the natural courses of the railroads did not serve this traffic. By 1884 still another obstruction appeared. As early as 1879 the British Government forbade the importation of American cattle on the ground that they were often diseased, and in addition to being unfit for consumption, were likely to contaminate the British herds. Texas fever came to be talked about, together with hoof-and-mouth disease and tuberculosis. The State of Kansas passed a quarantine law in 1885, forbidding the driving of Texas cattle into the State, and guards with shotguns patrolled the border of the State, to maintain the law. The next year Colorado passed a similar law and effectively closed the drive. Associations of cattle-men saw the impending termination of the business. In 1884 they held two conventions, one at Chicago where the stock-men were chiefly concerned with the new dairy interests of Illinois and Wisconsin, and one at St. Louis, where the Western dealers discussed their future. In the latter convention they turned instinctively to Washington, as the frontier has always done. They presented a request for the erection of a national cattle trail from central Texas to the Canadian line, wide enough for the herds to find abundant pastures and forever to be withheld from private entry or state restriction. "As the Indian gave way to the pioneer," said a speaker at one of the cattle conventions, "so must the cowboy go before the settler, and the ranche take the place of the range, until the eight million acres of land now grazed by cattle shall teem with villages and model farms for the cultivation of refined cattle cared for, not by cowboys with revolvers, but cowboys with brains." After 1885 the cow country was gone and the beef industry underwent a long reorganization. The charges of the cattle-men that the railroads treated commerce them unfairly and that the packers operated a selfish Interstate monopoly added to the complaints that grew in volume through the eighties and that led toward an assertion of national power over the railroads. The fact that the continental systems were substantially complete by 1884 and that the country was beginning to regret its generosity in the land grants gave further impetus to the same movement. The Senate in 1885 yielded to the pressure. A select committee on interstate commerce, with Shelby M. Cullom, of Illinois, as chairman, was directed to make inquiries into the needs for regulation and the methods of accomplishing it. The earliest important movement for railroad regulation in the interest of fair play and of the community served by the road, arose in the States northwest of Chicago about 1873. The railroads in this region preceded much of the population instead of following it, and were not restrained by parallel and competing water routes or well-established highways. The export surplus of the region was chiefly grain, for hauling and storing which the railroad companies and the terminal elevators which they controlled frankly charged "all the traffic would bear." In the flush years between 1865 and 1872 the Northwestern farmer made money in spite of the rising value of the greenbacks and the high freight tariffs of the railroads. The depression of 1873 intensified the greenback movement and caused the farmers to join by hundreds of thousands a new society, the Patrons of Husbandry. The The Patrons of Husbandry were organized in 1867 as an agricultural benevolent society, but found few interested supporters for half a decade. The National Grange, as their central organization was called, movement was composed of delegates from the State Granges, and these in turn gathered in the representatives of the local Granges, to which the farmers belonged. The Granger movement became a reality when the farmers became aware of their dissatisfaction, sought for a means of venting it, and found in the mechanism of the local Grange a tool ready to be used. The membership of the Patrons of Husbandry began to grow after 1870. In the ensuing State elections candidates found it prudent to avow their interest in the regulaton of the railroad rates, which was the chief subject of discussion in the Granger gatherings. State laws were passed, culminating in the Potter Law of Wisconsin in 1874, which asserted the right of the Commonwealth to regulate the railroads' charge for service. The railroads of the Granger district ignored the legislation when they could and fought the Granger laws with all the legal powers at their disposal. Most of the laws were faulty, being based upon hostility to the roads, rather than upon an understanding of their business, but the Supreme Court of Wisconsin approved the theory of the Potter Law, and in March, 1877, the Supreme Court of the United States in a series of Granger cases upheld the common-law right of a State to regulate its railroads. The case of Munn vs. Illinois was the basic case in connection with which the decision was handed down. Most of the States followed the precedent of the Granger legislatures and passed rate-fixing laws or created railroad commissions before 1885. The problem was gradually lifted out of the field of class politics into that of economic investigation. In the Windom Report made to the Senate in 1873, and the Hepburn Report made to the New York Legislature at the end of the decade, and in the annual reports of the various railroad commissions, data were accumulated upon which to found the conviction that the railroads needed to be regulated, and that no single State was powerful enough to do it. In a case decided in 1885 the Supreme Court reached this latter conclusion, and declared that the regulation by a State of any portion of an interstate journey was an infringement upon the exclusive powers of Congress over interstate commerce. The whole machinery of regulation was thus threatened. The completion of the continental railroads at the same time broadened the conviction of a need for regulation, and the Cullom committee, reporting in January, 1886, made a similar recommendation to Congress. An Interstate Commerce Act was passed in February, 1887, forbidding combinations among the railroads and creating a non-partisan Interstate Commerce Commission to investigate and report upon grievances against the roads. The pooling of freight receipts by competing roads was prohibited, and they were forbidden to charge more for a short haul than for a longer haul over the same track in the same direction. The attempt to force the roads to compete with each other for their business was in part nullified by this "long-and-short-haul clause," because since no two roads between competing points rendered their service under precisely the same conditions, it was sometimes impossible for the longer road to compete for through traffic without fixing a rate for its long-haul service which would have been ruinous if applied to its whole business. Judge Thomas M. Cooley, of Michigan, became the guiding spirit of the Interstate Commerce Commission, and formulated the principles upon which it operated until its powers were revised in 1906. Another non-partisan measure inspired by the importance of the agricultural problem was the creation of a DeDepartment partment of Agriculture with a seat in the of Agri- Cabinet. There had been a department of that culture name since 1862, but with subordinate rank under the Interior Department. It was enlarged in 1884 by the addition of a Bureau of Animal Industry for the purpose of controlling cattle disease and lessening the danger of its spread. Cleveland signed the bill creating a new department, of which ex-Governor Jeremiah M. Rusk, of Wisconsin, was appointed Secretary by President Harrison. In 1890 it was given the duty to inspect cattle and fresh meat offered for export. The reluctance of European Governments to concede the sanitary character of American foods forced this action upon Congress. The consequence of the inspection service was an extension of the technical duties of the United States, and was one of the facts tending to change the nature of the National Government. Further examination of the remaining natural resources was authorized at the same time. Ten years earlier the survey work of the Interior and War Departments had been combined in the Geological Survey in the Department of the Interior. Under the direction of Clarence King and Major J. W. Powell it turned the resources of science upon public lands. Powell's report upon the arid regions was followed in 1889 by appropriations for the survey of all the sites available for the construction of reservoirs and irrigation projects. The Preëmption Law, whose abuse was an old nuisance, was repealed in 1891. BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE Ethelbert Talbot, My People of the Plains (1906), gives a sympathetic picture of the spirit of the vanishing frontier, which was also caught by Owen Wister, The Virginian (1902). The cattle industry is described in Emerson Hough, The Story of the Cowboy (1897); Clara M. Love, "History of the Cattle Industry in the Southwest," in Southwestern Historical Quarterly (1916); and F. L. Paxson, "The Cow Country," in American Historical Review, October, 1916. Edward W. Martin (pseud. for J. D. McCabe), History of the Grange Movement (1874), is a contemporary subscription history that was circulated among the farmers. The Granger movement is exhaustively treated in Solon J. Buck, The Granger Movement (1913). The Windom Report on Transportation Routes to the Seaboard is in 43d Cong., Ist Sess., Sen. Rep. 307. The Cullom Report of Senate Committee on Interstate Commerce is in 49th Cong., 1st Sess., Sen. Rep. 46. Joseph Gilpin Pyle, The Life of James J. Hill (1917), contains much material upon frontier problems. |