The raising of cattle has always been, since the earliest settlements, a frontier industry. Before the soil was broken by the plow the natural grasses furnished cheap and abundant pasturage. Accordingly, the cattle ranges, since the first settlement of Jamestown, ex tended just west of the line of permanent set tlement. They moved through the Southern States in advance of tobacco and cotton until they reached Texas. There the rangers from the United States came into competition with those from Mexico, producing complications which afterward led to the Mexican war.
Immediately after the Civil War the wide ranges of Texas having become overstocked, there begun a vast migration of cattle from the southern to the northern ranges. The route, known as the Cattle Trail," was merely a strip of land of indefinite width fringing the western settlements. After the building of the transcontinental railways the points at which the trail crossed these railroads became great shipping points from which cattle were sent to the great markets and packing towns of the corn belt.
Wheat, like beef, has been primarily a frontier crop. Both these products are most economically produced by extensive rather than intensive methods; that is, by the use of little labor on much land. Accordingly, under what is known as the territorial division of labor, those sections where labor is relatively abun dant and land relatively scarce are given over to the crops which can be cultivated economi cally by intensive methods, while those which require extensive methods, migrate to those sections where land is relatively more abundant and labor relatively scarcer. The wheat belt, in accordance with this law, has gradually mi grated westward, first through western New York and Pennsylvania, later through Ohio. Indiana and Illinois. Here it split, the spring wheat belt moving northwestward through Wisconsin, Minnesota and the Dakotas, while the winter wheat belt moved southwestward through Iowa, Missouri, Nebraska and finally into Kansas.
A dearer idea of our present agricultural situation can be gained through a brief survey of our agricultural history. This history is divisible into five main periods. The first is the same as our colonial period and may be called the period of trial and adaptation. The second is that comprised between the dates 1789 and 1830 and may be called the period of the conquest of the forest. The third is the period from 1830 to 1860 and may be called the period of the conquest of the prairies. The fourth is the period from 1860 to 1888 and may be called the period of the settlement of the Far West. The fifth is the period from
1888 to the present time and may be called the period of reorganization.
The Period of Trial and The colonial period was necessarily a period of experiment and adjustment; of trial and adap tation. The settlers faced conditions of which they had had no previous experience and they had to acquire their own experience through bitter trials and disappointments. The sum mers were hotter and the winters far colder than anything with which they were familiar. The plant and animal life also differed from that of the Old World. What crops to grow and how to grow them was consequently an unsolved problem for the first settlers except in so far as the practices of the Indians gave them a clue.
Jamestown, for example, is in the same lat itude as the northern coast of Africa. The first English explorers had visited the coast of Virginia in summer when the heat was more intense than in England. A natural in ference was that the new country would be adapted to a semi-tropical agriculture. The fig and the olive were tried and there were numerous experiments in silk culture. These were soon given up in favor of stock-raising and the growing of corn and tobacco. In New England, besides cattle and hogs, most of the English grains and garden fruits and vegetables were tried out. In the middle col onies wheat was grown successfully and ex ported to the West Indies. So successful were the colonists in this work of trial and rejection that the main features of our present agricul ture were all fixed. Until our present Federal Department of Agriculture began sending its plant explorers to the ends of the earth in search of new crops, not a single new crop was introduced into this country since the colonial period except sorghum and alfalfa.
The Period of Conquest of the Forest.— Before the War of Independence some of the Colonial population had spilled over the Alleghanies into the great interior basin. The movement westward on a large scale began soon afterward. The various col onies ceded to the Federal government their claims to the western lands. The government then began a land policy which encouraged set tlement. This policy began as a financial pol icy and ended, through a series of transitions, as a social policy. That is to say, the govern ment began selling the public land as a means of filling the treasury and of paying off the Revolutionary War debt. It ended by giving the land in small farms, without money and without price, to landless men who would actually live upon and cultivate it.