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The Passing of the Frontier; a chronicle of the old West by Emerson Hough
page 109 of 128 (85%)

When he said that, he pronounced the doom of the old frontier.



Chapter IX. The Homesteader

His name was usually Nester or Little Fellow. It was the old
story of the tortoise and the hare. The Little Fellow was from
the first destined to win. His steady advance, now on this flank,
now on that, just back of the vanguard pushing westward, had
marked the end of all our earlier frontiers. The same story now
was being written on the frontier of the Plains.

But in the passing of this last frontier the type of the
land-seeking man, the type of the American, began to alter
distinctly. The million dead of our cruel Civil War left a great
gap in the American population which otherwise would have
occupied the West and Northwest after the clearing away of the
Indians. For three decades we had been receiving a strong and
valuable immigration from the north of Europe. It was in great
part this continuous immigration which occupied the farming lands
of upper Iowa, Minnesota, and the Dakotas. Thus the population of
the Northwest became largely foreign. Each German or Scandinavian
who found himself prospering in this rich new country was himself
an immigration agency. He sent back word to his friends and
relatives in the Old World and these came to swell the steadily
thickening population of the New.

We have seen that the enterprising cattlemen had not been slow to
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