Indian tribes. War, instant and merciless, where it meant murder
for the most part, was set on foot as soon as white touched red
in that far western region.

All these new white men who had crowded into the unknown country
of the Plains, the Rockies, the Sierras, and the Cascades, had to
be fed. They could not employ and remain content with the means
by which the red man there had always fed himself. Hence a new
industry sprang up in the United States, which of itself made
certain history in that land. The business of freighting supplies
to the West, whether by bull-train or by pack-train, was an
industry sui generic, very highly specialized, and pursued by men
of great business ability as well as by men of great hardihood
and daring.

Each of these freight trains which went West carried hanging on
its flank more and more of the white men. As the trains returned,
more and more was learned in the States of the new country which
lay between the Missouri and the Rockies, which ran no man knew
how far north, and no man could guess how far south. Now appears
in history Fort Benton, on the Missouri, the great northern
supply post--just as at an earlier date there had appeared Fort
Hall, one of the old fur-trading posts beyond the Rockies, Bent's
Fort on the Arkansas, and many other outposts of the new Saxon
civilization in the West.

Later came the pony express and the stage coach which made
history and romance for a generation. Feverishly, boisterously, a
strong, rugged, womanless population crowded westward and formed
the wavering, now advancing, now receding line of the great