Tumbleweeds

In all that vast expanse of country west of Fort Riley clear to the Sierras of California there are not over four hundred thousand acres of arable land.

This extract from McClelland’s report, later appearing as preface to some fourteen volumes of Pacific Railroad explorations, evidently acted as a direct challenge to the pioneering spirit of a country that was young. Following immediately upon its publication, as if in a concerted effort of refutation, the great westward trek across a continent set in, the determined advance of a land-hungry horde intent upon seeking out and settling that four hundred thousand acres of arable land; and in the brief space of thirty years there were thirty million acres under fence while the swarming multitude of hopeful settlers continued to surge westward across the face of the earth.

Thus do even wise men frequently fail to vision the immensity of the future which stretches forth ahead within the puny span of their own remaining years.

Another few decades and old Joe Hinman, himself accounted a wise man among his fellows, sat his horse on a little rise of ground and lamented his own lack of foresight. Donald Carver, his younger companion, gazed off across the flat where several riders held some two thousand head of steers. Hinman had come with the vanguard of the invaders and had watched succeeding waves of home seekers swarm past on all the ancient trails, the bull trains stretching almost without a break from the Missouri to the Colorado hills, when Cheyenne, Kiowa and Comanche contested the advance at every crossing of the Republican and the Smoky Hill, at the Great Bend of the Arkansas, and historic Pawnee Rock; had watched the bull teams and the prairie schooner giving way to freight cars that rattled past on steel rails which spanned a continent. He had seen the rolling plains of Kansas, once constituting the first reaches of the Great American Desert, lifted bodily into statehood and wondrous fertility, so long since that younger men had almost forgotten that their native State had ever been other than a prosperous agricultural community. While the main tides of settlement had swept on to the west and north, Hinman had turned aside and traveled south on the Chisholm Trail till he reached a point where the floods of home seekers were halted by some invisible barrier. There he had settled and prospered, but even now, thirty years after driving his first claim stakes through the prairie sod, that same barrier resisted all advance. Just outside his dooryard a vast tract, sixty miles by two hundred in extent, remained undeveloped and untouched. The land was rich and beckoned temptingly to those who sought a scrap of ground which might constitute a home, yet beyond Hinman’s holdings the virgin sod extended to the far horizon with never a ribbon of smoke by day or a twinkling window by night to indicate the friendly presence of a settler’s cabin,--the Cherokee Strip, upon which the white man was forbidden to settle by the terms of an ancient treaty. This great tract had been set aside to serve as insulation between warring whites and reds, its status still the same even though the necessity for such insulation had been long since removed,--an empire lying dormant and awaiting only the magic word which should strike off the shackles and permit its broad miles to blossom into productiveness.

“There she lays, son,” Hinman said, waving an arm in a comprehensive sweep toward the unowned lands. “Some day right soon they’ll open her. Every land-hungry party in four States has his eye on the last frontier and whenever she’s throwed open to settlement you’ll see one hair-raising mad stampede. So if you’re going off somewheres, like I heard it rumored, why I’d cancel the arrangements and sit tight.”

The younger man nodded without comment.

“Fortune always beckons from some place a long ways remote,” Hinman rambled on. “When likely she’s roosting right at home, if only we’d have a look. Now I quit Ohio as a youngster because there wasn’t any land left open but hardwood swamp lands, which could be had for about a dollar an acre, but I couldn’t see its value at a dollar a mile. To-day that Ohio swamp land is selling round two hundred an acre while what ground I’ve got under crop out here would average right at thirty and raw grassland not over three or four.”

“But owning the most part of two countries,” Carver commented, “you can maybe worry along.”

“Likely,” Hinman confessed. “But that’s not the point. I could have stayed right at home with those swamp lands and without ever exerting myself, except maybe to keep entertained with a brace of coon hounds, I could have growed into more wealth by considerable than what I’ve accumulated out here by steady work. That’s the real point; so it appears that my leaving there was sheer lack of foresight. So it’s likely that your best chance to get ahead and lay up an honest dollar is by staying right here instead of stampeding off somewheres. That’s the real reason I sent for you.”

“Since I’ve never even considered leaving, and you well aware of it,” said Carver, grinning, “then the real reason you sent for me was to engage me to perform something you didn’t want to do yourself--which in turn is related to the possibility of my accumulating an honest dollar. We’ve rambled all the way from timbered swamp land on down to the surrounding short grass. What sort of country lays beyond? My curiosity is fairly foaming over.”

Hinman regarded him quizzically and Carver bore the scrunity undisturbed. The older man knew that Carver was dependable; that once committed he would follow any mission to its termination and defend the financial interests of his employer with every resource at his command. It was only in his own affairs that he evidenced supreme carelessness. Older men forgave his irresponsibility in that quarter and accorded him a certain measure of respect for the reason that even in the midst of some bit of recklessness he retained an underlying sense of balance and proportion. And he had worked intermittently for old Joe Hinman for the past twelve years.

“It’s not that I don’t want to do it myself,” Hinman denied, reverting to Carver’s mild accusation. “It’s only that it wouldn’t look right on the surface. Now whatever property is down in the Strip is legally non-existent, you might say, and consequently untaxable,” thereby disproving his oft-lamented lack of foresight. “And it’s drawing right close to the first of March.”

“So you want me to move a thousand head of steers across the line and hold ’em till after you’ve been assessed.” Carver hazarded.

“Two thousand, son,” Hinman corrected. “Two thousand head. You couldn’t hold ’em in the quarantine belt for long without getting jumped, but you know the boss of every outfit off to the south and you could maybe trade deals with one of them. You’ll know how. It’ll save me taxes on two thousand head and give me a few weeks’ free grass. That much for me and a thousand nice dollars for you if you put it across.”

“An hour after dark I’ll be shoving those cows across the line,” Carver promised. “Meantime you might advance a hundred. Unfortunately I’m just out of funds.”

“Unfortunately,” said Hinman, “you’re just always out.” He counted off the money. “You’ve worked for me on and off ever since you was big enough to claw your way up onto a horse and on some occasions you’ve exercised such fair average judgment in looking after my affairs that I’ve wondered why on all occasions you was such a poor hand to look after your own.”

“I’ve been so taken up with your business that I’ve sort of let my own interests drift along,” Carver explained.