9 WESTERNS: The Law of the Land, The Way of a Man, Heart's Desire, The Covered Wagon, 54-40 or Fight, The Man Next Door, The Magnificent Adventure, The Sagebrusher and more. Emerson Hough
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Franklin saw many wagons coming and unloading their cargoes of bleached bones at the side of the railroad tracks. The heap of bones grew vast, white, ghastly, formidable, higher than a house, more than a bowshot long. There was a market for all this back in that country which had conceived this road across the desert. Franklin put out a wagon at this industry, hauling in the fuel and the merchandise of the raw plains. He bought the grim product of others who were ready to sell and go out the earlier again. He betimes had out more than one wagon of his own; and Battersleigh, cavalryman, became Batty, scouter for bones, while Franklin remained at the market. It was Franklin who, bethinking himself of the commercial difference between hard black horn and soft, spongy bone, began the earliest shipments of the tips of the buffalo horns, which he employed a man to saw off and pack into sacks ready for the far-off button factories. Many tons of these tips alone he came to ship, such had been the incredible abundance and the incredible waste; and thus thriving upon an industry whose cause and whose possibility he deplored, he came to realize considerable sums and saw the question of subsistence pass rapidly into unconcern. Thus he had gone to work in his new and untried world with a direct and effective force. He dropped from him as a garment the customs and standards of the world he had left behind, and at once took his place as a factor in a new order of things.
Meantime the little town added building after building along its straggling street, each of these houses of a single story, with a large square of board front which projected deceptively high and wide, serving to cover from direct view the rather humiliating lack of importance in the actual building. These new edifices were for the most part used as business places, the sorts of commerce being but two — "general merchandise," which meant chiefly saddles and firearms, and that other industry of new lands which flaunts under such signboards as the Lone Star, the Happy Home, the Quiet Place, the Cowboy's Dream, and such descriptive nomenclature. Of fourteen business houses, nine were saloons, and all these were prosperous. Money was in the hands of all. The times had not yet come when a dollar seemed a valuable thing. Men were busy living, busy at exercising this vast opportunity of being prehistoric.
One by one, then in a body, as though struck by panic, the white tents of the railroad labourers vanished, passing on yet farther to the West, only the engineers remaining at Ellisville and prosecuting from the haven of the stone hotel the work of continuing the line. The place of the tents was taken by vast white-topped wagons, the creaking cook carts of the cattle trail, and the van of the less nomadic man. It was the beginning of the great cattle drive from the Southern to the Northern ranges, a strange, wild movement in American life which carried in its train a set of conditions as vivid and peculiar as they were transient. At Ellisville there was no ordered way of living. The frontier was yet but one vast camp. It was, as Battersleigh had said, the beginning of things.
Many of the white-topped wagons began to come from the East, not following the railroad, but travelling the trail of the older adventurers who had for a generation gone this way, and whose pathway the railroad took for its own. Some of these wagons passed still onward, uncontent. Others swerved and scattered over the country to the south and southwest, from which the Indian tribes had now been driven, and which appeared more tempting to the farming man than lands farther to the west and higher up that gradual and wonderful incline which reaches from the Missouri River to the Rockies. One by one, here and there, these new men selected their lands and made their first rude attempts at building for themselves the homes which they coveted and had come far to win.
Ellisville lay at an eddy in the Plains, and gathered toll of the strange driftwood which was then afloat. Though the chutes at the railway were busy, yet other herds of cattle passed Ellisville and wandered on north, crowding at the heels of the passing Indians, who now began to see their own cattle to be doomed. The main herd of the buffalo was now reported to be three or four days' drive from Ellisville, and the men who killed for the railroad camps uttered loud complaints. The skin-hunting still went on. Great wagons, loaded with parties of rough men, passed on out, bound for the inner haunts, where they might still find their prey. The wagons came creaking back loaded with bales of the shaggy brown robes, which gave the skin-hunters money with which to join the cowmen at the drinking places. Some of the skin-hunters, some of the railroad men, some of the cowmen, some of the home-seekers, remained in the eddy at Ellisville, this womanless beginning of a permanent society. Not sinless was this society at its incipiency. In any social atmosphere good and evil are necessary concomitants. Sinless men would form a community at best but perishable. Tolerance, submission, patriotism so called, brotherly love so named — all these things were to come later, as they have ever done in the development of communities, builded mainly upon the foundation of individual aggressiveness and individual centrifugence. Having arrived, we wave scented kerchiefs between us and the thought of such a beginning of our prosperity. Having become slaves, we scoff at the thought of a primitive, grand, and happy world, where each man was a master. Having lost touch of the earth, having lost sight of the sky, we opine there could have been small augur in a land where each man found joy in an earth and sky which to him seemed his own. There were those who knew that joy and who foresaw its passing, yet they were happy. Edward Franklin saw afar off the dim star of his ambition; yet for him, as for many another man in those days, it was enough to own this earthy this sky, to lie down under his own roof at night to untroubled dreams, to awake each morning to a day of hopeful toil.
CHAPTER IX THE NEW MOVERS
Far away, across the wide gray plain, appeared a tiny dot, apparently an unimportant fixture of the landscape. An hour earlier it might not have been observed at all by even the keenest eye, and it would have needed yet more time to assure an observer even now that the dot was a moving object. Under the shifting play of the prairie sun the little object appeared now dark, now light in colour, but became gradually more distinct. It came always crawling steadily on. Presently an occasional side-blown puff of dust added a certain heraldry, and thus finally the white-topped wagon and its plodding team came fully into view, crawling ever persistently from the East into the West.
Meantime, from the direction of the north, there came travelling across the prairie another cloud of dust more rapid than that stirred up by the slow-moving emigrant wagon. Sam, the stage driver, was crossing on his regular buckboard trip from Ellisville to Plum Centre, and was now nearly half-way on his journey. Obviously the courses of these two vehicles must intersect, and at the natural point of this intersection the driver of the faster pulled up and waited for the other. "Movers" were not yet so common in that region that the stage driver, natural news agent, must not pause for investigation.
The driver of the wagon, a tall, dark man, drew rein with a grave salutation, his tired horses standing with drooping heads while there took place one of the pregnant conversations of the Plains.
"Mornin', friend," said Sam.
"Mornin', sir," said the other.
"Which way you headin', friend?" asked Sam.
"Well, sir," came the answer, slowly, "I rather reckon you've got me. I've just been movin' on out. I want to locate, but I reckon my team could travel a little further if they had to." This with a certain grimness in his smile, as though he realized the whimsicality of the average motive which governed in that day in quests like his. "Is there much travel comin' through here this season?" he resumed, turning in his seat and resting one foot on the wheel as he sat still perched on the high wagon seat.
"Well," replied Sam, "they ain't so much just yet, but they will be pretty soon. You see, the Land Office is about sixty mile east of here yet, and folks is mostly stoppin' in there. Land around here is pretty much all open yet. If they move the Land Office to the track-end, of course all this land will be taken up a good deal faster."
"Is it good farmin' land around here?"
"Sure. Better'n it is farther west, and just as good as it is farther east. Wheat'll do well here, and it ain't too cold for corn. Best cow country on earth."
"How is Ellisville doing now?"
"Bloomin'."
"Yes,