During the first half of his term President Cleveland had the opposition of a strongly Republican Senate. In the second half the Senate remained Republican by a majority of two, and the House continued Democratic. His civil service policy naturally met severe criticism not only from Civil Service. his party foes, but also from the spoils men among his Democratic followers, who desired a clean sweep of Republican office-holders, and from those of his independent supporters who looked to him to establish the service on a strictly non-partisan basis. The outcome of the first two years of his administration was that, of the entire body of Federal office-holders, two-thirds were changed and the obnoxious Tenure of Office Act was repealed, thus leaving the president the right of removal without presenting his reasons. Nevertheless there was a gain, for Cleveland somewhat checked the political activity of officeholders, the criticism by the Republicans placed them on record against the former spoils system, and before leaving the presidency (but after the election of 1888 showed that power was to pass to the Republicans), he transferred the railway mail service to the classified list requiring competitive examination.
344. The transition of executive power for the time to the Democratic party, however much it impressed the imaginations of the public as the end of an era, was not so significant as the national growth and expansion in the decade between 1880 and 1890 whereby forces were set loose which determined the characteristics of the succeeding period. Between these years the nation grew from about fifty millions to over sixty-two millions. The Middle West, or North Central group of states, gained nearly five millions and the Western division over a million and a quarter. West of the Alleghanies altogether more than eight million souls had been added, while the old Eastern states gained but four millions. In 1890 the North Central division alone had achieved a population nearly five millions greater than that of the North Atlantic, while the trans-Alleghany region surpassed the whole East by about ten millions, and the numbers of its representatives in House and Senate placed the political destiny of the nation in its hands.
345. One of the most important reasons for the wholesale
taking up of Western resources in these and the following years
was the burst of railway building subsequent to the
interruption of the panic of 1873. The eager
pioneers pushed into western Kansas and Nebraska
Development
of the West.
as they had into the northern Ohio Valley a half-century
before. Nebraska grew from a population of one hundred
and twenty-three thousand in 1870 to nearly half a million in
1880 and to over a million in 1890. From about a third of a
million in 1870, Kansas rose to almost a million in 1880, and to
nearly a million and a half in 1890. The railway had “boomed”
the Golden West and a cycle of abundant rains seemed to justify
the belief that the “Great American Desert” was a myth.
Thus settlers borrowed money to secure farms beyond the
region of safe annual rainfall under the agricultural methods of
traditional pioneering. Swift disappointment overtook them
after 1886, when droughts and grasshoppers ruined the crops
and turned back the tide of Middle Western colonists until the
western parts of these states were almost depopulated, Kansas
alone losing one-seventh of its population; nor did prosperity
return for a decade.
346. As the column of settlement along the Ohio Valley had extended its Hanks into the old North-West between the Ohio and the Great Lakes, and into the old South-West of the lower Mississippi after the War of 1812, so the later pioneers by railway trains began to take possession of the remoter and vaster North-West and South-West. The “granger roads,” centring in Chicago, thrust their lines out to develop wheat farms in interior Iowa, Minnesota and the Dakotas, where the virgin soil of the prairie farms brought returns that transferred the wheat belt to this new land of promise, and by competition forced the older wheat areas to develop varied agriculture. The introduction of the recently invented steel roller system of making flour into the Minneapolis mills not only built up a great flour industry there but created a demand for the hard wheat suited to the North-western prairies. The pine forests of Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota were exploited in the same era.
347. A more impressive movement was in progress as additional transcontinental railways were extended from the frontier to the Pacific. In 1870 for a thousand miles west of Duluth, at the head of Lake Superior, along the line of the projected Northern Pacific railway there were no cities or little towns. Relying upon its land grant and upon the undeveloped resources of the vast tributary region, the railway, after halting for a few years subsequent to the panic of 1873 at Bismarck on the Missouri rushed its construction to Seattle and was opened in 1883. The Great Northern, a product of the vision and sound judgment of James J. Hill, started from St Paul without a land grant and reached Puget Sound in 1893, constructing lateral feeders as it built. Thus a new industrial zone had been brought into existence. Colorado had become a state in 1876; in 1889 North Dakota, South Dakota, Washington and Montana were admitted as states and the next year Idaho and Wyoming were added. The Western political forces, especially the friends of silver, were thus given the balance of power in the Senate and additional weight in the electoral college.
348. As a new North-West was opened by the completion of the Canadian Pacific (1883), the Northern Pacific (1883) and Mexico, Arizona and southern California to San Francisco by 1883. In 1883 also the lines which became the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fé, extending from the lower Missouri The South-West. valley, with St Louis and Kansas City as important terminals, through south-eastern Colorado, northern Arizona and New Mexico, reached the same goal. The Denver & Rio Grande in the same period opened new mining areas between Denver and Ogden. Not only additional mines were reached by these lines, but a great cattle country, recently the habitat of the bison and the Indian, was opened. All the large cities commanding the approaches to this country developed packing industries, but Chicago especially profited. Although her main supply was still the Middle Western farms, this domestic supply was supplemented by vast quantities of range cattle. South-eastern Texas was the original home of these cattle ranches, but the driving of herds to supply the miners of the Rocky Mountains revealed the fact that the whole bison country was capable of supporting range cattle, and the practice grew of driving the stock to the feeding ground of the north and returning. The height of the movement along the cattle trail, which in its largest extent ran through the public lands of the great plains from Texas to the Dakotas and Montana, was reached in 1884. In that period cattlemen fought over the possession of the range, controlled vast tracts by seizing the approaches to the water supplies under perversion of the land laws, fenced in the public domain, either defiantly or by leases from land grant roads, and called out proclamations of presidents from Hayes to Cleveland. The steady advance of the farmer, and protective measures against the spread of the cattle diseases known as Texas fever, gradually prevented the continuance of the trail, and ultimately broke down the system of great ranches. The grade of cattle was improved and great packing interests organized the industry on the basis of concentrated large scale production. About 1870 shipment of livestock from Chicago had become significant, and within a decade the refrigerator car revolutionized the packing industry by making possible the shipment of dressed beef not only to the markets of the Eastern United States but even to Europe. The value of slaughtering and packing industries in the United States increased from less than thirty million dollars in 1870, to over three hundred millions in 1880, and to five hundred and sixty-four millions in 1890.
349. Another important revolution in American economic life was effected by the opening of new iron-mines, the growth of the steel and coal industry and the rise of an extraordinary internal commerce along the Whole length of the Great Lakes. By 1890 the output of pig-iron in the United States surpassed
