The West of the midway district between the Missouri and Pacific was largely settled by reflex. The mines of California spilled back men, great, splendid men, to the eastward again, to exploit all those ranges of the Rockies whose wealth the trappers had not suspected. Montana, Idaho, Colorado, Nevada—all these might be called a part of the scheme of California. New and splendid empires were founded, new standards of civilization were erected in the recent wilderness. The grand and alluring story of the West went on apace for yet a little time. But these times were not to endure. There came swiftly the Western rush of population, which swept off the map the free lands of all our Western empire. The vast American public, mad with the lust of land, raped the Indian reservations from those that had frail title given them in the honor of a great nation; so that thus one more bar was broken between the East and the West. Home-building, farm-making man came close on the heels of trapper and trader and nomad cattle driver. The hordes of the land seekers held their lotteries even in the desert once dreaded by the travelers of the old Santa Fé trail. Incipient cities were built in that waterless waste where Jedediah Smith, the first transcontinental traveler, lost his life in mid-continent. Never a bit of open land was left in all the West; or if there were such land remaining, it was of a quality that would once have been viewed with contempt. The story of the swift changes wrought by the iron trails is such as not to afford complete satisfaction in the contemplation; yet we may calmly review the different stages of that story. First we had the day of competitive railway building, when there were not enough railroads for the demands of a vast and unsettled region whose resources appealed to a population. Then we came rapidly to the time of too many railroads; of attempts to adjust an unprofitable competition; of combinations, of arrangements, agreements, mergers; and of popular and governmental action upon such mergers. To-day all America is districted and divided among a few great railway systems. Once we were better than our transportation; now we are not so good. Once we depended upon it; now it rules us almost without argument. The swiftness with which these tremendous changes have been brought about furnishes one of the most remarkable phenomena recorded in the history of the world.