FURTHER WEST. The old order of developing new regions in the West was reversed when the railroad era began. Formerly the country was settled first, and the towns grew up to supply the needs of the rural population. Afterwards the towns were created by speculators far in advance of the farming settlement; and by the conveniences they afforded for selling crops, and buying implements, lumber and household supplies, they attracted farmers to their vicinity. Each new frontier town is an advertisement of the surrounding country, upon the settlement of which it must depend for its existence. The towns-folk are untiring in their praises of the soil and climate, and if you believe them the next grade of human felicity to living in their raw little village is to live upon a farm in the neighborhood. Whatever happens in the way of disagreeable weather, they assure you it is good for the crops. If it snows in May or hails in June, they come up smiling, and remark blandly that it is just what the crops need. The creation of a new town on a line of railroad pushing its track out into the vacant, treeless spaces of the far West, is an interesting process to observe. A speculator, or a company of speculators, look over the ground carefully fifty or a hundred miles in advance of the temporary terminus of the railroad, and hit upon a site which they think has special advantages, and is far enough away from the last town. They make a treaty with the railroad company for a section of land, agreeing, perhaps, to share the prospective profits on the sale of lots. Then they "scrip" the adjoining sections of Government land, or take it up with desert land claims. A large amount of land scrip is afloat on the market issued in pursuance of Indian treaties, Agricultural College grants, old Military Bounty Land acts and other peculiar features of our complicated Public Land System. The speculator with his pocket stocked with scrip is able to pick out any choice sections not occupied by homestead or preëmption claimants. Having thus obtained a sufficient body of land to operate with, the founding of the new town is trumpeted in the newspapers, and in all the frontier region for hundreds of miles there is a stir of excitement about the coming city. Billings, on the Yellowstone, is a good example of a town made by this process. In the beginning it had no existence save in the brains of its inventors. The bare prairie was staked out in streets, avenues and parks, on a scale for a city of twenty thousand inhabitants. A map was engraved, and within a few weeks after the place got its name, the "Billings boom" began to be talked of as far east as St. Paul. Billings lots were advertised in every town from St. Paul to Miles City, and whole blocks were sold in Chicago and New York. The purchasers, as a rule, knew no more about the valley of the Yellowstone than about that of the Congo, and few of them could have put their finger on a spot upon a map within a hundred miles of