ABSTRACT
The range cattle industry, as it flourished in the Great Plains and farther westward in the last half, and particularly in the last third, of the nineteenth century, was essentially an outgrowth of a much older Mexican frontier economy. The story of farming on the Plains is largely a repetition of the experience in the western Prairies, except that the percentage of successful crops over a period of years became less with each frontier advance. Deep and scanty planting of the seed, and fallowing with continued plowing and dust mulching every other year, made crops possible in years when rainfall did not get too near the ten-inch deadline. Except for the Pacific coast, irrigation was primarily for forage crops and general farming. The state law of Nebraska required farmers to fence their crops, or else they had no protection against range stock.
