The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 48, July 1944 - April, 1945 Page: 346

ie arrmcrs' AlliaNcc i
Ueras, 1875-1900
A Revolt A#gaist hourbo ad flour-
geois Democracy
RALPH SMITH
T HE FARMERS' ALLIANCE was born fifteen miles from Lam-
pasas, Texas, in 1875, when farmers and stockmen invoked
frontier America's gift to the art of popular sovereignty,
the vigilante, to clean up thieves, "cattle kings," and land
sharks. With carpet-bagger rule at Austin, Lampasas and
adjoining counties became a pandemonium of Indians, Mexican
bandits, and renegades.' By the late sixties the federal gov-
ernment was gathering the Plains Indians onto reservations,
and Northerners, Easterners, and ex-Confederates, who later
furnished spontaneous leadership to lackadaisical western
farmers, sought new fortunes in Greeley's dreamland. Texas
was made the most attractive state to shifting Americans and
foreigners by propaganda from immigration societies, land
companies, and the state immigration bureau. Additional in-
ducements were the wide open range, land for a dollar an acre,
and an individual land policy which, beginning in 1870, gave
eighty acres to a single man and 160 to a married man upon
three years' residence and payment of a small patent fee and sur-
'A. J. Rose, Occurrences in San Saba and adjacent counties during 1860
and 1868, in Rose Papers, in the Archives of The University of Texas;
Proceedings of the Fourth Annual Reunion of the Old Settlers Association
of Bell County; The Texas State Gazette, December 30, 1865, August 3,
October 5 and 26, 1876; A. J. Rose to W. Dunbar, October 21 and 22,
1892, Rose to Silas Hare, March 1 and December 10, 1892, and December
28, 1899, Rose to John Sloan, December 20, 1890, in Rose Letter Book, in
the Archives of The University of Texas; Geo. W. Todd to his Excellency
the Governor, August 27, 1866, G. B. Cook to - , August 27, 1867, in
Records, Adjutant General's office, Austin, Texas; W. C. Holden, Frontier
Problems and Movements in West Texas, 1848-1900, 98-99, 105-106, 109,
123, Ph. D. dissertation in The University of Texas Library (hereafter
cited as Holden, Frontier Problems). In 1864 about seventy organized
deserters plundered Lampasas County. Ibid., 99.