" ...It was no accident that some of the first bureaucracies took shape in the West: the National Forest Service, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (which gradually took modern form as the older Indian Service sank beneath its long heritage of fraud and corruption), and the U.S. Geological Service. Mythologized as the heatland of individualism, the West became the kindergarten of the modern American state. "

― Richard White , The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896