Homesteaders are good stock upon which to build a civilization. Many of them are sturdy folk who have come to the West to establish homes and with determination are doing so. Of course, there are the habitual drifters who have always been failures because they never stayed long enough anywhere to succeed. But they prove up on their claims and then go elsewhere, drifting still. Others leave, holding their land as an investment, because they have not found the land or the circumstances up to their expectations. The free land has gradually been taken up, so that there is very little of it left in any one of these counties. The population is becoming less transient on this account. More people are staying because there is no more free land, and no other newer frontier.
What, then, has the survey shown of the Range? How has it fared in its 100 years of growth? What are its assets as well as its needs? In a word, what has it made of itself? The very presence of real farm-houses on dry farming land and mesas speaks in itself of a small world conquered. Of course, there are farm-houses in the valleys. But sheer grit is all that achieves a house and a barn and a wind-shield of trees out on the mesa. Lumber is expensive and must be hauled from the nearest market. Trees, so wary of growing there, must be watched, watered and carefully tended every day for the first five years. A home on the plains means more sweat and toil and effort than a home anywhere else in our country.
WATERING HER GARDEN
This homesteader of ten years’ standing has succeeded in cultivating an attractive garden patch even in the thirsty soil of New Mexico.
Self-Help the Rule
The development of the Range has been haphazard. Any Land Company has been able to work up a “boom” at will. Not even misrepresentations and uncounted, unlimited hardships have stirred the Government to form and follow any better colonization policy for its unoccupied lands than its “Homestead laws.” The western farmer has never been cherished by his Government as has been the Canadian farmer. Until the comparatively recent development of county agent services and the Farm Bureau, he has had to work for everything he got with very little help from any one.
An intense economic struggle is behind the homesteaders. They begin from the bottom up. Some are just now beginning, but for the majority the difficulty of getting a start is over. But the last few years have been hard for every farmer and rancher on the Range, old settler and new alike. No part of the country can afford to have the men on the land as hard pressed as these men have been. Too large a proportion of the farms have been mortgaged for the economic well-being of a nation.
A COMMUNITY RENDEZVOUS