There remains something considerably less than 500,000,000 acres of public land open to settlement. From this total amount careful and conservative estimates deduct 300,000,000 acres as not suited to present known methods of agriculture. The remaining 200,000,000 of the public domain is passing into the hands of private individuals at a rate exceeding 17,000,000 acres per year. At the present rate of diminution the valuable public domain will be exhausted within the next decade and a half.
The public domain lies largely in the States and Territories of Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Washington, Utah, Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado, South and North Dakota and California. In Texas, by virtue of the agreement with the United States at the time of annexation, the title to the public lands rests in the State. Liberal grants to the Western States, of lands for school and institutional purposes, should be added to the public domain in order to arrive at the total land available for future settlement. These State lands are sold at prices somewhat below the price of similar unimproved lands in the same locality, but on long terms, and appeal about equally to the farmers and the speculators. Their gradual disposal is placing in the treasuries of the Eastern States a large school fund. The people are the beneficiaries under the administration of the State land laws. A possible 50,000,000 acres of farming land is available from this source after the National domain is gone. It is well to note in passing that the value of the State lands rises in proportion to that of surrounding lands. It is controlled and disposed of with entirely different motives from those supposed to govern the control and disposal of the lands of the general Government. It is not free land in any sense of the word.
There are many who, remembering how the Western limit of grain raising has crept westward across Kansas, Nebraska and the Dakotas, look for a repetition, or, more properly speaking, a continuation of this phenomenon across the remaining public domain. It is true that we are only on the borderland of plant-breeding possibilities. Spelz, or macaroni wheat, Kaffir corn, and other drought-resistant cereals are making a marvelous change in Western farming conditions, and in the certainty of crop maturity; but as was stated before, under known conditions, only two-fifths of all this Western land is now or will ever be adapted to agriculture. On the remaining three-fifths, grazing, limited in amount, will continue to be profitable. Within this large area lie the giant ridges of the Rocky Mountains. Great gulches channel their slopes. Valleys are strewn with the debris of ages of erosion. Rain fall is scanty. Water supplied from artesian wells has only a limited possibility of use. Irrigation is local in application, and limited not only by stream supply, but also by the topography of the country. We have reached the limits of the immediate adaptation of agriculture to climatic conditions.
The area of the valuable public domain is measurable, but it is as yet not measured. To the eastward of the area named there is some land still open to settlement under the homestead act. What sort of land is it? Land covered with glacial drift, swamps, hills, sandy land—the cast away heritage of three generations of keen-eyed farmers. Greater stress of need will bring some of this under the plow, but the fact remains that it is undesirable land, viewed from the standpoint of the man who desires not only a home, but a competence.
Alaska, with unknown but probably limited agricultural possibilities, is already beginning to attract the attention of the speculative public. Farmers are not greatly interested in the development of agriculture in a region so remote and where the season precludes farming on a broad scale.
This somewhat lengthy statement of present day conditions is necessary in order to understand the danger that menaces us as a people through the alienation of the public domain from its legitimate uses. The land open to settlement is passing, not into the possession of makers of homes, but into the hands of speculators who are enriching themselves in the first instance at the expense of the farmers, but ultimately at that of the people at large.
The vast grants to the transcontinental railroads, by means of which the Government paid private parties royally for building roads that have, since their construction, charged the people for services rendered “all the traffic will bear,” threw open, wide open, the doors to the land speculator.
Railroad lands were bought up at a low figure by companies backed by Eastern capital, just as today similar companies are buying up and exploiting the Canadian Northwest. Settlers were sought for and brought in by the car load. They were located on a quarter section of Government land, and sold as much more of the adjoining speculators’ land as they could be persuaded to buy. Under other firm names these same gentlemen who exploited the public and corporation lands sold horses and farm machinery to the new settler, taking mortgages as partial security on crops not yet grown. The lean years came, and the land companies reaped to the full their harvests.
So passed away from the people millions of acres of land in the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas and the bordering States. Today that land is selling back to the people at prices ranging from $10 to $40 an acre—land which I have seen sold under the sheriff’s hammer at less than $1.00 an acre.
These land agencies are, in a thousand ways, busying themselves in the securing of further lands for speculative purposes. The days of wholesale grants having gone by, they are turning their attention to the lands of the individual settler, and under their tutelage clerks, teachers, town men and women, hired laborers, men who do not know wheat from barley or rye from flax, are filing upon the last of the tillable public lands. Under the homestead law, these settlers are allowed six months after entry in which to establish homes on their land. This time is taken full advantage of. Then a board shack is built and the law complied with by the breaking of a few acres of sod. Eight months more of (constructive) continuous residence, and the land becomes the property of the settler upon a cash payment of $1.25 to $2.50 an acre, according to location. The company furnishes the commutation money and “finds” a purchaser for the claim. The shack is boarded up or moved off. The sod grows to weeds. The settler, having made from $800 to $2,500 by a little enterprise and a good deal of perjury, is eliminated from the problem.