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Show 42 WAR FOR THE COLORADO RIVER was not easily written. The men of vision and the men seeking to create national benefits for all the people were often defeated and thwarted by powerful opponents - grafters, greedy and selfish politicians, speculators, and others who simply wanted to give the whole West back to the Indians. Numerous laws were passed, but none of them established the fundamental, compre- hensive policy that was both desirable and necessary. The nineteenth century passed into history without it. A major effort that was made to formulate a practical national development program for the public domain was the Carey Act of 1894. It provided that to aid the western states in reclaiming their desert lands for settle- ment, each state would be given a million acres by the Federal Government. A settler was to be limited to 160 acres, and the land could be used only for agricul- ture under irrigation. The Carey Act was not successful, and it did not pro- vide the solution or the program wanted. The individual states had trouble carrying out its provisions, and settlers repeatedly failed because of financial difficulties en- countered in attempts to build irrigation systems. Congress, recognizing these difficulties and not having sufficient data upon which to base corrections, in 1948 appropriated $100,000 to be used for determining the extent to which the West could be developed through irrigation. Before this appropriation had produced any beneficial results, a new president moved into the White House. President Theodore Roosevelt took office on September 14, 1901. He had lived in the West, had been a cowboy and rancher, an explorer, a hunter and a writer. He not only knew the West, but he had studied its problems |