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Show 363, . . . fortunately farming on so collossal a scale even with improved implements and good cultivation seldom pays, and therefore the big grants are being subdivided into comparatively small lots and sold to true husbandsmen. Clearly he had missed the larger reality which would destroy the hopes of "true husbandsmen" in the West. Muir predicted an agrarian Utopia in the Central Valley; his vision of "the most foodful and beautiful of all the lowland valleys of like extent in the world," would result from a preserved forest watershed, storage reservoirs, and other lessons he had learned from Mormon water rights systems, and Nevada farming. He failed to consider the economic forces which were already shaping the American landscape. Henry Nash Smith explains: The agrarian Utopia in the garden of the world was destroyed, or rather aborted, by the land speculator and the railroad monopolist. These were in turn but expressions of the larger forces at work in American society after the Civil War - the machine, the devices of corporation finance, and the power of big business over Congress. The Homestead Act failed because it was incongruous with the Industrial Revolution. Perhaps Muir had deceived himself to please a hypothetical audience, or did not fully consider what he was saying. As his other articles for Scribner's make clear, his perspective toward agriculture had not really changed, as long as he viewed the farms from the mountains; then all of man's improvements |