OCR Text |
Show 198 HISTORY OF PUBLIC LAND LAW DEVELOPMENT operations and value anything in existence in the plantation South before the Civil War and were only equalled or exceeded at a later time by the huge grain farms in the Red River Valley of the Dakotas and in California. The owners of some of these estates have shown remarkable tenacity in retaining their rich lands, which were first developed as cattle ranches. For years the Chicago market was supplied with their fat stock and many of their huge bullocks were shipped live weight to the English market.47 Prairie soils of Indiana and Illinois were too productive and became too highly valued to be used long for cattle ranches. By the fifties they were being rented to tenants and tenancy was well under way years before the Census Bureau began to collect information concerning its extent. The multiple ownerships of tenant farms of a number of score of landlords in Indiana and Illinois whose family holdings dated from the thirties and fifties of the 19th century are impossible to isolate in the Census reports but it is known that one landlord had at least 280 tenants in Illinois alone by 1880, in addition to a larger number in Kansas and Nebraska, and dozens of others had smaller numbers of tenants. In both states the tendency to break up the very large farms of 5,000 to 45,000 acres into tenant units did not prevent the establishment and increase in the number of farms that in the East would have been regarded as very large. For example in Illinois in 1860 and 1870 there were, respectively, 194 and 302 farms with improved acreage over 1,000 acres. If allowed the usual amount of unimproved land that was perhaps used for pasture, they would range upward from 1,370 acres. In 1880 there were 649 farms containing 1,000 acres of both improved and unimproved land. In that same year Illinois had 47 Gates, "Hoosier Cattle Kings," pp. i ff.; and id., "Cattle Kings in the Prairies," Mississippi Valley Historical Review, XXXV (December 1948), 379 ff.; id., Frontier Landlords and Pioneer Tenants (Ithaca, N. Y., 1945), passim. 3,249 farms of 500 to 1,000 acres of improved and unimproved land. The number of farms of 500 acres and more were only 1.5 percent of the total, but the percentage of acreage in farms would be much larger. Again the Census fails for it provides no such data. It took shrewd and able management, given personally either by the resident owner or by his representatives, to transform raw prairie estates into productive rent-paying farms or owner-operated farms of 500 acres and more. Many more of the large buyers of the years before the Civil War either were forced to unload their large holdings to meet their costs or preferred to sell rather than to carry their investment indefinitely. The first land office in Iowa was opened in 1838. There was a small flurry of purchasing during the next 3 years but Iowa did not become the first objective of land speculators until the 1850's, when it was apparent that the most favored route for a transcontinental railroad was that by way of South Pass- which meant across Iowa. It had also been known that Iowa prairie lands were among the best in the country. Then began the rush of land buyers to obtain an investment in the state having the least waste and the largest proportion of excellent land of all states. Capital flowed into Iowa in great quantities. In every land office town agents were prepared to enter land for absentee investors, to manage their sales, leases, and collections, and to pay their taxes. During this period of booming land sales, warrant entries, and talk about railroads, more public land passed into private ownership in Iowa than in any other state. Among the buyers were 101 individuals or partnerships who bought 2,786,000 acres-7.8 percent of the acreage of the state-in amounts of 5,000 acres or more. Six of these purchases were for more than 100,000 acres, one was for 178,000 acres, one for 190,000 acres, and one for 250,000 acres. Four other large acquisitions averaged 83,000 acres. In one tract of 2,500,000 acres in nine counties of central Iowa, 31.7 percent or 792,796 acres were ac- |