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Show 416 HISTORY OF PUBLIC LAND LAW DEVELOPMENT being made were thus much more than the number of farms being made, at least for a decade or more to come. Though the homesteader was a petty capitalist intruding himself between the government and the man who was to develop the extra quarter, increasing the latter's costs, and dissipating population over a wide area, he may have been providing himself with the capital necessary to make a success of his agricultural operations. He may also have been responsible for bringing to his area friends or relatives for whom he was holding the extra section. When he swore that he was not making the extra entry for others he was committing perjury but his crime, if crime it was, was commonly done and was not as harmful as if he were making his entries for a cattleman, a timber baron, or a large capitalist estate builder. The oft-repeated criticism of farmers holding too much land for their capital resources applied almost everywhere but particularly in newly developing areas where it might take a family a generation to bring land into high production and Percentage of Improved Land in Farms and Average Size of Farms in Row of Counties Extending Westward from the Missouri Line to the Colorado Border, 1880 Percentage of Average Size of County Improved Land Farms Miami 75 139 Franklin 70 124 Osage 64 130 Lyon 60 124 Chase 50 167 Dickinson 65 168 Saline 54 160 Ellsworth 36 172 Russell 29 183 Ellis 23 187 Trego 13 219 Gove 12 213 Wallace 8 207 Computed from data in Tenth Census of the United States, Agriculture, pp. 52-53, 115-116. provide themselves with proper improvements. A glance at the statistics of the size of farms in Kansas in 1880 shows 1,169 farms with 500 to 1,000 acres and 235 with over a thousand acres, although the classification of 500 to 1,000 acres is not very meaningful. The average size of farms in 1880 ranged from 139 acres (75 percent improved) in Miami County in eastern Kansas, to 207 acres (8 percent improved) in Wallace County in western Kansas. It hardly needs to be said that farms in the more western counties were more recently established and the occupants had less time to bring them into cultivation. The practice of commuting homesteads to acquire a quick title, though with the payment of $200 for a quarter-section, did not become sufficiently general to warrant attention in land statistics or in the comments of the Commissioner of the General Land Office in his annual reports until after 1880. This negative evidence, together with the continued favorable and widely expounded views concerning the functioning of the land system, suggests that in these better days of homesteading Congress had hit upon a combination of legislation that provided more than adequately for the needs of settlers; it also suggests that abuse of the legislation was less serious than the success in making it possible for the man with little capital to get started on the road to farm ownership. Between 1863 and 1880, 469,782 applications were filed for 55,667,044 acres under the Homestead Act; 162,237 original entries had been carried to the final entry when the occupants proved up on their tracts. Five years later, the period in which the original entry (if all went well) ripened into final entry, 54 percent of the homesteaders had completed all requirements for titles to their tracts. These 257,385 final homesteads represent more than one-sixth of all the farms in 24 states and territories in which active homesteading was under |