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Show 498 HISTORY OF PUBLIC LAND LAW DEVELOPMENT and that was what the stockmen wanted. But those who still thought of the public lands as providing an opportunity for the landless protested so vigorously that the proposal was dropped.3 The Kinkaid Act President Roosevelt focused attention upon the inadequacy of the 160-acre homestead law for the semi-arid lands in his State of the Union message to Congress in 1902. A year earlier the Congressman from northwestern Nebraska had introduced a bill to provide for 1,280-acre homesteads in the semi-arid lands but obtained little support. In 1904, his successor, Moses P. Kinkaid, introduced a similar measure and was successful in securing a favorable report from the House Committee on Public Lands after it had reduced the size of the unit to 640 acres. Discussion in the House centered on the question of whether the measure would be subsequently extended to the remaining public lands. Little attention was devoted to the economic feasibility of 640-acre grazing units in the Sands Hills region where it was primarily to apply. Both the House and Senate passed it without division after clarifying amendments had been adopted and the two versions reconciled. The Kinkaid Act provided that in the western two-thirds of Nebraska, homestead units of 640 acres would be available to settlers who would live on them for 5 years and would make improvements worth $1.25 for each acre. Land suitable for irrigation along the Platte and other streams was to be excluded from the provisions of the act. Persons who had already homesteaded on 160 acres or less were privileged to make another entry to bring their holdings to the full section. No commutation of entries was to be allowed. In his supporting speech Kinkaid declared 3 Peffer, op. cit., pp. 72 ff. that the settlers had already classified the lands of western Nebraska by their action in locating only upon the hay lands close to the streams and rejecting the sand hills where water was not available and rainfall was insufficient to produce anything but a very meager stand of forage.4 Knowing members of Congress might well have inquired how abuse of the Kinkaid Act could be prevented in view of the widespread evidence that efforts to prevent misuse of the original Homestead Act and its commutation feature had met with little success. Rich and influential cattlemen of Nebraska immediately took advantage of the new law, and to no one's surprise for, as Marie Sandoz has said, it was intended as a cattleman's law. Speaking of the opening of the Sand Hills to the enlarged entry Miss Sandoz writes: The day of the opening long queues of home-seekers waited for hours, only to find that even the sad choice of land that was free had been filed earlier in the day. There was talk of cattleman agents who made up baskets full of filing papers beforehand and ran them through the first thing. One woman was said to have filed on forty sections, under forty names, at five dollars a shot. The land was covered by filings that would never turn into farms.5 Times were somewhat changed, however, and the cattlemen were not to have their way entirely. Their fences still enclosed thousands of acres of land now intended for small grazing homesteads, and their hands still tried to intimidate possible settlers from taking up land, and even resorted to murder on occasion. In the past, courts, Congressmen, and newspapers, even Presidents, except for Cleveland, had favored the large ranchers with their illegal 4 Cong. Record, 58th Cong., 2d sess., April 18, 1904, pp. 5006-5009; 33 Stat., Part I, p. 547; Arthur R. Reynolds, "The Kinkaid Act and Its Effects on Western Nebraska," Agricultural History, XXIII (January 1949) , 20-29. 5 Marie Sandoz, Old Jules (Boston, 1935) , pp. 269-70. |