OCR Text |
Show 516 HISTORY OF PUBLIC LAND LAW DEVELOPMENT The Conference of Western Governors which had become a vehicle for attacking Federal management of the public lands and demanding that responsibility for their administration be transferred to the states jumped into the struggle for stock raising homesteads at its meeting in Denver in April 1914. At their 1913 meeting the governors had demanded that the new states be placed on a truly "equal footing" with the old by being given responsibility for and ownership of the land within their borders. Recognizing that this objective would not be gained, they asked that the conservation program on the public lands be placed in state hands, that public lands be speedily conveyed to private ownership, that 5 percent of the remaining public lands be given the states for public highways, that other grants be made for the establishment of forestry schools and that mineral lands be reopened to entry at nominal prices. In 1914 the conference reiterated its demands of the previous year and in addition asked for the adoption of a stock raising homestead law, for a summer homestead law that would permit people to acquire sites for summer homes in the forests, and asked that 10 percent of the remaining public lands be given the states (in addition to the 5 percent for good roads) for irrigation.48 Cattlemen and sheepmen once so powerful in the councils of the West, were now displaced by real estate groups, commercial clubs, railroad representatives, and other of special agents, acting as detectives, was spying on the "humble homesteader" to find reasons to report adversely on their entries and, as a result, hundreds of thousands of "industrious, honest, law-abiding citizens" had been driven away to find homes on the Canadian prairies. "There are no more patriotic, home-loving people in the world than those who are now attempting to acquire title' to 160 acre tracts of land in the great arid west." App. to Cong. Record, 63d Cong., 2d sess., June 25, 1914, pp. 684-86. 48 Cong. Record, 63d Cong., 2d sess., April 20, 1914, pp. 6894-95; New York Times, April 12, 1914. new economic forces who wanted to encourage immigration and the breakup of the range into 640-acre homesteads whose occupants, it was believed, would contribute more to growth and prosperity than the great cattle barons had ever done. Leasing of the range would lock up ownership in the hands of the absentee Federal government and keep out homesteaders; classification would take time, be expensive, and would give too much authority to bureaucrats. Since the 320-acre act was working badly, and even the Kinkaid Act in Nebraska not producing the benefits that had been expected of it, it could be predicted that extension of the 640-acre homestead unit to other states would be sure to harm the public rangelands and the large sheep and cattle interests. But western repres-sentation anticipated that this evil would be offset by the creation of tens of thousands of new farms whose occupants would stimulate the growth of towns and cities in their states. Stock Raising Homestead Act Adopted Edward T. Taylor, Congressman from Colorado, has a peculiar niche in history because he was the man who finally maneuvered through the House both the 640-acre Stock Raising Homestead Act in 1916 and later the Grazing Act of 1934, which took his name and in effect reversed the earlier act which he had come to regret. In calling up the 640-acre act, Taylor reminded the members of the House that representatives of the Department of the Interior had declared the Kinkaid Act had been "wondei-fully successful" in making possible the swift development of western Nebraska. The Congressman optimistically reported that "hundreds of thousands" of people had taken up dry farming on the public lands under the Enlarged Homestead Act of 1909 and built up many rich and prosperous communities. With the better lands suitable for small homesteads largely gone, much of the remaining lands were arid, not |