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Show DRY FARMING AND STOCK RAISING HOMESTEADS, 1904-1934 521 bert Work had lost all assurance that the law was working out well and feared, on the contrary, that it was doing major damage to the livestock industry. "Stock raising on a tract limited to 640 acres is not practicable," he declared; "homesteads for stock raising are rapidly reverting to the open range." The government "has been criticized because it invites its citizens to enter public lands of this character, invest their small savings in an effort to develop them, only to find that they have wasted their time and capital in a fruitless struggle against insurmountable conditions." He urged the repeal of the Stock Raising Homestead Act and that a policy of leasing the lands be substituted. In the hearings in 1926 on a bill to institute leasing of the public lands Senator Robert N. Stan-field, Chairman of the Senate Committee on Public Lands and Surveys, went further in calling the Stock Raising Homestead Act a failure. He said that in the main the 640-acre homesteads had been acquired by speculators for resale, that the act had been "detrimental to the utilization of grazing on the public domain," and had enabled speculators to collect tribute from livestock men. "In other words, it has been an instrument of blackmail upon the livestock interests, to a large extent."59 Will C. Barnes of the Forest Service had no hungry constituents to pacify. He looked upon the Stock Raising Homestead Act in a very different way from most members of Congress and was more rigorously critical than the Secretary. He knew that the West had been combed over carefully by land agents and landseekers since the passage of the Enlarged Homestead (Reed Smoot) Act and doubted that there remained any considerable quantity of land on which settlers could hope to make a living. In 1917 he stated his belief that it 89 Hearings Before the Committee on Public Lands and Surveys, United States Senate, on Grazing Facilities on Public Lands, 1926, p. 68. would take 35 acres of public land to keep a cow and that on the average it would require 50 acres. Not one tract in a thousand had surface water and well digging was expensive and generally fruitless. The act was nothing but a remnant sale. When it was reported to him that many persons from the East were either preparing to go west to search for land or were already flooding western communities for that purpose he warned that the best of the remaining lands would be taken up by people already on the spot who would hold for buyers.60 In 1923 Barnes was even more forthright in condemning the Stock Raising Homestead Act for the damage it was doing to the range and for the "vast amount of actual suffering" it was causing people who had been misled into believing they could make a living on such a small tract only suitable for grazing and producing nothing but Russian thistles and black alkali. His views, he conceded, would not be well received by some papers in the West, or by the "hosts of locators-those blood suckers who infest every little prairie town in the range region, and lure men out onto lands" on which they may previously have located for substantial fees one or more settlers who had earlier failed. Barnes told of one of "these harpies" who had located three successive families on a tract which all three had abandoned within a year. Our government, he complained, "deluded seekers of free government land" to take up 640-acre tracts, and had virtually made the Secretary of the Interior stand officially responsible for the statement that "they are capable of supporting a family." Here he was alluding to the sections in the act which required the Secretary of the Interior to open to entry only such lands as were fit for stock raising in section allotments and "are of such character that six 80 Breeder's Gazette, 71 (Jan. 18, 1917), 141-42. |