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Show Chapter XVIII Dry Farming and Stock Raising Homesteads 1904-1934 Members of Congress who had grown up with the belief that free homesteads would solve labor troubles in the East, provide opportunities for the younger people being crowded out of the older rural areas, satisfy the longings of the land-hungry immigrants pouring into the Nation's ports, and, perhaps above all, promote the growth of the West, were reluctant to believe that the era of free lands for farms was over after 1900. Homestead was the great measure which offered something to every element of the population. In addition to saving the Union, it was the major achievement for which the Republican Party was responsible. Its results were seen everywhere in the West, its importance to the country and to the Party was clear. What free homesteads had done for Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakotas in the seventies and eighties might they not do in the Rocky Mountain, Interior Basin, and Coast States? It was difficult for the members to admit that the semi-arid lands or the range country could not be made into viable farms by grants of 160-acre homesteads as the region east of the 100th meridian had been. In an attempt to adjust the homestead system to this semi-arid area Congress had passed the Timber Culture and Desert Land Acts but the changes had proved to be of questionable wisdom. Congress then had repealed the Timber Culture Act and placed more safeguards in the Desert Land Act but in doing so it had made the land system more inflexible just at the time when it needed to be radically changed and adapted to areas of less than 20 inches of rainfall. Grazing homesteads large enough to be efficient economic units were then proposed but encountered opposition from those who feared land monopoly and argued that experience had shown that further liberalization of the land unit would only result in the accumulation of large ownerships. Increased Values Encourage Investors There was much talk about saving the public lands from the grasping speculator, the timber barons, and the cattle kings for the land-hungry immigrant, the dispossessed tenant or mortgaged farmer of the Middle West, or the New Englander who was tired of trying to make a living on his rock-strewn, thin-soiled hills. In fact those who were looking to the government for additional land did not fall into these categories. Previously, according to the more romantic view, people rushing west to take up land were "settlers," that is, 495 |