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Show 400 HISTORY OF PUBLIC LAND LAW DEVELOPMENT really threefold: to get groves of trees growing in the hope that they would affect the weather and bring more rainfall, to provide a source of fencing, fuel wood, and building materials in the future, and to provide another method by which land could be acquired in areas where larger units than the usual 160 acres seemed necessary. Once a settler had filed a timber culture entry, he could control the tract for 13 years before it lapsed for nonfulfillment, and if the land officers had not observed the failure of the entryman to prove up the period might be longer. Other settlers, however, might contest the entry thereafter. During this time the entryman had the use of the land without being subject to any taxes on it; more important, he could hold it for himself or other members of his family who might later wish to preempt or homestead it, or he could sell a relinquishment. Here was its chief value, for though the sale of relinquishments was contrary to law, the business flourished and provided a small but significant return to early comers enabling them to make a better start on their other claim or claims. It was the prospect of selling a relinquishment that induced many pioneers in new territories to file timber culture claims and it was the business in relinquishments that explains why such a small proportion of the original timber culture claims never went to patent. There were 290,278 entries for 43,500,000 acres, most of them in Kansas, Nebraska, and Dakota Territory, of which only 10,866,888 acres went to patent. The balance was either relinquished or cancelled." "Herbert S. Schell, History of South Dakota (Lincoln, Nebr., 1961), p. 179; Fred A. Shannon, The Farmer's Last Frontier, Agriculture, 1860-1897 (New York, 1945), p. 59; William F. Raney, "The Timber Culture Acts," Mississippi Valley Historical Association, Proceedings, Vol. 10, 1918-21, pp. 219-29. I have taken the acreage of final entries, including the commuted entries, from Hibbard, History of the This is not to say that the Timber Culture Act was not productive of tree growth on the Plains nor that many settlers did not acquire title to the extra 160 acres. Timber was needed for various purposes and the evidence indicates that settlers did set out trees and try to tend them for a time; recent research has revealed that some groves did survive.28 It also appears that some settlers gained title to their timber culture claim, which, with a preemption Public Land Policies, p. 422. Copp, The American Settler's Guide, pp. 69-75, is useful here. One of the least studied features of the western land business is the sale of relinquishments, which is touched upon in this work in a number of places. Sufficient evidence has come forth from widely scattered sources to suggest that the cost of farm making and the average settler's lack of capital were among the factors inducing settlers to resort to methods of holding surplus claims for a time until the pressure for land made it possible to sell them and thus to provide the necessary funds for making and stocking their farms. Evidences of this tendency to control more land than an ordinary settler could ever expect to develop may be seen in the early claims associations which sometimes allowed settlers to "occupy" 320 or 480 acres and the entries of both homestead and preemption tracts and later of timber culture tracts. By claiming and later selling such surplus tracts many pioneers managed to accumulate sufficient funds to make successful farms in a lifetime or less, though they may have started with little or nothing. A recent writer missed the importance of the sale of relinquishments and seems to have concluded that the 43-percent failure of settlers to gain ownership of entries they had made in Nebraska caused "agonizing heartbreak" rather than providing them with funds for improvements. Homer Socolofsky, "Success and Failure in Nebraska Homesteading," Agricultural History, 63 (April 1968), 103 ff., also seems to have misunderstood the thrust of my article on "The Homestead Law in an Incongruous Land System," which was not intended to display homestead as a failure but as a statute whose operations were less successful than previous writers had indicated because it was embedded in a land system whose basic feature of providing revenue from land purchasers was inharmonious with a free land policy. 28 Everett Dick, The Sod-House Frontier, 1854-1890 (New York, 1937), is excellent on pioneer life on the plains. |