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Show HOMESTEADING, 1862-1882 417 way.53 There is a fairly close correlation between the number of final homesteads in the newer territories in 1885 and the number of farms found by the census takers in 1880. Homesteads and Farms in Newer Territories Total of Final Homesteads Number of State or Territory in 1885 Farms in 1880 Dakota 15,583 17,435 Idaho 1,323 1,885 Colorado 4,804 4,506 Montana 1,094 1,519 Utah 3,231 9,452 Washington 5,499 6,529 Nevada 292 1,404 From BLM, Homesteads, and Tenth Census of the United States. The growing number of immigrants and the increasing quantity of capital flowing westward in the late seventies and eighties created a period of economic prosperity and coincided with the third great rush to acquire a stake in the public lands. During the years 1875-79 the number of immigrants averaged 171,107; in 1882 it jumped to a new high of 788,992, and averaged 605,519 for the years 1880 and 1884. Thereafter the incoming tide slackened somewhat but not until 1894 and 1895 did the number fall below 300,000.54 Although an increasing proportion of the newer immigrants took employment in industry, enough of them sought out homes in the frontier West, along with continued migration of older American stock, to send values spiraling upward, and to stimulate the 63 If we deduct the farms in existence in 1860 from the total for the states in which there was active homesteading, in 1880, we have 979,866 farms created after 1860 of which 26 percent may have been homesteads. 54 Historical Statistics of the United States (Washington, 1960), pp. 56-57. rapid transfer of public lands to private ownership.55 No Timberland Policy In the haphazard development of land legislation Congress had never devised a policy for timberlands. Instead, it had allowed all laws such as cash sale, warrant, and scrip entry, preemption, graduation, and homestead to apply to them as to all other lands when offered. As long as the forests covered potentially useful farmlands this is understandable, but by the 1850's the pineries in the Lake States and in the eighties the longleaf pine lands in the Deep South, which were generally of little use for farming, were being bought by lumbermen and dealers in timberlands. Some cut on the public lands with impunity, but in the fifties and again when Carl Schurz was Secretary of the Interior during the Hayes administration, an effort was made to prevent timber hooking, although not altogether successfully. Most of the land could be acquired, if surveyed, with warrants or scrip at no more than $1 an acre, and if not surveyed, it was easy enough to hire men to file preemption or homestead claims on the desired tracts and to prove up or commute at the end of 6 months and get title. Costs were still low. For some years after the adoption of the Homestead Act, timberlands in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Colorado, Oregon, and Washington continued to be offered and were open to unrestricted entry. The growing anti-monopoly feeling in the West, however, discouraged administrators from con- 66 Folke Dovring examined in a restricted form the role of the Homestead Act in inducing European emigration to America in "European Reactions to the Homestead Act," Journal of Economic History, XXII (December 1962), 461-72. More detailed examination of letters written from the United States in the years after 1862 is needed before the role of the homestead law is so minimized in explaining decisions to emigrate. |