OCR Text |
Show 434 HISTORY OF PUBLIC LAND LAW DEVELOPMENT All three men had presented adequate evidence of the fraudulent character of contract surveying and of extensive misuse of the Preemption, Timber Culture, and Desert Land Acts; in calling for their repeal, they had avoided the major question of how to make these laws work properly through efficient administration. It was unfortunate that the report of the commission, the more restrained section of The Public Domain, and Commissioner Williamson's recommendations concerning the need for a reconsideration of the major land laws were so completely disregarded.91 It goes without question that Powell's report on the arid lands and the report of the Public Land Commission, with their obviously misleading accounts of the region both east and immediately west of the 100th meridian, would not be favorably received in North and South Dakota, Nebraska, and Kansas. The Nebraska State Agricultural Society and the Nebraska State Horticultural Society asked Professors Sam-muel Aughey and C. D. Wilber of the College of Agriculture to comment on the 91 Search in the New York Times index and the periodical literature reveals little attention was paid to the report or to Donaldson's The Public Domain. tenor of the reports to " 'condemn as agricultural,' and 'dominate, for all time to come, only as pasturage lands,' that portion of the state situate west of the one hundredth meridian." The professors scoffed at the commission which contained no one familiar with soil science, denied that the rainfall beyond the 100th meridian was insufficient to produce .cereal grains, directed attention to the cycles of rainfall in which a number of abnormally dry years had been followed by unusually wet years, and argued that "climates in the west are becoming moister; that rainfall is increasing steadily." This increased rainfall which was attributed to farm development was sufficient, they maintained, to produce crops without irrigation in the plains east of Denver and Laramie. To close the area west of the 100th meridian to homestead-ing would be "in the interest of capital against the toiling millions. The success of this project would be a crime against society and calamitous to us as a state."92 92 Samuel Aughey and C. D. Wilber, "Agriculture Beyond the 100th Meridian or a Review of the U.S. Public Land Commission" (Lincoln, Nebr., 1880), 7 pp. |