OCR Text |
Show 466 HISTORY OF PUBLIC LAND LAW DEVELOPMENT of the problem of the Indian living in a white man's world. Farm Making and Stockmen Farm making in the West reached its peak in the 20 years between 1880 and 1900 when 497,230 new farms were created in the public domain states west of the first tier beyond the Mississippi, but including Minnesota. In that same period 176,901 new farms were created in Texas. A total of 5,396,000 immigrants came to the United States in the eighties and though there were not quite so many in the nineties the number of immigrants still exceeded that of any decade before the eighties. Farms were being created well beyond the 98th and the 100th meridian, though their size indicates that they were combinations of homesteads, preemptions, timber culture claims, desert land entries, and purchases from railroads and of school sections. Settlers were moving in growing numbers into the area where the cattle industry flourished, and where Major Powell thought the land should be made available to stockmen in units of 2,560 acres. Although grain farming was hazardous in western Kansas and western portions of Nebraska and Dakota Territory, landseek-ers and real estate interests, such as railroads and town promoters, could not agree with Powell and population continued to press into this range country. Settlers found that a couple of wet years when wheat crops were very good would be followed by an equal or greater number of dry years in which crops were partial or complete failures. Population would enter this area of meager rainfall in good years; in dry years farms were abandoned and there was a reverse movement of population back to areas of more rainfall. Over the course of two generations the settlers adapted their crops by introducing drought-resistant strains of wheat and sorghum and their methods of tillage to the region. Grain farming has survived, along with cattle raising. Cattlemen had preceded settlers into central and western Kansas, Nebraska, and Dakota Territory, grazing their livestock over large areas of public lands which were wide open to them without cost. But as disputes arose over water rights, the fore-sighted stockmen saw the necessity of controlling access to water. At this point they resorted to the homestead or preemption laws:, had their hands apply for land along streams, commute their homesteads to preemptions, take title and transfer the quarter-sections to their employer. Possession of a few hundred acres might thus give the stockman control of many thousand acres of grass land. Then in the years of fair rainfall came the settlers, breaking up the range, insisting on the adoption of herd laws, and trying to ban further introduction of Texas steers that brought the destructive Texas fever to local cattle. Barbed wire had been perfected by this time and the stockmen bought it by the carload and fenced in millions of acres to keep out both homesteaders and other stockmen. This brought about such an uproar against the fences that the Senate called for an investigation in 1884.10 Special agents were sent into the high plains country to investigate accounts coming to the land office of fraudulent entries. From the reports of these agents and complaints of many settlers, Henry M. Teller, 10 Few topics have so fascinated historians and the public as the early days of the cattle industry on the Great Plains. Four generally good studies which have dealt with the public land question in some degree are: Ernest S. Osgood, The Day of the Cattleman (Minneapolis, 1929) ; Everett E. Dale, The Range Cattle Industry. Ranching on the Great Plains from 1865 to 1925 (Norman, Okla., 1930) ; Louis Pelzer, The Cattlemen's Frontier. A Record of the Trans-Mississippi Cattle Industry from Oxen Trains to Pooling Companies, 1850-1890 (Glendale, Calif., 1936) ; Ora B. Peake, The Colorado Range Cattle Industry (Glendale, 1937) . |