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Show DRY FARMING AND STOCK RAISING HOMESTEADS, 1904-1934 497 men who wanted land to make a farm to which they would dedicate their lives. After 1900, contemporary observers-and later, historians-noted that those who flocked to the land offices to enter a 640-acre Kinkaid tract, or a homestead on one of the Indian reservations being opened to settlement were for the most part "men well-to-do who are attracted by the chance of securing a valuable prize without risk." A writer in the Outlook said in 1909, "The day of real land hunger passed many years ago; what now exists is money hunger, for the rise in land values throughout the agricultural sections has inspired speculative ambitions and attracted every one with savings. . . ." Ethan Allen Hitchcock, Secretary of the Interior, had characterized many of those entering homesteads in Nebraska in 1902 as follows: "What is known as 'hobo filing,' the making of entries by tramps and other irresponsible persons in the interest of those desiring to obtain large quantities of public lands for grazing purposes, so it is averred, is there resorted to."1 It has already been seen that from the very beginning of western development many people were disposed to take advantage of the land system to accumulate wealth, not through developing the land but through speculating in it or, as a recent historian has said, "there were more people interested in unearned increment than in economic development.2 Abuses of the land system were observed and combated on every frontier and "money hunger" was always apparent. The opportunities for speculation became much 1 Peffer, The Closing of the Public Domain, p. 144, citing "The March of the Land Hungry," Outlook, Sept. 3, 1909, pp. 133-34; Secretary of the Interior, Annual Report, 1902, H. Doc, 57th Cong., 2d tea., Vol. 18 (Serial No. 4457), No. 5, p. 12. 2 Thomas LeDuc, "History and Appraisal of U.S. Land Policy to 1862," in Howard W. Ottoson (ed.) , Land Use Policy and Problems in the United States (Lincoln, Nebr., 1963) , p. 27. greater after the Civil War with the tremendous rush of people into the West and the rapid appreciation of land values, and probably most of those locating land were hopeful of selling some of it. But that land hunger as such was a thing of the past is not borne out by the records of farm making in the 20th century in the newer western states. From Gallatin's day on, the settlers' protagonists-Benton, Walker, Grow, Julian, and Holman-had striven to create a land system that would make possible the success of the small man with little capital and as regularly the legislation they framed tended to open up new avenues for land engrossment. The outcries of the pro-settler element in Congress against "the rape of the public domain" and their advocacy of legislation that would reserve the public lands for homesteaders were set down as demagoguery by the more realistic western Representatives who were aware that measures designed for small farmers commonly played into the hands of large operators. In the 20th century when it seemed advisable either to lease the remaining public lands having any value for agriculture to stockmen on terms that would prevent the destructive overgrazing then practised on the open range, or to make possible grazing homestead units of 640 or 1,280 acres, the fear of engrossment and abuse of any such law was difficult to eliminate. Some cattlemen, despairing of obtaining the legislation they wanted from Congress as long as the public lands were administered in the Department of the Interior, began to demand the transfer of the grazing lands from the General Land Office to the Department of Agriculture and its Forest Service. There, they might have the benefit of the same kind of controlled leasing regulations that Pinchot was instituting within the national forests. Leasing would mean the end of homesteading |