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Show DRY FARMING AND STOCK RAISING HOMESTEADS, 1904-1934 501 In 1900 there were 1,728 farms and ranches of at least 1,000 acres in the counties in which the Kinkaid Act was to apply. In the more western counties the percentage of farms in excess of 1,000 acres ranged from 8 in Scotts Bluff township to 31 in Grant, which may be taken as a clear indication of the widespread use of dummy entrymen and the marked tendency to sell tracts as soon as title was acquired. These same counties by 1930 had 5,068 farms in excess of 1,000 acres and 502 in excess of 5,000 acres.11 It took many Kinkaid homesteads to make a ranch of 5,000 to 15,000 acres or the 11,893-acre average of 78 farms in Grant County in 1940. We may deduce from the Census of 1960 that it took 4,256 Kinkaid homesteads to make 456 farms or nine each to make a viable ranch that survived until then.12 Professor Harold Hedges of the Department of Rural Economics in the Nebraska College of Agriculture summed up in 1928 the results of the Kinkaid Act for the Sand Hills country: Even the increased size of homesteads was not sufficient to insure permanent settlement. Many abandoned their claims before proving up on them. Others were glad to sell their holdings after they realized that crop-farming on the Sand Hill land was out of the question except in limited areas. Since the 'kinkaider' days individual holdings of land have been enlarged by purchase and 11 Grant County farms and ranches in the Sand Hills country averaged 5,738 acres in 1930. Sheldon has compiled a number of useful tables showing the number of cattle, the acreage of farms, and the number of farms in excess of 1,000 and 5,000 acres in the western counties of Nebraska, Land Systems and Land Policies in Nebraska, pp. 162, 165, 186. 12 Moses Kinkaid testified before the House Committee on Public Lands in 1914 that his act had worked as well in western Nebraska as the 160-acre act worked in admittedly good areas. The committee wanted him to testify that a large proportion of the settlers had stuck to the land but he was cagy and evaded a direct answer. House Committee on Public Lands, "Grazing Homesteads and the Regulation of Grazing on the Public Lands," 1914, pp. 334-47. lease and attempts at cropping operations have been abandoned. Fenced pastures have replaced the open range and private control of the land is the rule. The final result is a cattle industry established on a much sounder basis than in the days of free grass. Hedges analyzed the operations of 47 Sand Hills ranches mostly in Cherry County. They averaged 6,681 acres, had herds of from 111 to 1,843 yearling cattle and represented an investment of $16,815 to $332,073.13 Cattlemen Begin to Fear Range Loss As cattlemen watched the progress of homesteading in the fine rangelands they had once enjoyed, and had in some instances illegally fenced, some of them came reluctantly to the realization that only through leasing with legalized fencing could they gain immunity from the inroads of the homesteaders and some protection against abuse of the range. A few scattered and ineffective efforts were made to bring about a leasing policy in the early part of the century. Another and more strongly supported proposal was to extend the 640-acre Homestead Act of 1904 to the non-irrigable lands of South Dakota and Montana. Such a measure, overwhelmingly endorsed by the Legislature of South Dakota, though opposed by the House of Representatives of Montana and the Commissioner of the Land Office, won committee approval in both Houses of Congress and actually passed the lower House in 1905. However, members of the Senate preferred to wait upon the results of the Kinkaid Act in Nebraska. All that was apparent at the time was that a motley crew of people were drawn to the land offices of western Nebraska to take ad- 13 Harold Hedges, Economic Aspects of the Cattle Industry of the Nebraska Sand Hills, Bulletin 231, Experiment Station, College of Agriculture, The University of Nebraska (December 1928) , pp. 4, 10. |