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Show DRY FARMING AND STOCK RAISING HOMESTEADS, 1904-1934 509 future as an additional producer of stock and farm products."30 Barnes' view of the relative success of dry farming in the arid lands of the West in 1913 is here summarized because his announced position strengthened the support for larger homestead units. He and many others were later to change their minds. The Need for Classification Keen critics of the public land system were well aware, as Major Powell and the Public Land Commission had been in 1879, that classification of the public lands was essential if the country was to avoid the kind of errors it had made in the past. Valuable mineral and forest lands had been permitted to pass to private ownership as free grants, donations to railroads or as cash sales at $1.25 an acre, and individuals had been enabled to control great areas of rangeland by making entries along streams or at water holes. Provisions in the Kin-kaid and Enlarged Homestead Acts limiting entries under them to nonirrigable land implied a form of classification, as had other reservation and withdrawal actions in the past, but with no funds to carry out thorough classification of the land these restrictions were not significant. Further need of classification came with the large withdrawals for forest conservation, watershed control, power sites, and irrigation that were made by Roosevelt's orders. President Taft had some doubts as to legality of these withdrawals, particularly in the light of the strong opposition they had stirred up in the West. In a special message to Congress on January 14, 1910, he recommended the adoption of a measure to provide for the classification of the remaining public lands "according to their principal value or use." In the same message he urged Congress "to validate the withdrawals . . . and to authorize the Secretary of the Interior temporarily to withdraw lands pending submission to the Congress of recommendations as to legislation. . . ." Taft's uncertainty as to the exercise of Executive power, which the courts had sustained, is in contrast to Roosevelt's boldness, the more so as the measure that emerged from Congress seemed to weaken the right of withdrawing public lands.31 Taft's method, however, won congressional approval, whereas Roosevelt's withdrawals had raised a storm of criticism among his own party followers in the West. The Withdrawal Act of June 25, 1910, authorized withdrawals of public lands from any form of entry for "power sites, irrigation, classification of lands or other public purposes" and stipulated that all such withdrawals should remain in force until revoked by an act of Congress. It authorized no appropriations, however, to carry out classification of the lands and provided no funds for the development or use of the withdrawn lands. As Miss Peffer says, it was a reservation, not a conservation measure.32 Further liberalization of the settlement laws followed, making final entries under the Desert Land Act easier, permitting settlers to gain ownership of both desert land and enlarged homestead tracts totaling 480 acres, reducing the cultivation and residence requirement, and allowing 5 months continuous absence for each of the 3 years. These all showed how far Congress and the Land Office were prepared to go in trying to settle land of increasingly doubtful agriculture value, while competing with Canada, which was offering homesteads on better land.33 It is significant that it was the Geological Survey, in the Department of the Interior, not the Land Office, which was pressing for Barnes, op. cit., pp. 87-90. 31 Peffer, op. cit., pp. 115-19. 32 36 Stat., Part 1, p. 847; Peffer, op. cit., p. 118. 33 Hargreaves, op. cit., pp. 354-56. |