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Show 650 HISTORY OF PUBLIC LAND LAW DEVELOPMENT commissioners and presidents of western railroads and even persuaded the acting head of the General Land Office under Cleveland, E. T. Best, to favor cession of all public lands, including the forest reserves.36 He also favored the sale or leasing of the grazing lands to provide revenue for irrigation development.37 Congress continued to make appropriations to the Department of Agriculture for experiments in inducing rainfall and for collecting information on irrigation.38 There was set up in the Department an Office of Irrigation Investigations of which El wood Mead took charge in 1899. Mead was then writing sober accounts of the "Rise and Future of Irrigation in the United States."39 Under his direction the office developed a corps of irrigation and drainage engineers (13 in 1905) who provided carefully prepared reports of the progress being made and the potential for 36 The Burlington and the Denver and Rio Grande Railroads were most prominently associated with this movement to aid irrigation by having the public lands ceded to the states. Richard C. Overton, America's leading railroad historian, who has done so much to make known the leading role the Chicago Burlington and Quincy Railroad exerted in good railroad management, has no index reference to either irrigation or reclamation in his Burlington West. A Colonization History of the Burlington Railroad (Cambridge, Mass., 1941), or in Burlington Route. A History of the Burlington Lines (New York, 1965). For the Mead paper and letters of Best, Smythe, Wm. Pearce, B. A. McAllister, Wm. J. Palmer, and G. W. Holdrege see S. Doc, 55th Cong., 1st sess., Vol. 5, No. 130 (Serial No. 3562), pp. 7-37. 37 Just at the time Best advocated cession of the public lands to the states, which he felt could better manage them, the National Forest Commission, for which President Cleveland had asked, was recommending the expansion of the national forest reserves. 38 Appropriations were $10,000 in 1892, $6,000 in 1893 and in 1894, $15,000 in 1895, $10,000 in 1898, $35,000 in 1899, and $65,000 in 1902 and 1903. 39 Department of Agriculture, Yearbook, 1899, pp. 591-612. Paul K. Conkin, "The Vision of Elwood Mead," Agricultural History, XXXIV (April 1960), 88-97. Under Mead in the same office was Ray P. Teele who was later to become a principal critic of the Federal reclamation policy. future irrigation development.40 By 1902 Mead had built up in the Department of Agriculture a staff of 46 who were well prepared to assist in planning any reclamation program Congress might adopt. Under normal conditions the Office of Irrigation Investigations as it had now become might be expected to be consulted both by Congress and those in whose hands any such program should be placed.41 Eleven years of agitation for government aid to bring the arid lands of the West into cultivation by the Irrigation Congresses, the National Irrigation Association which had been supported by contributions of $125,000 by five western railroads under the leadership of James J. Hill of the Great Northern, and other western real estate and business interests were approaching success.42 They were aided by the exaggerated claims made of the great potential acreage which could be irrigated and carved into farms. Both national political parties took up the issue. Earlier demands for the cession of the public lands to the states had died down somewhat as it became apparent that no state had the credit to develop its arid lands. This was obvious from the fact that 8 years after the Carey Act became law and its requirements successively relaxed a mere 11,321 acres had been patented and only 669,476 acres, selected by four of the 10 eligible states, had been approved. Three states had made no progress toward having lands segregated for their selection. At this rate it would have taken 150 years for the states fully to utilize the limited opportunity Congress gave them to obtain 40 Mead remained in the office at least until 1907. 41 Official Register of the United States, 1903, Vol. 1, pp. 1108-1109. 42 For the National Irrigation Congresses see William E. Smythe, The Conquest of Arid America (New Yor, 1905), and the lrrigattion Age, 1891-1918; Mary Wilma M. Hargreaves, Dry Farming in the Northern Great Plains 1900-1925 (Cambridge, Mass., 1957), pp. 68, 136. |