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Show RECLAMATION OF THE ARID LANDS 653 conservative states' righters, and representatives from the older states, who wanted the income from the public lands to benefit all the states rather than one section of the country, and from farming interests in the older states which feared the competition of millions of acres of additional and highly productive irrigated lands. Some farseeing individuals predicted that once this system of subsidized farming was inaugurated, it would have no end and would lead to more and more marginal, costly, and unprofitable projects being undertaken, but they were voices crying in the wilderness. Francis G. Newlands of Reno, Nevada, was the House leader of western forces working to push the Federal government into sponsoring and financing reclamation projects. Early in 1901 he tried to amend the usual rivers and harbors bill to provide for the construction of reservoirs on the Humboldt River in his state to save the spring floodwaters for irrigation. He also led the move to create reservoirs on the headwaters of the Missouri and to provide larger sums for investigating the possibilities of irrigating the arid lands. In all of these efforts he was unsuccessful but he effectively drew the attention of the House to the irrigation question and laid the basis for favorable action nearly a year and a half later. Newlands already had drafted a bill providing that the proceeds from land sales in the arid states be used to build irrigation projects in those states. When opponents of Federal participation in irrigation asked why he did not favor the cession of the public lands to the states to permit them to carry out such work instead of advocating Federal construction, New-lands pointed out that state leadership would lead to jurisdictional disputes since most rivers were interstate, citing as an example the Truckee River and its headwaters. Furthermore, the states lacked the credit to do the task and if the lands were ceded to them "the trust will be improvid-ently exercised by the State." The land would fall to "the monopolistic holdings" already too large. Newlands might have answered a query of a Hoosier Congressman who wanted to know whether he would favor using the same Federal funds to drain wet lands useless without drainage, by reminding him that those same wet lands had been given Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin in 1850 to aid in their drainage but that, instead, the states had permitted them to become "monopolistic holdings." Newlands felt that Nevada suffered an indignity in having such a large proportion of its lands held by the central government but he was aware that the state could not develop them as the Federal government could. He was particularly anxious that the public lands should not be permitted to fall into the hands of speculators and other nonsettlers. "We have suffered . . . from the monopoly of the lands," he declared. "There is not a man in California who does not know how the ownership of those large tracts [Mexican land grants of 50,000 to 100,000 acres] has steadily retarded the progress and development of the State."49 At the outset he felt that 80 acres of irrigable land was all that should be permitted entrymen and he was anxious to withhold all irrigable lands for homesteads. He thought of the low elevation arid lands, to which water could be brought through government irrigation works, as offering homes to thousands of landless people as the homestead law had done earlier. "The aim ... is to prevent monopoly of every form, to open up the public domain to actual settlers who desire homes, and to disintegrate the monopolistic holdings of land that prevail on the Pacific 49 Cong. Record, 56th Cong., 2d sess., Jan. 30, 1901, p. 1701; 57th*Cong., 1st sess., Jan. 21, 1902, p. 841. |