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Show 656 HISTORY OF PUBLIC LAND LAW DEVELOPMENT bona fide resident on such land, or occupant thereof residing in the neighborhood of said land, and no right shall permanently attach until all payments thereof are made." This is the famous land limitation section which, with later amendments, was planned to reassure critics of the measure who maintained that the benefits of the great irrigation works constructed at public expense would largely fall to the land grant railroads and speculators who had acquired before 1902 much of the best land suitable for irrigation. More important, it was included by those who believed that "agriculture was a way of life" and who with Jefferson, Greeley, Lincoln, and Liberty Hyde Bailey wanted to assure the division of arable public lands into single family farms, owner operated. The framers of the Newlands Act thought of it as a continuation of a long line of measures, all devised to bring about the establishment on the public lands of sturdy yeomanry, no matter how hard the struggle of farm making on the frontier. By denying water to owners of excess land within projects it was expected that all such owners would be compelled to sell their surplus holdings, presumably at prices not too difficult for homesteaders to pay. The framers of the Newlands Act were especially anxious to convey the impression that it was in the tradition and a continuation of the Homestead Act which had aided 600,000 people to acquire farms in the more humid regions of the West.58 "Act of June 17, 1902, 32 Stat., Part 1, p. 388. It is useful at this point to see how the Canadians were influenced by irrigation development in the United States and profited from its experience in shaping their own policy: Lawrence B. Lee, "The Canadian-American Irrigation Frontier. 1884-1914," Agricultural History, 40 (October 1966), 271-83. 58 An admirer of the work of the Reclamation Service, George Wharton James in Reclaiming the Arid West. The Story of the United States Reclamation Service (New York, 1917), p. 30, said the excess-lands provision was "an effort ... to take it out of the power of capitalists and speculators in land to take Implementation of the Act The Newlands Act required for its implementation the best information the Geological Survey had been gathering about rainfall, the flow of water in streams to be harnessed, the nature of the stream bed in which dams were to be constructed and the permeability of the soil and rock behind the dams. Also needed was information it had not been gathering concerning the nature of the soil to be reclaimed, whether it would drain properly when irrigated, whether irrigating it would bring up the alkali, whether, in fact, the soil was of such quality as to stand continued cultivation and make possible the payment of the water rents, what crops it could produce, whether there was a demand for such crops, and whether they could be marketed in competition with crops produced in more humid regions where heavy water charges were not required. At this point there were three departments of the government which could provide a staff of experts to aid in planning a program but no one of the three was quite prepared to undertake it alone. First was the War Department with its Corps of Engineers, organized just a century before, which had been engaged in building levees, bridges, jetties, canals, and other river and harbor improvements and roads and making surveys for other projects.59 selfish advantage of the beneficent work of a government of democracy designed for the benefit of all citizens. . . ." Mary Montgomery and Marion Claw-son in their History of Legislation and Policy Formation of the Central Valley Project (Berkeley, 1946), pp. 135 ff., quote passages from Senator Newlands, Judge Raker, and F. H. Newell in which they emphasized that the Newlands Act was to provide farm homesteads for the small man. 69 Forest G. Hill, Roads, Rails and Waterways. The Army Engineers and Early Transportation (Norman, Okla., 1957), pp. 3 ff.; W. Stull Holt, The Office of the Chief of Engineers of the Army (Baltimore, 1923), passim; Arthur Maas, Muddy Waters. The Army Engineers and the Nation's Rivers (Cambridge, Mass., 1951), passim. |