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Show RECLAMATION OF THE ARID LANDS 667 irrigated lands. The Office of Irrigation Investigations under Elwood Mead was publishing information resulting from its studies that should have been very useful in planning the projects under the Act of 1902. For example, in the 1903 Yearbook of the Department of Agriculture was an article on "Preparing Land for Irrigation," written by Ray P. Teele who was to become one of the outstanding authorities on irrigation, in which attention was devoted to removing the sagebrush, leveling the land, and locating laterals and buildings. Sugar beets, eventually one of the principal staples of irrigation farming, came in for a technical article.94 Other topics to which economists, engineers, agronomists, and rainfall and drainage experts of the Department gave their attention were rainfall and irrigation, crops used in the reclamation of alkali lands in Egypt, engineering features of drainage in irrigation projects, injury of surplus water to irrigated land, relation of precipitation to irrigation, the use of small water supplies for irrigation, and experiments in ditch lining to prevent losses from seepage, percolation, and evaporation. The Department maintained four irrigation extension farms in the West to demonstrate the possibilities and costs of irrigation with small water supplies. The loss of Elwood Mead to Australia where he inaugurated a reclamation program was seriously felt, but others were in training to continue the investigations in the Department.95 Status of Public Lands in Reclamation Projects Authority to withdraw from all forms of entry public land that might be required for irrigation works and to halt all entries on public land believed to be susceptible to irrigation except under the homestead law was granted the Secretary of the Interior in the Newlands Act. In practice this meant that timber and stone and desert land entries were banned within a project area once the public notice to that effect had been issued. Settlers could enter tracts of 40 to 160 acres within the project area under the homestead law but were denied the commutation privilege allowed homesteaders elsewhere. Perhaps the most serious omission in the Newlands Act, and the most serious administrative error by officials of the Land Office and the Department of the Interior, was that the public lands within the project areas were not withdrawn from all entries until near the time when water would become available for irrigation. Thousands of people rushed to establish homestead claims on the public lands to be irrigated who could not possibly live on the desert without any income from the land for the 5 years necessary to gain title. In 1908 Fred Dennett, Commissioner of the General Land Office, brought to the attention of the Secretary of the Interior the "great hardships" the settlers had to endure."0 Not until 1911 did Congress move in the matter and then it took action because homesteaders on arid lands were complaining of the unusually serious drought which made it impossible for them to stay on their claims. In addition to appropriating $20 million to speed up the completion of irrigation projects Congress relieved settlers in 12 states of "necessity of residence" on their claims from February 13, to May 5, 1911. Dennett had also pointed out in 1908 that petty speculators were acquiring land with the intention of unloading their homestead rights on actual farm makers at a later time at a high price, thereby jeopardizing the latter's success. He recom- 94 Yearbook, 1903, pp. 239-50, 398-410. 95 Yearbook, 1907, p. 124; Conkin, "The Vision of Elwood Mead," Agricultural History 34:89. 96 Department of the Interior, Annual Report, 1908, Vol. 1, pp. 83, 88-89. |
