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Show 770 HISTORY OF PUBLIC LAND LAW DEVELOPMENT about the end of unlimited sales and in 1891 they secured legislation to halt cash sales, though commutation and desert land sales were still bringing in funds to the Treasury. Now they proposed to divert practically all income from these sales into a revolving fund for the construction of dams and reservoirs to provide water for the irrigation of arid lands. Reclamation soon grew into a mighty giant bringing to the semi-arid states both a farm population and the possibility of industrial development and urban growth. Retrospectively, critics may see that many blunders were made in legislating for the administration and disposal of the public lands. Too many laws were shaped largely in the hurly-burly of discussion on the floor of the Senate or the House with numerous amendments being added, deletions made, and words changed without careful attention to the effects of these alterations. When the differences between the versions of the two Houses were ironed out in conference and the measures reported back for final adoption, time was often short and they were too speedily approved. Hidden jokers, subtle changes in meaning, the removal of powers administrative officers needed to carry out their responsibilities effectively were not uncommon. The inflexible government price of $1.25, maintained until 1854, caused buyers to seek out only the best land. Combined with the rapid opening of new areas to purchase and settlement, the inflexible price served to scatter settlement widely, delay the coming of social institutions, and push the frontier of settlement far into the Indian country with friction and wars resulting. Classification and appraisal of the public lands was out of the question before 1870 but thereafter some progress might have been made with more constructive leadership. Homesteading might better have been confined to areas with sufficient rainfall, but banned in the semi-arid lands west of the 102d meridian and heavily forested regions of the Upper Lakes States, the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific Coast. Settlement laws, including the Homestead, Timber Culture, and Desert Land Acts and other measures ostensibly adopted for settlers, such as the Timber and Stone Act and the Forest Lieu Act should, after an initial but short period of trial, have been amended or repealed, as all succeeding Commissioners recommended. The Preemption and the Timber Culture Acts were repealed in 1891 but Congress permitted the Timber and Stone Act to remain in operation, to the great and constant annoyance of the Commissioners. Registers, receivers, and surveyors general were responsible to the local and national political leadership which gave them their appointments, and too often if the local leaders were in the lumber business or in the livestock industry the conflicts of interest were commonly resolved in favor of the interests rather than the government. Establishment of great ownerships-partly corporate and partly individual-of timberlands, range-lands, and even farmlands were enabled, and at times there was cause for concern because the proportion of farms occupied by tenants was increasing rapidly. Yet with all the poorly drafted legislation, the mediocre and sometimes corrupt land officials, the constant effort of settlers, monied speculators and great land companies to engross land for the unearned increment they might extract from it, the Federal land system seems to have worked surprisingly well, if we may judge by the results. Outside the cotton-growing South where the plantation system prevailed before 1860 and tenancy and sharecropping subsequently, suitable public land was being acquired by small owner operators and tenancy was less common. Disregarding the southern states, a total of 1,738,176 farms had been created in the public land states by 1880 and only in four states-California, |