18 



and attend to them with a higher degree of intelligence and a greater 

 expedition than you will ever accomplish by attempting to administer 

 them from Washington." 



I believe that local experience will largely sustain that statement. 

 If we are to disregard the unhappy experience of individuals in their 

 dealings with the land office at Washington and consider only general 

 legislation there is abundant evidence that national legislation on land 

 matters has either shown a marvelous ignorance of the arid region or 

 disregard of the requirements of that region. The government trans- 

 ferred the fertile lands of Kansas and Iowa to the settler who occupied 

 them upon the most liberal terms, but the individual who wishes to 

 reclaim the desert wastes of Wyoming is subjected, under the operations 

 of the desert law, to the requirement of expending, within a limited 

 time, enough money to buy a farm in many sections of the fertile and 

 populous east. 



The first attempt of the national law makers to deal with the irriga- 

 tion problem direct, was the legislation of 1888, which withdrew all the 

 irrigable lands of the arid region from settlement until such time as the 

 government could investigate this question, an investigation which those 

 in charge estimated would occupy fifty years. Its first law was one 

 which had to be absolutely disregarded, until public stntiment in the 

 arid States could force its repeal. We have the condition fixed by 

 congress which says that no acre of State land shall be sold for less than 

 ten dollars. Even the wildest flight of imagination cannot conceive how 

 the erudite statesman who framed that clause could have believed that 

 unimproved arid land was worth any such sum. What would have been 

 the result to this State if we had not been able to secure the repeal of the 

 law of 1888? It could have been nothicg except to stop our growth. 

 What is the effect of the $10 limitation? Simply to prevent State lands 

 being made an aid to growth; to make the selection of irritable land by 

 he State Land Commission equivalent to withdrawing it from occupancy 

 and development and to make the selection of grazing lands ridiculous. 



VIEWS OF MAJ. POWELL. 



The transfer of the control of the reclamation of our irrigable lands 

 to Washington would place it under the control of the Interior Depart- 

 ment. The representative of this department, at the Los Angeles Irri- 

 gation Congress in October, 1893, said: 



"There is not enough water and never can be; a quantity of water 

 can never be conserved sufficient to irrigate more than one-third of the 

 land already owned by private individuals. 



"Not one more acre of land should be granted to individuals for irri- 

 gation purposes. If you irrigate the lands yet 'retraining :n the hands of 

 the government you have got to sacrifice some of the lands yet remaining 

 in the hands of individuals." 



According to this, it is the opinion of the Interior Department, or 

 the accredited representative of this department, that no more irrigable 

 public land in Wyoming should pass into the hands of the settler. The 

 result of this policy, if carried out, would be that the valley of the Platte 

 Tiver would remain an arid waste, while the waters of that stream were 

 'used to reclaim the lands in the hands of private individuals in Nebraska. 



