38 OUR USE OF THE LAND 



ton and his supporters had been fighting for a generation. This 

 act offered for sale, at cheap rates, land which the government 

 had been unable to sell for ten years or more. Land that had 

 been on the market for thirty years or more was offered for 

 as little as 121/2 cents an acre. 29 



After the West and South had at last succeeded in getting 

 a public land policy that suited them, there was still the prob' 

 lem of speculators to settle. Between 1854 and 1862 when the 

 Homestead Act giving land to settlers was passed, 25,696,000 

 acres were sold. for $8,207,000. This was an average price of 

 32 cents an acre. 30 A large share of this land was bought by 

 speculators and later sold to farmers at from $3 to $10 an acre. 

 It did no good to sell land cheaply if farmers in the end had to 

 pay $10 an acre for it. The whole point of cheap land was to 

 draw settlers, not speculating companies, into the West. As the 

 Dubuque (Iowa) Daily Republic put it in 1857, the trouble 

 with speculators was that they produced "more poverty than 

 potatoes and consume (d) more midnight oil in playing poker 

 than of God's sunshine in the game of raising wheat and 

 corn." 31 The rough and tumble methods of the speculators 

 were governed by a single rule "Get the land cheap and sell 

 it high." 



THE LAND GROWS SCARCE 



As the population spread westward, good land became 

 scarce. This was something only a few people outside the 

 West understood then, or understand today. If you look at 

 a map showing the distribution of the population of the West, 

 you will see in such states as Nevada great vacant spaces. 

 True, there is still a lot of room for people in the United 

 States, but it takes more than room to support a family. The 



29 Hibbard, op. cit., p. 300. 



30 Ibid., p. 303. 



31 Ibid., p. 223. 



