148 OUR USE OF THE LAND 



the land company of the Kansas Pacific and Denver Pacific 

 Railroads said of the arid land that it was "unimpoverished by 

 abundant rainfall." Since twenty inches of rain a year was 

 a wet year in the range country, this was making the best of a 

 bad bargain, to say the least. A gentleman named Smythe 

 published in 1907 a book called The Conquest of Arid Amer 

 ica in which there was a chapter entitled "The Blessing of 

 Aridity." He referred to the arid regions as "the better half 

 of the United States." 11 



Along with this propaganda went current beliefs that rain' 

 fall followed the plow that is, that when land was plowed 

 more rain fell to nourish it. Unfortunately, about the time 

 people began moving into the arid country to farm it, there 

 was a series of unusually wet years, with the result that when 

 the usual dry season returned, the farmers thought that it was 

 a severe drought. They had put their money and their time 

 into the land, and they refused to believe that they had made 

 a mistake. Unhappily for them, the drought continued. After a 

 few years, the tide of dry farmers or "nesters," as they were 

 called in the West, began to retreat. From 19104929, SO/ 

 000,000 acres were taken up by dry farmers mostly in 1915. 12 

 This was the period immediately after the wide development of 

 farm machinery which made cultivation of large areas easy. 

 In fifteen representative dryfarming counties in six states 

 from 4 to 40 per cent of the population left the land between 

 1920 and 1930. 13 



THE DESTRUCTION OF THE RANGE 



In their wake the dry farmers have left the broken plains, 

 fields unprotected by the grass cover, bare earth which blows 

 across the flat land in great dust clouds, choking out the grass 



"Parkins and Whitaker, op. cit., p. 131. 



12 Western Range, United States Government Printing Office, p. 130. 



18 Ibid., p. 22. 



