WEALTH IN ARID LANDS. 



POSSIBILITY OF TRANSFORMING IT INTO FARMS 



CONSIDERED. 



What is to be the future of the more than 10,000,000 acres of un- 

 occupied government lands in Nebraska, probably the most important 

 remaining portion of the public domain ? Will the herds of the ranch- 

 men continue to hold their ground on the vast undulating plateaus of 

 so-called arid land, or will the soil be claimed through irrigation for 

 more profitable use, as it was once seized for domestic herds by the 

 slaughtering of hundreds of thousands of buffalo '? 



These questions are forcing themselves forward for answer, even 

 as the dark green of the corn fields is crowding back the lighter green 

 of the native grasses, where the farmers are sending their plows and 

 planters farther and farther up the steps by which the plateaus rise 

 and recede from the river valleys. 



The attempts of capitalists from outside of the State to secure 

 control of large tracts of the land now used for grazing by making en- 

 tries on them under the provisions of the reservoir act, though ren- 

 dered futile later by the rules with which the operation of that law 

 has been hedged about, have set the ranchmen of Nebraska to think- 

 ing. It did more than that when the news of the first filings under 

 that law spread among them. It sent them hustling on long horse- 

 back journeys over the plains to the land offices of the respective dis- 

 tricts in which they keep their herds, to protect their own interests 

 by making enteries, each on his own grazing land his own in the 

 sense that his herds occupy it, and by the unwritten law of the ranch- 

 man he holds it by virtue of that fact, so long as they continue to 

 occupy it. 



Under the rules governing the application of the reservoir act the 

 ranchman is safe from any encroachment. But he knows there is an- 

 other law more powerful than any statute enacted by State or federal 

 legislative assembly that inexorable law of the commercial world 

 which declares that any industry that avails itself of vast natural re- 

 sources must give way and relinquish its hold on those resources if it 

 shall be found that another industry can use them to greater profit 

 and the greater blessing to humanity. 



BENEFIT OF IKK1GATION. 



Though the purposes of investment agents and speculators who 

 came from all over the United States to make entries on Nebraska 

 lands never may be clearly known, since the rules promulgated by 



