THE RECLAMATION OF THE 

 ARID RIGION. 



PORTION OF ADDRESS OF R. S. FULTON BEFORE 

 AMERICAN FORESTRY ASSOCIATION.DENVER, 



AUG. 27, 1901. 



When we were children we used to sing "Uncle Sam is Rich 

 Enough to Buy Us All a Farm," and this consciousness was a safety 

 valve for all the discontent and envy arising from deprivation and 

 hardship among the poor. The public lands were open and the tinker 

 and the tailor, the bookkeeper and the barber, the laborer and his 

 sons knew that it' worst came to worst they could go west and find a 

 quarter-section and make a home on it. Who can tell what misery, 

 what riots, what anarchy, what class hatred we have .escaped through 

 this happy condition. But all that is a thing of the past now. The 

 safety valve is closed. 



The tillable land is exhausted and the prairie schooner no longer 

 fiits across the country with a family aboard hunting for a claim to 

 settle on. The need is greater than ever before because the whole 

 Middle West and even Iowa and Kansas are as thickly settled as New 

 York and New England were when they sent their sons and deughters 

 out to fill up Ohio, Kentucky, and the Mississippi Valley. Then the 

 home-seekers came out of a small fraccion of territory compared with 

 that which is swarming to-day. All New England, the Atlantic 

 States, the whole Mississippi Valley, clear to the foot of the Rocky 

 Mountains is dotted with school houses full of children who in twenty 

 years must have homes of their own. 



Where shall they go? Shall they crowd out their older brothers 

 on the farms or take lower wages and longer hours in the coal mine 

 or the factory in order to get places at all? Who can think of such 

 an alternative, with its privations, its struggles for a chance to labor, 

 its strikes against hard conditions, without casting about for some 

 relief. Who can calculate the strain upon republican institutions 

 when the hungry poor have no place to go and have the extravagance 

 of the rich flaunted constantly in their faces? 



Only divine intelligence could foretell the many ways in which the 

 upbuilding of the West will benefit the rest of the union. The vast 

 sums spent in attempting to control the floods of the Mississippi would 

 be largely saved because foresting the vacant lands, storing the win,- 



