14 THE EXHAUSTION OF THE ARABLE LANDS. 



surveys* must be made; existiiiR eliiims, water rights, ami titles— inchoate and complete 

 — extinguished; national and State laws fornnilated and enacted tluit will harmonize or 

 extinguish conflicting national, State, municipal, corporate and individual Interests; and 

 then extensive and costly works constructed — all of which will consume much time. In 

 the interim, population and consumption will have outrun production, the small remain- 

 der of the unoccupied non-irrigable arable lands will have disappeared, and such portions 

 of the arid districts as can be brought under the plow will be needed to meet the urgent 

 wants of an ever increasing consuming element. 



The processes and progress of agricultural development in prairie regions where 

 rains are ordinarily sutHcieut, and in mountain districts where arable lauds, susceptible of 

 irrigation, exist only in tracts of small extent, differ most radically, as is evident wlien 

 the progress made in Nebraska and Kansas is contrasted with that made in Colorado and 

 Utah. Utah has been settled more than forty years; Colorado, Nebraska and. Kansas 

 from thirty to thirty-five years. In 1888, Colorado bad 5'i0,000 acres employed in growing 

 staple crops; Utah, 396,000; Nebraska, 8,141,000; and Kansas 10,552,000; the cultivated 

 area in Kansas being twelve times that of Colorado and Utah. Had any considerable 

 part of the lands of the mountain districts been arable and susceptible of irrigation, they 

 would long since have been seized upon for farms by the great army of the landless. 



The uneultivable character of the lauds of plain and mountain <listricts. and the 

 rajiid diminution of the unoccupied arable soils of the United States, have been clearly 

 shown by the events following the opening to settlement of the limited and not over-fertile 

 Oklahoma country, :vhen men who had failed to find satisfactory locations in California, 

 Oregon and Washington retraced their steps, hoping to secure land upon which to found 

 a home, only to find in advance of them an army of would-be settlers large enough to 

 occupy a territory ten times the size of Oklahoma. Similar scenes have more recently 

 been enacted upon the opening of a part of the Sioux reservation, where a Itmd-hungry 

 myriad, in the depth of a Dakota Winter, contended for the possession of lauds wholly 

 within the belt where the farmer must strive with drouth and a soil below the average in 

 fertility. 



While I write, an army of settlers is camped along the southern Kansas border, 

 Impatiently waiting a proclamation from the President— which may not come for many 

 mouths — opening to settlement thegood, bad and indiflerent lands of the Cherokee Outlet; 

 which body of land will probably furnish some 20,000 fair to good farms of IGO acres each, 

 and a like number that will not pay for cultivation; the remaining 16,000 quarter sections 

 being fit only for pasturage, and much of it of little worth for that purpose. These 

 Btateuients will not be chalenged bj' tho.se familiar with that country, unless they are en- 

 gaged in "booming" the district in question. 



In California, as well as in the States of the Missouri valley, there is much laud ye' 

 unoccupied, mostly in the possession of corporations and individuals who are holding It 

 for Henry George's "unearned increment." These lands are likely to be brought into 

 cultivation very tardily, and in such a manner as to add but little to the area in grain 

 crops, as they will no more than replace lands diverted from cereal culture to pasture and 

 meadow — a diversion necessitated by the constantly increasing number of animals kept. 



In Oregon and Washington are great unoccupied areas. Such portions of these 

 unoccupied lauds as lie east of the Cascade Mountains — say two-thirds of each State- 

 possess many of the characteristics of other mountain districts. Such small portions of 

 western Oregon and Washington as are without timber have long been occupied, while 

 the remainder of these fertile districts is so heavily timbered as to render such lands uu- 

 uvailable as a source of food supply during this century. 



Far at the southeast, in Florida, is found an immense unoccupied area — some 12,- 

 000,000 acres or more — but this region is a land of sand-barrens, impassible swamps, dense 

 forests and everglades, little of which is fit for human habitation. Long as Florida has 

 been .settled, and though by reason of possessing the ad vantages of a. semi-tropical climate 

 it has become the Winter abode of so many well-to-do people, it shows but little agricult*- 



•Major Powell proposes four different surveys - topographic, li.vdrocrapliic, engineering aod geo- 

 lo^flcal — wliich will certainly require several decades to complete, and which will cost vast suDia. 



