206 THE HIGH COST OF LIVING 



individuals, dummy claimants being used for this 

 puipose. The amount of these fraudulent enclosures 

 will never be known. Some years ago there ap- 

 peared in Everybody's Magazine an investigation 

 of land monopoly upon the Pacific coast. ^ It re- 

 cited the story of how a poor German butcher had 

 landed in this country in 1850; of how he crossed the 

 continent and began to acquire land. In a genera- 

 tion's time he and his partner secured possession of 

 14,539;000 acres of the richest land in California and 

 Oregon. His holdings covered 22,500 square miles, 

 an area three times as great as the State of New 

 Jersey with its population of 1,500,000 souls. It is 

 said that a man may travel upon a single estate in 

 California from the northern to the southern bound- 

 ary of the State without traversing any other prop- 

 erty. 



This same article tells how 100 men in the Sacra- 

 mento Valley, California, came to own 17,000,000 

 acres; of ranches of twenty and even a hundred 

 miles in extent; of individual estates twice the 

 size of Belgium and bigger than all Switzerland, 

 bigger even than the combined area of New Hamp- 

 shire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Delaware. 

 Other investigations have been made of the extent 

 of the land monopoly and of the methods employed 

 in acquiring these great estates. An exhaustive 

 study, made by Mr. William R. Leighton, of Omaha, 



1 Everybody's Magazine, May, 1905. 



