EDITORIAL 



CUT-OVER LANDS A NATIONAL PROBLEM 



NO nation, with the possible exception of Russia, in 

 Siberia, has ever become possessed of such an enor- 

 mous area of land capable of agricultural develop- 

 ment as the United States. In the Colonial period, the 

 energy of our mixed but largely English stock, confined 

 by the barrier of the Appalachians, and by the ferocity of 

 the Iroquois tribes in western New York, expended itself 

 upon the crowded and not very fertile soils of New Eng- 

 land and the Atlantic seacoast. The extent of this clearing 

 greatly exceeded the limits of normal development, and 

 visitors in New England are frequently amazed at the 

 evidences of past cultivation of barren hillsides and rocky 

 thin-soiled pastures. 



With the bursting of the great Appalachian dam, about 

 the time of the Revolutionary War, this flood of pent-up 

 energy flowed westward, first clearing the fertile wooded 

 soils of the "Northwest territory," and the more mixed 

 and spotty areas of the South, then, with increasing 

 force, deluged the prairies of Illinois, Iowa, and the Great 

 Plains, where the settler no longer had to clear his land of 

 stumps and forest growth. The gold rush of '49 carried 

 the wave of settlement to the Coast, while the backwash 

 from this wave filled the interior basins. 



This great westward movement took the cream of the 

 public lands those most easily cleared, most fertile, and 

 best located. Then came a further great absorption, this 

 time of public timber lands, accompanied by the building 

 up of large units of ownership through the assembling of 

 smaller tracts, so that the business of lumbering might be 

 profitably and economically conducted. 



About the time that lumbering, conducted on a gigantic 

 scale in the Lake States, began to reach a stage of exhaus- 

 tion, and the area of cut -over lands had mounted to large 

 figures, the available fertile and watered public lands of the 

 country had been almost completely absorbed. Immense 

 areas remained, but these were too mountainous or too dry 

 to be farmed under the Homestead Law. About this time, 

 too, many farmers' sons in the richer sections, and others 

 from overcrowded cities, began to seek a foothold onthe soil. 



This pressure created a market for cut -over lands. Up 

 to this time, the Lake States lumbermen had abandoned 

 large areas after removing the timber, rather than pay 

 taxes. It was natural that they should seize the oppor- 

 tunity to realize something from the sale of this cut-over 

 land, and a second era was ushered in by the advent of 

 the land speculator, who bought up large tracts at very 

 low prices, often realizing several hundred per cent by 

 selling to customers at from $5 to $10 per acre. 



But the clearing of a farm from either timber or cut- 

 over land is pioneer work, requiring years of hard physical 

 toil, or else t he expenditure of considerable capital to make 

 headway in removing stumps and bringing the raw soil 

 under the plow. Buildings must be erected, the land must 

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be fenced, agricultural machinery and livestock acquired, 

 and the roughness of the soil subdued to permit proper 

 cultivation. Studies made of clearing land show that the 

 actual costs of removing brush and stumps and breaking 

 the soil will reach figures that in some parts of the Pacific 

 Northwest are prohibitive. When added to this we include 

 the cost per acre of the fencing, building and other capital, 

 and the cost of living during the period when the farm is 

 being brought under cultivation, we are faced with the fact 

 that the true economic value of cut-over and unimproved 

 lands is very low as compared with these same lands after 

 this investment has been made. 



The pioneer on government land incurred no cost but 

 his filing fees and his labor. A great item in reducing his 

 living expenses was the plentiful supply of wild game in 

 these new regions. Coming of rugged stock inured to 

 hardships, with simple wants, he usually succeeded in sub- 

 duing the forest and carving out a farm. The modern 

 pioneer is confronted at the outset with an expense of pur- 

 chasing his land. Too often he is city bred, ignorant of 

 farming as a profession, unable to do without many of the 

 modern luxuries, and soon discouraged both by the un- 

 wonted hardships encountered, and by the comparative 

 loneliness of life on a new farm. But even if he comes of 

 good farming stock, or from the hardy races of immigrant 

 peasantry of Europe, he has to face the three handicaps 

 not known to our fathers, the first cost of soil, the absence 

 of wild game (or restrictive game laws) and the compara- 

 tive poverty of the soil. For all will admit that the richer 

 soils were the first cleared and settled. Is it any wonder 

 that the saying is current that it takes three crops of 

 settlers to subdue a farm in the wooded sections ? The final 

 owner builds his success upon the ruined hopes and 

 wrecked investments of his less fortunate predecessors. 



The area of cut -over lands in America is enormous, and 

 is increasing every day. What is going to be done with 

 these lands? Are they to remain a wilderness, scorched 

 and blackened by repeated fires, on which not even a 

 second growth of timber can succeed in establishing itself ? 

 Or, worse are these lands to remain as an enormous 

 sponge, in the hands of land speculators, who by playing 

 upon the credulity and eagerness of land-hungry pur- 

 chasers, and by charging many times the intrinsic value 

 of the lands, deprive them of their entire store of savings 

 and leave them a mortgage in place of the capital abso- 

 lutely required for farm development ? When the victim 

 fails to meet his interest, the sponge is squeezed dry, the 

 purchaser evicted and the land is again on the market to 

 soak up more savings. 



The time was in this country when any method of 

 making money, not prohibited by law, was considered 

 legitimate, and the operations of dealers in cut -over lands 

 were regarded as beneficial to a community by bringing in 



