A SQUARE MILE OF LAND FOR THE ASKING 



THE 640-ACRE STOCK RAISING HOMESTEAD LAW. ITS OPPORTUNITY FOR THE LAND HUNGRY 



BY WILL C. BARNES 



THE final act in the fifty-year-old policy of the Fed- 

 eral government, to give free to every citizen a cer- 

 tain part of the public domain upon which to make 

 a home, was brought to a close and "finis" written large 

 upon it when Congress at its last session passed what is 

 known as the "640-acre Stock Raising Homestead Law. ; ' 



Originally there were more than two billion acres of 

 land in the area covered by Continental United States, 

 but now there remains of this huge tract but a scant two 

 hundred and thirty million acres ; a mere remnant which 

 has been picked and culled over for more than fifty years 

 by millions of settlers until, when compared with the 

 fertile lands that the pioneers of as late as twenty-five 

 years ago found, in the great Mississippi Valley, it is 

 hardly worth 

 the taking. Ten 

 years more and 

 the public do- 

 main will be u 

 matter of past 

 history. Senator 

 Teller of Colo- 

 rado once put it 

 very tersely 

 when he re- 

 in a r k e d that 

 most of this 

 residue "was fit 

 only to hold the 

 rest of the coun- 

 try together." 



The first home- 

 stead law which 

 began this 

 home builders' 

 plan of the gov- 

 ernment was 

 passed in 1862. 

 The end of the 

 Civil War set free from military duty a large number of 

 men whose army experience had made them restless and 

 inclined to seek 'new fields of adventure. The country 

 west of the Mississippi was then practically a wilderness 

 full of Indians, romance, and excitement, and to it they 

 turned by thousands, deserting their former farm homes 

 for the more fertile plains of the west. 



A few years later came the pre-emption law, which 

 practically sold to each citizen an additional 160 acres at 

 the minimum price of $1.25 per acre. Then came the 

 timber culture act, by means of which any one could 

 secure 160 acres by simply planting trees upon a portion 

 of it. Theoretically this law was a great proposition for 

 turning the treeless prairies of the middle west into 

 forests, but practically it did nothing of the kind and 



WHEN THE LAW FAILED TO PROTECT 

 Thousands of so-called "homesteads" like this were located in the midst of immensely valuable timber. 



through its operation the government was separated 

 from many an acre of good land. 



Congress then had another liberal fit and the "Desert 

 Land Law" of 1877 was added to the list. By this -each 

 citizen could secure title to 640 acres more of land "upon 

 which crops could not be raised . except by irrigation." 

 The frauds which were perpretrated under this act, 

 and the way truth and the water was man-handled 

 in gaining possession of lands under it would make 

 Ananias himself blush. 



A year later, in 1878, Congress passed the "Stone and 

 Timber" act under which almost any citizen could select 

 160 acres of land, "chiefly valuable for stone or timber," 

 and obtain title to it by paying the magnificent sum of 



$2.50 an acre, 

 receiving in re- 

 t u r n timbered 

 lands worth a 

 hundred times 

 the fee. There 

 may be a record 

 in the land office 

 to show that 

 somebody once 

 took up a piece 

 of land under the 

 law for the stone 

 upon it but 

 mostly it was 

 used to accumu- 

 late millions of 

 acres of valu- 

 able timber land, 

 especially on the 

 Pacific Coast. 

 Once a noted 

 timber specula- 

 tor brought to 

 Oregon a solid 

 trainload of people from his home town, each of whom 

 located a tract of land under this law, paid the fees and 

 price per acre, presumably furnished by the interested 

 party, returned immediately to their eastern homes and, 

 when title to the land was received from the government 

 it was promptly turned over to the aforesaid speculator 

 for some relatively small sum. Nor was there anything in 

 such a performance that violated any federal statute; 

 the law itself was easy, that was all. 



Thus it was that not many years ago a single citizen 

 of the United States could obtain legal title to no less 

 than 1,120 acres of public land without any very heavy 

 expenditure of cash, although many a one must have 

 been afraid to look up the word "perjury" in the dic- 

 tionary. 



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