1 904 



FORESTRY AND IRRIGATION 



be brought together these tracts are 

 destined to be occupied by farmers pro- 

 ducing in a single year ten times the 

 value of the land itself as it stands at 

 present. 



Here rises the question of the con- 

 tinual controversy which is going on 

 between the stock men and the irriga- 

 tors. Men in the East do not quite 

 understand the situation why there 

 should be such differences but it is 

 easily explained. The stock-growing 

 proposition is one thing ; farming is 

 another. Half a billion acres in the 

 West today are free grazing lands. The 

 stock men can run their vast herds over 

 this land free of any charge. The land 

 belongs to the people of the United 

 States, but the stock men through its 

 continued use for many years have come 

 to consider that it belongs to them, and 

 they are extremely jealous of the in- 

 coming farmer and irrigator, who nat- 

 urally picks out the most fertile and 

 best-watered land for his home. The 

 big stock man cares nothing about 

 irrigation ; what he wants is ten or 

 twenty or thirty thousand acres of land 

 to run his immense herds upon. In re- 

 cent years, however, the live stock com- 

 panies and combinations have realized 

 the changing conditions and the advance 

 in value of good western land suitable 

 for irrigation. While doing everything 

 within their power to discourage settle- 

 ment, they have at the same time cast 

 about them to secure ownership of the 

 best of the remaining public domain, 

 and they found convenient some land 

 laws which, when government land was 

 apparently without limit, were slipped 

 through Congress to enable speculators 

 to acquire it with ease and at small ex- 

 pense. The outcome is that the oper- 

 ations of these laws have been and stand 

 to-day a serious menace to the real de- 

 velopment of the West its cultivation 

 and population. 



Official and other estimates place the 

 irrigable land of the arid region, when 

 all the water supply possible shall have 

 been utilized, at not over 100,000,000 

 acres. Last year 2 2, 650, 928 acres passed 

 from the government into private hands, 

 and with but a very slight increase in 

 population. The land was not utilized 



for homemaking, yet it would have made 

 226,509 home farms of 100 acres each. 

 Last year the absorption of public land 

 was almost as great, 19,488,535. It is 

 obvious that t'his sort of thing should 

 be stopped at once. The cattle men and 

 the speculators are insistent that present 

 conditions should continue, and that no 

 land laws should be repealed by Con- 

 gress. Naturally they are. On the other 

 hand, it is to the interest of every man 

 who cares anything about seeing the 

 West grow into a thickly populated 

 agricultural community, to every man 

 who wants to take up a home for him- 

 self or for his children, or, on a broader 

 plane, to every man who would see this 

 rich heritage of the American people 

 beneficially utilized by its real owners 

 and their children, to see that Congress 

 loses no time in striking from the statute 

 books acts which are plainly there in 

 the interest only of speculators and stock 

 syndicates. 



Irrigation and settlement are no ene- 

 mies of stock raising, though they are to' 

 a certain extent of the present methods 

 of ranging. But the production of cattle 

 and sheep under irrigation are vastly in 

 excess of the more general range methods 

 of to-day. The great forage crop of the 

 West, alfalfa, is destined to feed sheep 

 and cattle in twenty times the number 

 that now subsist upon the free range. 

 Under its arid conditions this range land 

 produces but scantily, and it takes from 

 15 to 30 acres to sustain one steer, 

 whereas one acre of irrigated alfalfa will 

 more than sustain him. In other words, 

 a 1 60- acre homestead, if used for cattle 

 growing, will produce 160 steers, as 

 against perhaps 8 under the old condi- 

 tions. Fifty thousand acres, which 

 amount of good land may be found in 

 the holdings of many live-stock corpo- 

 rations in the West, will support 2,500 

 head of cattle, while, if all irrigated, it 

 would carry 50,000 head. At the same 

 time it would support 1,560 farmers and 

 their families, instead of a syndicate 

 employing a few managers and a troop 

 of cowboys. 



At the last session of Congress an 

 effort was made to repeal the Desert 

 Land Act, the Commutation Clause of 

 the Homestead Act, and the Timber 



