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CHAPTER II 

 THE STORY OF OUR PUBLIC DOMAIN 



I 



BUILDING THE NATION 



N any consideration of Federal Lands, the Public 

 Domain is basic. Not only was it, originally, 

 the nation's sole land possession, sum of all potential 

 land possessions, but later it became parent of many 

 great land divisions. Sales of its lands provided the 

 national income for many years. Gifts of its lands 

 brought settlers, whom it fed, clothed, housed and 

 supplied with farms, water, fuel, lumber, power, and 

 material for industry. It furnished roads for travel, 

 railroads for transportation, material for manufac- 

 ture and commerce. It set apart ample reserves for 

 the future of all that mineral, soil and water provide. 

 Out of the Public Domain the nation was built 

 and shaped. Its function of creation began in 1/80, 

 and for more than a century it was the great original 

 source of prosperity, the spring and reservoir of na- 

 tional progress. To-day, its lands shrunken to culls, 

 its greater work of the future carried forward by 

 younger specialist land organizations carved out of 

 its vitals, its national importance departed like the 

 glory of a day at dusk, nevertheless, it remains the 

 largest of the subdivisions of our Federal Lands, and 

 busier in many directions in its impoverished decline 



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