62 OUR FEDERAL LANDS 



the minerals in school lands were reserved in na- 

 tional ownership. Fourteen bills in the Sixty-Ninth 

 Congress demanding release of the minerals to the 

 states show the trend of the coming uprising. 



After the hundred and eighty-three million 

 acres of the National Forests were withdrawn from 

 the Public Domain, followed by withdrawals con- 

 tinually since of lands set apart temporarily or per- 

 manently for other special purposes, leaving little 

 more than grazing lands and poor agricultural lands, 

 the importance of the Public Domain to the develop- 

 ment of the country began rapidly to subside. 



"The Federal Government," said Secretary 

 Work in 1926, "is still throwing open to homestead 

 entry large areas of land the character of which 

 makes the homesteading of them impractical. Yet 

 our citizens are being invited to waste their time and 

 savings in fruitless enterprise. From the Arkansas 

 River Valley in Colorado I have received complaints 

 regarding settlers who had filed entry on a number 

 of tracts of public land. Unable to obtain a liveli- 

 hood from the lands they had homesteaded, they 

 were making appeals for charity, from a neighbor- 

 ing town." 



In no respect is the decline of the General Land 

 Office more simply and strikingly shown than in re- 

 cent sharp reductions of its visible equipment. A 

 dozen years ago its staff and records filled an impos- 

 ing building covering an entire Washington block 

 opposite the old Patent Office on F Street. In 1922, 

 the declining business of the bureau still engaged 



