HEARINGS BEFORE COMMITTEE ON AGRICULTURE. 171 
Mr. Henry. Do you count the forest? 
Fe vac It is outside, but the forest is all used for range; 
all of it. 
Mr. Bowin. Very few cattle per section? 
Mr. Sprnuman. Very few. On a great deal of the range land of 
the West they consider 50 acres of land to the head about what the 
land will carry. Now the question is what to do with that land out 
there. Weare taking that up. It seems to me that the principle of 
the homestead law can not be applied to the range land in this way. 
The principle underlying the homestead law is to give a man a bit of 
land where he can get a decent living for his family; the area of land 
that has been given him by the homestead laws has been supposed to 
enable that man to accomplish that. Now, with the millions of acres 
of land in the West that can be used for no other purpose except 
range, the question is, How much of the land will it take to make a 
decent living for a family? That should be the size of the homestead. 
It is important in that connection to determine what the stock-carrying 
capacity of the range country is. We have already determined that 
over some of the more important districts of the range country, but 
the range country is enormously large, and there are some large areas 
that we have not been able to get into yet. 
I will give a little instance. We fenced a little piece of range land 
out in Wyoming, and by conferring with the man whose cattle grazed 
on that land we estimated there were about 50 head of cattle fenced 
out. We found that we actually fenced out over 500 head. So we 
have got to go to the cattle men, and get into their confidence, the 
sheep men, and get into their confidence, and let them know we are not 
hunting figures for taxation purposes, in order to find out what the 
carrying capacity of the range is. We have a gentleman in our office 
who is thorougly familiar with the range conditions. He has studied 
that question for years, and he is one of those men who has courage 
enough to go 100 miles across the desert out there, with only two 
water places, one a boiling-hot spring and the other an alkali spring. 
We are going to get some results out of that. We are trying to 
determine the carrying capacity of those ranges of the West, and those 
problems that arise there. 
The Cuatrman. Can not the cattle and sheep men determine that? 
Mr. Sprtiman. Each one knows it, but he will not tell anybody. 
The Cuarrman. Can not any cattle or sheep man tell the condition 
of the range, whether it is overstocked or understocked ? 
Mr. Srintman. We want to find out what the homestead should be 
in the various parts of the range country. 
Mr. Scorr. It does not seem to me as if the investigation on that 
line will throw any particular light upon the homestead question, for 
the reason that, obviously, the homestead, from your statement, would 
have to be of very different sizes in different sections of the State. 
Mr. Spiniman. They certainly would, and the size would have to be 
determined by some commission. We already have a commission 
which is looking after the question of public lands of the West and to 
make recommendations. We want information for them to use. We 
are going to have laws on that subject. It is a pressing subject in the 
West. Men are shooting each other down there over misunderstand- 
ings about land that does not belong to either one of them. 
Mr. Ropry. We have 7,000,000 of sheep and we have a lot of cattle 
and we do not find them on the assessor’s book. 
