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The Closing of the Public Domain
$21.52
E. Louise Peffer
Book
The Closing of the Public Domain
$21.52
E. Louise Peffer
Book
The Closing of the Public Domain Disposal and Reservation Policies, 1900-1950 E. Lousie Peffer On June 17, 1902, the 56th Congress of the United States passed the Reclamation--or Newlands-Act, which allocated the proceeds of future sales of public lands to the irrigation of the arid West. Federally sponsored reclamation was the last of the great developmental projects of the country to be subsidized initially by proceeds from the public domain. In its major aspect, the act represented a continuation of an established pattern of policy. In another respect, however, it gave indication of a new trend in policy for the future. In 1900 there were still around 560 million acres open to entry and settlement under the general land laws of the United States, within the continental limits of the country exclusive of Alaska. This was more than a fourth of the land area of the whole country. It was difficult, even impossible, to accept the idea that so vast an area could not long be expected to furnish homes. Indeed, the Reclamation Act was intended to push far into the future the time when consideration of such an eventuality would be necessary. By the most optimistic estimates, reclamation, chiefly by irrigation, would in time bring 100 million acres into cultivation-and the tendency was to accept the most optimistic figure. Furthermore, the non-irrigable land was not worthless; some of it was valuable for forests, some for minerals, some as range. Consequently it was hardly likely that the country could be brought to believe that the frontier of opportunity afforded by the public domain was closed, as Frederick Jackson Turner, in his famous hypothesis advanced in 1893, had suggested the geographical frontier to be; and that a new policy was dictated. There was, however, a small but dynamic body of opinion which cited, as evidence of the need for change, the very arguments advanced against a change of policy. The public land policy of the United States has been described as having fallen into three phases: sale, development, and reservation. The Reclamation Act bridged the three, using as expedients in aid of further development the old principle of sale and the new principle of reservation. The resort to the reservation principle in the Reclamation Act did not constitute Congressional acceptance of the idea it represented. It did, however, point the direction in which public land policy was to travel in the twentieth century. In its main outline, the story of the public domain in the twentieth century is one of a tug of war between the forces advocating the continuation of the process of settlement and development, and the growing number of those maintaining that the equity of the public in the valuable resources which remained should not be dissipated. It is a struggle which continues actively today in spite of the apparent victory achieved by the reservationists in the passage of the Taylor Grazing Act in 1934. This act, as amended, virtually closed both the public domain and one of the most significant and colorful epochs of American history. This study does not purport to be a history of the public domain in the twentieth century. Nor can it present a full coverage of the phase of public domain history implied by the title; for the latter period, much of the material necessary to round out the account is not yet open to public scrutiny. It is proposed to relate, on the basis of the sources which are available, the steps by which the concept of the public domain has veered from one of land held in escrow pending transfer of title, toward one of reservations held in perpetuity in the interest of the collective owners, the people of the United States. This is a reproduction edition from a scanned copy of the 1951 original edition: Title: The Closing of the Public Domain Author: E. Louise Peffer Publisher: Stanford University Press 1951 ISBN: 080473237X
