mits, and to make and apply appropriate regulations to each district, with the special object of bringing about the largest permanent occupation of the country by actual settlers and home seekers.

The fundamental fact that characterizes the situation under the present public-land law is that the number of patents issued is increasing out of all proportion to the number of new homes.46

These statements were an effective prelude to the conservation movement four years later. In 1909 larger homestead grants-320 acres were to be made for dry farming according to the act of February 19, 1909 (35 Stat. L., 639). More lands were to be withdrawn from Indian reservations for power and reservoir sites by the act of June 25, 1910 (36 Stat. L., 858). During the following year Congress began appropriating for the purchase of forest reserves in the Appalachian and the White Mountains. Furthermore, the President was authorized to withdraw at his discretion any of the public lands, including those in Alaska, and to reserve them for water-power sites or irrigation. 47

The National Conservation Commission reported to Congress in 1909 a number of recommendations, some of which, if fulfilled, would assign work to the General Land Office. It advised that:

The timber, the minerals, and the surface of the public lands should be disposed of separately.

Public lands more valuable for conserving water supply, timber, and natural beauties or wonders than for agriculture should be held for the use of the people from all except mineral entry.

46 58 Cong. 3 sess., S. doc. 189, p. xii. The commission consisted of Messrs. W. A. Richards, F. H. Newell, and Gifford Pinchot. The report includes a mine of statistical information concerning the management and disposition of the public domain.

47 A list of withdrawals made by the President between June 25, 1910 and December 6, 1912 is given in 62 Cong. 3 sess., H. doc.

Pending the transfer of title to the remaining public lands, they should be administered by the Government, and then use should be allowed in a way to prevent or control waste and monopoly.48

It emphasized that changes in the laws were necessary partly because the original laws "contemplated conditions and needs which have been greatly modified by conferences, political, social, and economic conditions, and by decisions of the Land Office and of the courts which were not foreseen by the law makers. It urged the classification of lands, the repeal of the Timber and Stone Act and the Desert Land Act, and insisted that all locations on mineral lands be filed at the local land office within a reasonable time after their initiation, 19 Four years after this report was made, the work of the Land Office was greatly simplified by the act of September 30, 1913 (38 Stat. L., 113) which gave the President authority to prescribe the methods of the openings. Commissioner Clay Tallman declared in 1921 that this simple little act had "done more toward insuring equal opportunity and prevention of land litigation than any other single act in the history of the land laws. Under it, millions of acres have been opened to entry in an orderly manner with less than half a dozen contests to determine who was entitled to the land." 59

The National Conservation Commission evidently considered it just as necessary that the lands which were entered should be utilized to the best advantage as it was that certain lands should be reserved. In harmony with this idea was the "Stock-raising Homestead Act" of December 29, 1916 (39 Stat. L., 862). This authorizes the Secretary to designate

48 60 Cong. 2 sess., S. doc. 676.

49 A comprehensive account of this work is given in Van Hise, The conservation of natural resources in the United States. Another very technical and practical attempt to solve the conservation problem is presented in Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, XXXIII, pp. 487-710 (May, 1909). See also, Reform of the land laws; conservation of the natural resources, in 61 Cong. 2 sess., S. doc. 283.

50 Land Service Bulletin, vol, 5, No. 2, p. 3 (1921).

"stock-raising lands," which may be acquired under the homestead laws in 640-acre tracts, provided such lands cannot be classified as timber or irrigable lands and they are in his opinion more adaptable for grazing than for any other purpose. Thousands of acres of this picturesque cow-boy land were afterward patented, and millions of acres more will have to be settled before the American frontier shall have passed into private ownership.

51

When the Federal Power Commission was created by the act of June 10, 1920 (41 Stat. L., 1063), it was provided that certain lands should be placed under its control for the use of such projects as water-power and navigation structures and reserved from disposal until either the Federal Power Commission or Congress shall direct otherwise. 52

During this period of conservation of the natural resources, other services pertaining to the administration of special land affairs have developed to commanding proportions, particularly the Reclamation, Forest, and National Park Services, the Geological Survey, the Bureau of Mines, and the Office of Indian Affairs.

51 An explanatory statement relative to the Stock-Raising Homestead Law, with a copy of the act is given in 64 Cong. 2 sess., S. doc. 663.

52 The Federal Power Commission is composed of the Secretaries of War, Interior, and Agriculture.

CHAPTER II

ACTIVITIES

Surveys of the Public Domain. On acquiring public domain the first duty of the General Land Office is to survey it. At the end of the fiscal year 1920, there had been surveyed more than 1,271,000,000 acres, including the surveys in Alaska, of which more than nine million were completed in 1920. To this must be added more than two million acres of resurveys. There remained unsurveyed 549,000,000 acres, of which 172,367,339 acres are in the United States proper and 376,914,262 acres are in Alaska. Thus at the rate at which the lands were surveyed in 1920, it will take at least sixty years before the original surveys of all of the remaining public domain can be made. All of the surveys made by the General Land Office are essentially cadastral surveys, and include only enough detail to identify the land subdivisions. Detailed topographic mapping showing in detail the contour of the land, roads, elevations, etc., is done by the Geological Survey.

Until 1910 the surveying was done through a system of contracts with private surveyors, although there had been some agitation for a system through which the work would be done directly by government surveyors. President Cleveland, in his message to Congress on December 3, 1894, said that he was satisfied that the surveys "should be made under the immedi

1 For a graphic account of the methods employed in this activity, see Woodward, Public Domain, its surveys and surveyors, Michigan Pioneer and Historical Society, Collections, vol. 27, pp. 312, 321, also Manual of Surveying Instructions for the survey of the Public Lands of the United States, issued by the General Land Office in 1855-1902, and 1919.

ate control and direction of the Commissioner of the General Land Office." 2 Sixteen years later this was still more desirable.

The business of surveying the public lands in its generally accepted sense, the comparatively simple process of "sectionizing" the country, a process that had been employed for a century and a quarter, was approaching its final stages for want of new worlds to conquer. Surveys of fragmentary and remotely situated groups and of isolated tracts in the rougher country were beginning to require more attention. The location and acceptance of initial and control lines, which had been always considered as mere incidents of the survey, were becoming problems fraught with uncertainty because of obliteration or the mythical character of the surrounding surveys. Engineers of standing were loath to risk their fortunes and their reputations on such work on a contract basis. As a consequence, in every state there were numbers of complicated, isolated, fragmentary surveys which no qualified surveyor would undertake to execute by contract. But the work must be done and the contract system was still in force. Finally a per diem system of payment was worked out whereby the surveyor contracted to complete a survey at a stipulated amount a day for a limited number of days. This system took care of a few of the more favorable cases, but the great majority remained untouched. Furthermore, the necessity for executing resurveys in certain of the states-Colorado, Wyoming, and Nebraska in particular-was becoming more urgent. Few engineers were qualified by training to perform this intricate and painstaking class of work, and those who were equipped hesitated to undertake it under contract, even under the newly inaugurated per diem form of contract, on account of the uncertainty as to even the approximate extent of retracement and reëstablishment that would be necessary in order to find and establish a proper base for the work, and the utter guesswork as to possible conflicts of claims and other survey complications that might develop with the progress of the resurvey.

2 Richardson, Messages and papers of the Presidents, vol. 13, p. 5975.

Annual Report, 1920, pp. 18-19.