Now also flourished apace the industry of mortgage loans.Eastern money began to flood the western Plains, attracted by the high rates of interest.In 1886 the customary banking interest in western Kansas was two per cent a month.It is easy to see that very soon such a state of affairs as this must collapse.The industry of selling town lots far out in the cornfields, and of buying unimproved subdivision property with borrowed money at usurious rates of interest, was one riding for its own fall.
None the less the Little Fellow kept on going out into the West.
We did not change our land laws for his sake, and for a time he needed no sympathy.The homestead law in combination with the preemption act and the tree claim act would enable a family to get hold of a very sizable tract of land.The foundations of many comfortable fortunes were laid in precisely this way by thrifty men who were willing to work and willing to wait.
It was not until 1917 that the old homestead law limiting the settler to a hundred and sixty acres of land was modified for the benefit of the stock-raiser.The stockraising homestead law, as it is called, permits a man to make entry for not more than six hundred and forty acres of unappropriated land which shall have been designated by the Secretary of the Interior as "stockraising land." Cultivation of the land is not required, but the holder is required to make "permanent improvements" to the value of a dollar and twenty-five cents an acre, and at least one-half of these improvements must be made within three years after the date of entry.In the old times the question of proof in "proving up"was very leniently considered.A man would stroll down to the land office and swear solemnly that he had lived the legal length of time on his homestead, whereas perhaps he had never seen it or had no more than ridden across it.Today matters perhaps will be administered somewhat more strictly; for of all those millions of acres of open land once in the West there is almost none left worth the holding for farm purposes.
Such dishonest practices were, however, indignantly denied by those who fostered the irrigation and dryfarming booms which made the last phase of exploitation of the old range.A vast amount of disaster was worked by the failure of number less irrigation companies, each of them offering lands to the settlers through the medium of most alluring advertising.In almost every case the engineers underestimated the cost of getting water on the land.
Very often the amount of water available was not sufficient to irrigate the land which had been sold to settlers.In countless cases the district irrigation bonds-which were offered broadcast by Eastern banks to their small investors--were hardly worth the paper on which they were written.One after another these wildcat irrigation schemes, purporting to assure sudden wealth in apples, pears, celery, garden truck, cherries, small fruits, alfalfa, pecans, eucalyptus or catalpa trees-anything you liked--went to the wall.Sometimes whole communities became straitened by the collapse of these overblown enterprises.The recovery was slow, though usually the result of that recovery was a far healthier and more stable condition of society.
This whole question of irrigation and dry farming, this or that phase of the last scrambling, feverish settling on the last lands, was sorely wasteful of human enterprise and human happiness.It was much like the spawning rush of the salmon from the sea.Many perish.A few survive.Certainly there never was more cruel injustice done than that to the sober-minded Eastern farmers, some of them young men in search of cheaper homes, who sold out all they had in the East and went out to the dry country to farm under the ditch, or to take up that still more hazardous occupation--successful sometimes, though always hard and always risky--dry farming on the benches which cannot be reached with irrigating waters.
Strangely changed was all the face of the cattle range by these successive and startling innovations.The smoke of many little homes rose now, scattered over all that tremendous country from the Rockies to the edge of the short grass country, from Texas to the Canadian line.The cattle were not banished from the range, for each little farmer would probably have a few cows of his own;and in some fashion the great cowmen were managing to get in fee tracts of land sufficient for their purposes.There were land leases of all sorts which enabled the thrifty Westerner who knew the inside and out of local politics to pick up permanently considerable tracts of land.Some of these ranches held together as late as 1916; indeed, there are some such oldtime holdings still existent in the West, although far more rare than formerly was the case.
Under all these conditions the price of land went up steadily.
Land was taken eagerly which would have been refused with contempt a decade earlier.The parings and scraps and crumbs of the Old West now were fought for avidly.
The need of capital became more and more important in many of the great land operations.Even the government reclamation enterprises could not open lands to the settler on anything like the old homestead basis.The water right cost money--sometimes twenty-five or thirty dollars an acre; in some of the private reclamation enterprises, fifty dollars an acre, or even more.
