omestead 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
overbl