THE PUBLIC DOMAIN OF THE UNITED STATES.

By MAX WEST, Ph. D.,

Of the Division of Statistics.

INTRODUCTION.

There are within the limits of the United States, exclusive of Alaska and the new island possessions, nearly 573,995,000 acres of vacant Government land, besides 145,122,000 acres in Indian reservations, forest reserves, national parks, reservoir sites, and military reservations, or for some other reason reserved from settlement. The vast area of Alaska, which is very nearly all public land, together with lesser areas in Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and other new dependencies, will bring up the total extent of the national domain, exclusive of reservations, to nearly 1,000,000,000 acres. The table on page 326 shows the distribution of the public land by political divisions, and also compares the amount of public land in each State and Territory with the amount appropriated. The latter includes lands owned by the States and by public and private corporations, as well as all lands either actually owned by individuals, or "entered," though not yet patented, under the land laws of the United States. Since there are in the Western United States some 262,000,000 acres still unsurveyed, the figures given should be taken as being only approximately rather than absolutely correct; and besides the areas shown there are probably a few small isolated tracts of public land remaining undisposed of in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. The figures refer to the conditions existing on June 30, 1898, as shown by the report of the Commissioner of the General Land Office, except that corrections and additions have been made for forest reserves set aside since that time, and for the public lands of Hawaii. The table shows that more than 30 per cent of the area of the United States proper is still vacant public land, while about 73 per cent is reserved.

Future additions to the reservations for permanent forests and reservoir sites will no doubt diminish the area open to settlers, but these additions are likely to be counterbalanced in whole or in part by the opening of Indian and military reservations to settlement. The 1,000,000 acres granted to each of the arid States by the so-called "Carey act" will still further reduce the amount of land to be obtained by settlers directly from the National Government, but doubtless without reducing the total amount of public land available for settlement. At the present rate of disposal to individuals, the vacant lands in the United States proper would last for nearly a century.

325

Areas of vacant, reserved, and appropriated lands.

In the case of land grants in aid of railroad construction, lands within the limits of the grants are considered "unappropriated and unreserved" until selected by the grantee, though it is not certain that the usage of the various land offices is uniform in this respect. It follows from this mode of classification that to ascertain the amount of land still available for entry a deduction should be made from the amount given as "unappropriated and unreserved" to represent that portion of railroad grants not yet selected by the railroad companies. While no exact figures are available for this purpose, the General Land Office estimates the total amount of land granted to aid in railroad construction at 156,893,468 acres, and as the amount patented up to July 1, 1898, was but 88,947,862 acres, the remainder is a little less than 68,000,000 acres. It is, however, very unlikely that patents will actually issue to the grantees for half that quantity of land, for some portions of the grants had been appropriated by settlers before the grants were made, and still larger areas are so mountainous and barren as to be scarcely worth selecting and patenting. A deduction of 25,000,000 acres from the area unappropriated and unreserved would probably be sufficient to cover future patents on account of railroad land grants. These grants consist of the alternate sections lying within wide strips of territory crossing the western part of the United States, and in some cases indemnity lands have been granted beyond the limits of the original grants. The Northern Pacific Railroad grant extends in a band 40 miles wide across Minnesota and 80 miles wide across North Dakota, Montana, the northern end of Idaho, and Washington; the Union Pacific and Central Pacific Railroad grants are in a strip 40 miles wide extending from the Missouri River across Nebraska, southern Wyoming, northwestern Utah, Nevada, and California, to San Francisco, with branches in Colorado. and Kansas and northward through California and Oregon; the Atlantic and Pacific and Southern Pacific Railroad grants extend from the Rio Grande in New Mexico across Arizona and California to San Jose, with a branch to the southeastern corner of California. There are also many smaller grants in the more easterly public-land States, besides several wagon-road grants in Oregon and elsewhere.

PUBLIC LANDS FIT FOR PRODUCTIVE USES.

Far more important than the exact area of the public domain legally open to settlement is the question how much of this public land is actually fit for cultivation or for other productive uses. Having regard to present conditions, it must be admitted that all the best parts of the public domain have been appropriated, and that comparatively very little good agricultural land remains open to settlement; the mineral value of that which remains may be very great, but even of the mineral deposits it may be said that the most accessible and

most easily worked among them have probably been appropriated. Looking into the future, the question becomes much more difficult, for no one can tell even approximately how much of the land now lying waste may be ultimately reclaimed to productive uses. The one thing needed, as far as concerns the greater part of the 573,995,000 acres of vacant public land in the United States proper, including nearly all west of the ninety-eighth or one hundredth meridian, is an adequate supply of water; and this applies to much of the mineral land, as well as to that which it is desired to reclaim for agricultural purposes. Vast tracts of arid land in the Western United States contain in an unusual degree all the elements of fertility except water, and with the aid of irrigation could be made to yield more abundantly than even the best land of the humid regions. It has been said that "sagebrush is unerring evidence of kindly soil and abundant sunshine." Estimates of the amount of this land which can be irrigated with the water at command vary greatly, but there is none for the arid region as a whole more authoritative than those of Maj. J. W. Powell, formerly Director of the United States Geological Survey, and Mr. F. H. Newell, chief hydrographer of that Survey. Major Powell estimated that at least 150,000 square miles, or 96,000,000 acres, could be economically reclaimed by irrigation within the present generation; or, as he said before a Congressional committee in 1890, that about 100,000,000 acres could be reclaimed by the utilization of perennial streams alone.1 Mr. Newell places the irrigable amount at 74,000,000 acres,2 or about 7.6 per cent of the total area of the sixteen Western public-land States and Territories. This is a very conservative estimate, in which financial as well as engineering considerations are taken into account, and it looks not to the remote future, but only to what is likely to be profitable and therefore practicable within a generation. Future improvements in irrigation engineering and methods and discoveries of new underground water supplies, together with the increasing demand for agricultural products resulting from an increasing population, may in the course of time make it profitable to irrigate a much larger area; but any attempt to state the ultimate extent of irrigation would be only conjecture. The amount of land irrigated in 1889, the latest year for which census figures are available, was in most of the arid States so small in proportion to the estimated irrigable area as to be almost negligible in a rough calculation, so that it will not be far from the truth to take Mr. Newell's conservative figures as representing the probable future increase of the irrigated area. But it must be remembered that some part of the lands to be reclaimed will probably be lands now in private ownership. Although the area

1 First Annual Report of the United States Irrigation Survey, 1888-89, pp. VII, 14; Second Annual Report of same, 1889-90, p. 204.

2 The Public Lands and their Water Supply. (Extract from the Sixteenth Annual Report of the United States Geological Survey, 1894–95, p. 494.)