Comment by Ed Quillen

March 25, 2008 @ 5:14 pm

I certainly agree with Felice Pace that there’s plenty of mythology in the popular history of the American West. I have sometimes argued that “The Conquest of the West” is the American Iliad, our defining epic of nationhood. Just as the ancient Greeks delighted in the tales of Achilles and Hector, and the ancient Hebrews celebrated David and Goliath, we have the homesteaders and the miners and all the rest. Such accounts may lack some literal truth, but they often offer a great deal of cultural insight.

I wanted to illustrate a common “idealistic” theme behind three important laws: the Homestead Act, the General Mining Law of 1872, and the Colorado Doctrine of Prior Appropriation.

Of course all three were quickly put to use by big business. Large ranches had employees file homestead claims at water spots, since he who controlled access to water also controlled the surrounding pasturage, and once the homesteader had “proved up,” he sold the land to the company. After miners got past simple placer deposits and the soft rotten quartz in shallow lode mines, mining and milling took expensive machinery that required outside capital which meant big business. And once the easy ditches had been dug, water development required co-operation and capital, sometimes private, sometimes public.

In other words, the “family-farm” (or its mining equivalent) might have remained as an ideal (recall that until the 1980s, there was in theory a 160-acre limit on farms getting Reclamation water), but in reality, that ideal was quickly superseded (those California corporate farms irrigating thousands of acres with Reclamation water).

As for the railroad land grants, there was no relevant way to address them because I needed to focus on the cultural, political and economic results of the location of eastern terminus of the Pacific Railroad; it connected the West to the Midwest. as Lincoln desired, rather than to the South, as Jefferson Davis preferred in his term as U.S. Secretary of War. The land-grant financing mechanism was not espcially pertinent to the selection of a route.

The Gilded Age saga of immense grants of the public domain certainly deserves more attention. The railroads shaped the West in many ways, not least with their immense land grants, especially in the timber country.

Comment by George Draffan

March 27, 2008 @ 5:01 pm

There were dozens of railroad land grants in every area of the country, from Florida to Washington, from California to the Midwest. Ten percent of the lower 48 states were supposed to be sold in quarter-section parcels to settlers, but were instead sold to corporations. The result is not just clearcutting, but monopolies in transportation, mining, and real estate. The environmental, economic, and social problems set into motion by the railroad land grants continue today. Some of the history and consequences of the land grants can be seen at the website http://www.landgrant.org

Comment by kate grimes

March 28, 2008 @ 4:55 pm

Read Samuel Westerns “Pushed off the mountain sold down the river” for Western Myth debunking in Wyoming.