Carson Daily Appeal

There have been more than two hundred applications for land at the Land Office during the past month. This is in parcels ranging in area from 75 acres to 600 acres. This makes a rather gratifying showing for our School Fund; but inasmuch as it is a fact that our public acres are going into personal ownership ever so much faster than our population is increasing in the numbers of its actual human settlers, we may well pause and look at this land-selling question as it actually stands. Here and there an applicant is a small farmer or an actual wood-chopper; but the sorry fact is that most of those who apply for lands come either with a proxy for the actual applicant or are themselves purchasers for the sake of getting a corner on, and selling to, some cattle grazier or other person with a longing for wide herding lands. There is a pitiful paucity of the sure-enough granger element in all this—if, as we hope, a granger is an anti land grabber and a homestead man. To be sure it is better that our broad ranges of grazing lands should be owned and occupied by stock herders, even if those stock herders be Californians or Oregonians, than that they should remain forever unoccupied. But there is a full consideration of an opposite character which merits our regard:—it is embodied in the question—had not these lands better be held for actual settlers and small farmers than that whole valleys, water-courses, springs and all, should here and again, fall under the undivided ownership of a cattle breeder? The fact is that these rapid sales, in too many instances make possible this wholesale grabbing of feed producing, arable valleys with all their watering places. That is where the trouble (for the future) comes in; and so it happens that there may come a time when these large sales of our public lands will come to be looked on as a calamity.