advocates. Numerous bills were introduced in the Congress to counteract the authority given the President in the 1891 law.

After the management of the forest reserves was transferred from the General Land Office to the Department of Agriculture in 1905, the western interests in Congress managed to destroy the special Agriculture fund for the Forest Service and place it directly under Congressional appropriations.

They were successful in limiting the President's authority to create additional forest reserves and, in forestalling grazing land legislation. They managed for a time to keep much of the remaining public land open and available for entry.

The battle for control over the public domain took on a personal note after the Forest Service was transferred in 1905 to the Department of Agriculture. Gifford Pinchot, the Chief of the new Forest Service, conducted a campaign to obtain control of the majority of the remaining public lands. Secretary of the Interior Ballinger challenged his contention and one of the bitterest feuds in public lands history developed. Pinchot was dismissed from his post as a result of the controversy. Even after leaving the Forest Service, Pinchot continued to wage the public battles for the conservationists, and in particular, the Forest Service. 155/ In later years he battled with Secretary of the Interior Ickes over jurisdiction or control of the grazing lands and the Forest Service. Pinchot's public battles attracted public attention to the question of conservation of the remaining public domain. Perhaps he is as responsible as any of the leading figures of this period for the development of the management concept for the Federal lands.

100th Anniversary of the General Land Office

It was ironic that the 100th Anniversary of the General Land Office should fall right in the middle of the controversy over the transformation of emphasis concerning the disposition and management of the public lands. In the Office's 100 years, it had experienced three extremely important transitions. The evolution from the revenue theory into the free land period as typified by the Homestead Act, and then to the conservation concept that developed at the turn of the Century.

In an accounting of the General Land Office for the first 100 years, one cannot but be impressed with the importance of its work. The nation had developed from a frontier settlement just overflowing into the Ohio River basin, to a land connected from east to west with an elaborate transportation system with homesteaders establishing claims by the thousands, into a country aware and some what dissolutioned to find that the romance of the public lands and the frontier was giving way to a highly developed industrial society.

In 1912, there were 102 district land offices and the General Land Office had 1419 employees. From the passage of the Homestead Act in 1862, over 924,000 homestead entries had been made for a total of 127,846,424 acres of the public domain. The railroads had received over 125 million acres, soldiers had received 61 million acres in bounties from the Revolution, War of 1812, Indian Wars, and the Mexican War. 156/

The Federal Government had received more than 455 million dollars from the sale or lease of the public lands. The States had received over 15 million dollars from profit sharing laws. In excess of 75 million acres of the domain had been granted to the States for educational and charitable purposes.

In 1912, there remained 682 million acres of unreserved and unappropriated public lands. 157/

Commissioner Fred Dennett in a centennial address in Washington summed up the first 100 years of the General Land Office in this

manner:

And so great problems have confronted the
General Land Office under the legislation had
for the past 100 years. The era of sale adhered
to for a while and abandoned. The era of
development, under which so much progress has
been made, and dovetailed with it, and now con-
fronting, comes an epoch of reservation. То
meet these the Land Office has been the agent
of the Executive.

It is the nature of man to err, but, in viewing
the difficult problems that have had to be met,
and the abstruseness of the questions which have

arisen under them in carrying them out when
solved, but few mistakes have been made.

These problems which had to be solved have
affected the Nation at large. The advance
of the West has meant the prosperity of the
East.

The Land Office in its 100 years of history
has had problems of the most difficult kind
to meet, and has them yet. It has had to
interpret and administer laws, which,
admirable at the time they were passed,
become inadequate because of the conditions
which the laws themselves brought about.
It has lived through storms, and those who
have had the honor of service in it have
been confronted with harsh criticism, but I
say without hesitation that, when the last
patent to public lands has been written and
the books closed, it will be to finish a
history of deeds done and problems confronted
and overcome; and the volumes that are written
in the future will contain tributes to the
services of as faithful a class of employees
as ever labored for a Government, and who,
out of the past, have built traditions which
will call forth the commendation of those
who reap the reward of a West prosperous and
developed to its highest extent. 158/

The Commissioner's statement was somewhat muffled and perhaps not completely appreciated at the time it was given in Washington, D. C. The battle over the reservation and withdrawal policy was still a full blow storm. The fact of the matter was at that very moment certain individuals were trying to transfer the principal duties of the General Land Office to another Department and Bureau of the Federal Government.

National Parks

The withdrawal of land for National Park purposes developed quickly after 1900. While never tied to the forest reserve concept

as such, the legislation withdrawing land for Parks went hand in hand with the reservation of timber lands. Today more than seven million acres of the public domain have been withdrawn for Park purposes. Parks at Glacier, Yosemite, and the Grand Canyon were created during the first part of the 20th Century, when the conservationists were waging their crusade for a new land policy.

After the conservationists had accomplished their desire to have the Nation's forests reserved and land withdrawn for National Parks, they directed their efforts towards the grazing lands of the public domain. They had been very successful in counteracting the opposition of the western interests to forest reserves, and with the glow of success, pushed for control of the arid lands.

Today there are more than thirty National Farks, mostly in the Western States. The following table will illustrate the amount of land withdrawn from the Federal land reserve for park purposes.

PART V

THE MANAGEMENT PERIOD

1934

The Taylor Grazing Act

The passage of the Taylor Grazing Act in 1934 was the culmination of many years of latent awareness of the need for acomprehensive policy of land classification and management. The new law, the Taylor Grazing Act, formally ushered in the management period in the history of the public lands, and, while not perfect, was an immediate answer to the problem. It was a part of the progression of events in the history of the Federal lands in the United States, a land policy that had passed through the stages of revenue, development, and conservation, and from these emerged into a management era.

When the Homestead Act passed the Congress in 1862, there was such an abundance of land that there was no need for a management classification type of administration for the public lands. At that time there was not a great divessification of land use such as developed in the latter part of the 19th Century. It was only after 1875 for instance that the great cattle ranches began to mushroom in the trans-Mississippi West. With the growth of the cattle kingdoms and the continued migration of homesteaders westward, the two groups came into conflict over the use of the public lands. The agarians while taking up suitable farm land often cut the ranchers off from their supply of water or separated their summer and winter grazing areas, or the ranchers monopolized huge areas of land, some suitable for farming purposes.

The Public Lands Commission of 1880 in its report to the Congress recognized the impending difficulties between the grazing interests, the farmers, and the timber groups.

While the suggestions of the Commission were not adopted, it is worthwhile to look at one of their significant recommendations. They recognized the need for special legislation for forage types