There were land
leases of all sorts which enabled the thrifty Westerner who knew
the inside and out of local politics to pick up permanently
considerable tracts of land. Some of these ranches held together
as late as 1916; indeed, there are some such oldtime holdings
still existent in the West, although far more rare than formerly
was the case.
Under all these conditions the price of land went up steadily.
Land was taken eagerly which would have been refused with
contempt a decade earlier. The parings and scraps and crumbs of
the Old West now were fought for avidly.
The need of capital became more and more important in many of the
great land operations. Even the government reclamation
enterprises could not open lands to the settler on anything like
the old homestead basis. The water right cost money--sometimes
twenty-five or thirty dollars an acre; in some of the private
reclamation enterprises, fifty dollars an acre, or even more.
Very frequently when the Eastern farmer came out to settle on
such a tract and to meet the hard, new, and expensive conditions
of life in the semi-arid regions he found that he could not pay
out on the land.
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