A man would stroll down to the land office and swear solemnly that he had lived the legal length of time on his homestead, whereas perhaps he had never seen it or had no more than ridden across it.

Today matters perhaps will be administered somewhat more strictly; for of all those millions of acres of open land once in the West there is almost none left worth the holding for farm purposes.
Such dishonest practices were, however, indignantly denied by those who fostered the irrigation and dryfarming booms which made the last phase of exploitation of the old range.

A vast amount of disaster was worked by the failure of number less irrigation companies, each of them offering lands to the settlers through the medium of most alluring advertising.

In almost every case the engineers underestimated the cost of getting water on the land.

Very often the amount of water available was not sufficient to irrigate the land which had been sold to settlers.
In countless cases the district irrigation bonds-which were offered broadcast by Eastern banks to their small investors--were hardly worth the paper on which they were written.