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.

Perhaps he brought two or three thousand dollars with him.

It usually was the industrial mistake of the land-boomer to take from this intending settler practically all of his capital at the start.
Naturally, when the new farmers were starved out and in one way or another had made other plans, the country itself went to pieces.