Land force

“ To this the Forest Service replied by throwing open to agricultural settlement every acre of land, lying within the limits of the national forests, which was more suitable for agriculture than forest culture. ”

“ Every year millions of acres are added to our national domain. The wild prairie with its countless buffaloes and its skulking, murderous war-parties of red men becomes the frontier; the frontier becomes the settled farms and villages; the iron horse and the telegraph connect it with the great East; and still the pioneer and the army push ahead to open up still more of the richest land in the world to the conquering axe and plow of the Anglo-Saxon.
—From "Belden the White Chief".
Pupils should be prepared to recite on the following topics:
1. Moving west, then moving west again. ”

“ It was declared to be inexpedient to have less than twenty fighting men in each "society," and provision was made for a land grant to be given to these societies (or towns) not less than 10,000 nor more than 30,000 acres upon any of the frontiers, to be held in common by the society. The power of ordering and managing these lands, and the settling and planting of them, was to remain in the society. ”

“ Would not our returned soldiers, who already are matured men, be in their graves before their desert and swamp farms gave a living to their cultivators? Still more strange was the common notion that all soldiers, even the crippled, were eager to settle on land—that all wanted land and all were fit to be farmers! ”

“ Without a yard of territorial property—with no wealth but their ships—no force but their crews—and no hope but from their sword, they swarmed upon the boisterous ocean, and plundered in every district they could approach. ”

“ There are mountains to pierce, sea-shores to reclaim, vast stretches of submerged land to drain, millions of acres to irrigate and many more millions to utilize by dry-farming, rivers to canalize, the whole open country to organize and subdue by means of local engineering work, and a thousand other great pieces of construction to accomplish, all calling for the finest spirit of conquest and all contributing to the training of men and women. There is no necessity that the race become flabby. ”

“ Care must also be taken in loose soil that it is not loaded by any temporary works so as to force the earth in any direction, or a slip will occur and any trenches may become filled, and every effort should be made to cause equal loading and pressure and to prevent unequal settlement. ”

“ The three parties named will subdivide the land, under the supervision of the inspector, among themselves, and such others as may choose to settle near them, so that each family shall have a plot of not more than forty acres of tillable ground, and, when it borders on some water-channel, with not more than eight hundred feet water-front, in the possession of which land the military authorities will afford them protection until such time as they can protect themselves, or until Congress shall regulate their title. ”

“ In arcifinious lands, where the bounds are formed by nature, any gradual change in the course of the river makes a change also in the boundaries of territory, and whatever accession is given by the river to one side, it will belong to the possessor of the land on that side. Because the respective nations are supposed originally to have taken possession of those lands, with an intention of making the MIDDLE of that river, as a natural boundary, the line of separation between them. ”

“ The best use of the public grazing lands requires the careful examination and classification of these lands in order to give each settler land enough to support his family and no more. While this work is being done, and until the lands are settled, the Government should take control of the open range, under reasonable regulations suited to local needs, following the general policy already in successful operation on the forest reserves. ”

“ When the land has been acquired, a plan for a colony is worked out, with provision for necessary roads, town sites, irrigation or drainage systems, utilization of water power, social centers, experimental farms, etc. ”

“ Owing to the extensive subdivision of land customary in this country, every property is surrounded by hedges, ditches, and walls. There are, consequently, numerous positions and isolated points at which even moderate troops could defend themselves behind good cover. ”

“ The sound use of land and water is far more comprehensive than the mere planting of trees, building of dams, distributing of electricity or retirement of sub-marginal land. It recognizes that stranded populations, either in the country or the city, cannot have security under the conditions that now surround them. ”

“ But public lands taken up on military land-warrants issued under general laws, passed for the national object of encouraging and rewarding military service, and not limited to any particular state, have no more been regarded as lands sold, for any portion of the value of which the national government should account to the state in which the lands are actually taken up, than lands reserved and used for forts, arsenals, or light-houses. ”

“ Land-mad settlers were flocking into "Jefferson's Purchase," grubbing out hazel roots, splitting rails, making fences, building barns and bridges. Men whose sole wealth consisted in an auger, a handsaw, and a gun, were pushing into the prairies and the forests. ”

“ But while doing this he also places upon the land a dense population, closely attached to the soil, strong to resist incursion, and for economic reasons inhospitable to any marked accession of population from without. ”

“ At present, our whole land system is constructed to prevent their working. It is Nature's way alternately to gather together and to disperse abroad Our land laws are all on the side of gathering together. ”

“ The country is, therefore, here in similar condition to that of the Eastern Slave States. The improvements which the inhabitants have succeeded in making in the way of clearing the forest, fencing and tilling the land, building dwellings, barns, and machinery, making roads and bridges, and introducing the institutions of civilization, not compensating in value the deterioration in the productiveness of the soil. The exhausted land reverts to wilderness. ”

“ Beyond the original connection between militancy and land-owning, which naturally arises from the joint interest which those who own the land and occupy it, either individually or collectively, have in resisting aggressors, there arises later a further connection. As, along with successful militancy, there progresses a social evolution which gives to a dominant ruler increased power, it becomes his custom to reward his leading soldiers by grants of land. ”

“ Since the lands suitable for farming in their natural state have practically all been disposed of; the plan contemplates the reclamation of arid and swamp lands, and of land from which the forests have been cut but which are still covered with stumps. It is proposed that returned soldiers shall be employed by the government in the work of reclaiming the land, and that those who desire to become farmers may buy their farms in the reclaimed lands at a reasonable price, and with a period of thirty or forty years in which to pay for them. ”

“ They are therefore the defensive strongholds of a population located upon the arable lands, and not in the mountain fastnesses of the country; and their peculiar nature as exceptionally secure places of refuge for non-combatants and cattle, and for storage of produce, explains the fitness of their association with the arable soil of the area in which they are most abundantly present. ”

“ Increased population, high-power guns, cultivation of the soil, the breaking up of large ranches into smaller holdings, have resulted in the disappearance of much of the game with which the land then abounded. ”

“ Fences burned, bridges destroyed; the plantation a forest of tall weeds; horses, mules, cattle, sheep, poultry, provisions, wagons, implements of every kind—all gone; wealth, servants, comforts—all means of support for my family gone; all lost save honor. ”

“ You may just as well ask for a clause, giving license for every man to till his own land, or milk his own cows. The barons in Europe procured forest laws to secure the right of hunting on their own land, from the intrusion of those who had no property in lands. But the distribution of land in America, not only supersedes the necessity of any laws [pg 150] upon this subject, but renders them absolutely trifling. ”

“ Public lands required for construction purposes—including sand-pits, gravel-pits, and quarries—may be utilized without rental, and wood and timber may be cut from State-owned forests without compensation. ”

“ Frequent aggressions upon these reserves are occurring, which have produced collisions between the Indian agents and the settlers, who appeal to me for protection. Seeing so much land unoccupied and unimproved, these enterprising pioneers naturally question the policy which excludes them from soil devoted to no useful or legitimate purpose. ”

“ We see that this system of gigantic and laboriously constructed strongholds has been devised and universally adopted with the plain intention of providing for the security of the tillers and the produce of the soil. ”

“ A good deal of the land, distant from villages, lies waste, though capable of good tillage; and from the all pervading cause, the want of confidence in the Government and its officers, and of any feeling of security to life, property, and industry. Should this cause be removed, the whole surface of the country would become the beautiful garden which the parts well cultivated and peopled now are. ”

“ These land agencies are, in a thousand ways, busying themselves in the securing of further lands for speculative purposes. The days of wholesale grants having gone by, they are turning their attention to the lands of the individual settler, and under their tutelage clerks, teachers, town men and women, hired laborers, men who do not know wheat from barley or rye from flax, are filing upon the last of the tillable public lands. ”

“ Land defence, though a secondary branch of the great question of imperial defence, has been intimately connected with the development and internal growth of the empire. In the case of the first settlement of the American colonies they were expected to provide for their own land defence. ”

“ On flat or gently declining land they may be greater than on steep grounds, because, in order to prevent the washing away of the soil on precipitous land, the water must be led off by trenches, which of themselves make the divisions of land smaller. ”

“ If at any time we have been of opinion that the land should be allotted, as indeed it now seems to us, or likewise if the land is to be maintained, it was and is to avoid greater injury and robberies, which are committed without any remedy, when there are no repartimientos. Therefore, only one thing now works injury. ”

“ Nothing is said of the removal of human occupiers from this area, though it seems improbable that such 176favourable soil should be void of inhabitants, even if the exhaustion of the land in the old States, and the movements of the inhabitants westward, has been as rapid as recent observers would have us believe. ”

“ No more will there be lying idle whole sections of land to serve as hunting grounds for the large landlords. No more will land be lying unfertile; it will be cultivated, and even rocks pulverised in order to produce artificial soil. ”

“ All the rest of the land was cut up in the maddest way into patches and oblongs and triangles of various sizes between a hundred square miles and a few acres, and placed under the nearly absolute government of a series of administrators called landowners. They owned the land almost as a man now owns his hat ”

“ There was a domain of public land, which was continually extended by the conquests of neighboring States and the partial confiscations that followed. Although land in the conquered territory was sometimes granted to the poorer citizens, there were large tracts of public lands that were either cultivated or allowed to remain in pasture. ”

“ The British Field Service Regulations state that ordinary agricultural districts of Western Europe, not previously traversed by troops, will support a force of twice the strength of the population for a week at a maximum. ”

“ They can travel thro' the woods even by night, and know how to conceal their tracks. They pass easily between your forts undiscovered; and privately approach the settlements of your frontier inhabitants. They need no convoys of provisions to follow them; for whether they are shifting from place to place in the woods, or lying in wait for an opportunity to strike a blow, every thicket and every stream furnishes so small a number with sufficient subsistence. ”

“ The construction work of the Forest Service should be done by a Construction Corps enlisted in that Service. Every forester should be a reservist. A regularly enlisted force of fire-fighters and tree-planters should be organized—tens of thousands of them—to fight forest fires and to fight deserts and floods by planting forests. ”

“ These matters are controlled in the American Zone by the Basic Field Manual [27-10] on Rules of Land Warfare issued (1940) by The Judge Advocate General of the United States Army.
As concerns questions of transfer of sovereignty of a defeated belligerent to the victorious belligerent, the foregoing rules of land warfare provide—
“273. ”