The Indian Dispossessed
people to wait long. New bargains were made with the Indians, and cessions of land secured—always their best land, and at one-half to one-tenth of its real value. Reservations were diminished or done away with altogether, and tribes consolidated, and once more there was public land—not land in the wilds, to be earned by the subduing of it, but good land, and well within the boundaries of civilization.
Wholly changed conditions confronted the land department of the Government. The inequalities of value inherent to any country were enormously increased in these reservations by the proximity of towns on their borders, and by railroads often running directly through the ceded lands. A new scheme of equitable land distribution was demanded by the new conditions.
With the vanishing of the frontier the homestead law, with its fixed-price, first-come-first-served system, served its last useful purpose. Its impartial gifts and rewards had led the hosts westward to the Pacific coast, and it deserved to pass into history as a grand instrument in the upbuilding of the West. Not one condition remained to give the homestead law an excuse for exercise, yet from that time until to-day these ceded Indian lands have all been opened under the essential provisions of that law, for no other reason than that a Government bound by the Vociferous Few to questionable methods of gaining cessions of Indian lands has
248
