Employment and natural resources Author:United States. Dept. of Labor Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: the railroad companies. Grants were made for certain wagon-road projects in the far West. In 1862 the homestead law was passed de signed to be applicable only... more » to agricultural land. Laws were also passed for the disposal of other kinds of land—coal lands (1873),desert lands (1877), timber and stone lands (1878). By means of the grants and the various classes of laws here referred to, about seven-tenths of the total public domain have now been disposed of and gone into private ownership. In contrast to this feature of public-land disposal there has been a strong movement during the past 30 years for the retention of public land. The main class of land now retained permanently by the Government is that comprising the national forests. The bulk of these lie along the divides of the western mountain ranges as shown on map 3, page 41. They have been established by presidential proclamation under authority of a law passed in 1891. A number of national parks and monuments have been reserved by the Government. Another large class of reserved land is that contained in the Indian reservations, but since this land is gradually being allotted to individual Indians and thus passing into private hands, it can not be said to be permanently retained. The Alaska coal-land law of 1914 reserves to the Government the title to all coal land in that Territory, part of the land to be handled under a leasing system and the rest to be held for Government operation when needed. Laws have been contemplated, but not passed by Congress, for retaining grazing land and having it used under Government regulation. This method of handling grazing lands in the national forests has proved very successful. Although most of the grazing and all of the agricultural lands left in the public domain are still unreserv...« less