From the book Beyond the Hundredth Meridian by Wallace Stegner I liked a passage that best describes the relationship between man, land and the economy. There used to be a time where the relationship between men and land was sacred. The people would treat the land as a brother because they understood that it was thanks to the land that they were able to feed their families. It was a mutual love. They treated the land kindly and the land therefore produced sweet tasting vegetables and fruits. Unfortunately this relationship deteriorated when the monetary gain became the main focus. The relationship between men and land became numbed when the men were bombarded with the mortgage notices. The banks didn’t care for the small farmers. If they didn’t have the money to pay for the mortgages they would take the farm away and sell it to the best bidder. At the end the lands ended up being in the hands of the rich investors who did not care about the land but of the monetary gains that they were able to obtain from them. Therefore we are now confronted with the problem dealing with the exploitation of the land. The passage that I selected is found on pg. 221 which main focus is this problem. It mentions the following:
“It took a man to break and hold a homestead of 160 acres even in the subhumid zone. It took a superman to do it on the arid plains. It could hardly, in fact, be done, though some heroes tried it…Quiet as often as not it was the immigrants who stuck it out and eventually made it. Having gambled their savings and their entire lives for the chance, they were not often driven out by anything short of annihilation. Those who were defeated, and up to 1990 two thirds of those who tried it were, were by the normal course of events in peonage to the banks. A mortgage was more common on a western farm than a good team…The land of the failures went to the banks, and thus onto the market, and often in to the accumulating domains of speculators or large ranch companies. In the end, the Homestead Act stimulated the monopolizing of land that its advocates had intended to prevent.”
I also like this passage because surprisingly it also deals with our present problem in Arizona. At this moment with the Proposition at hand immigrants are not being welcomed in those lands. In this passage selected it clearly mentions that it was usually the immigrant that made the arid lands produce goods. Since they have already gambled all of their savings and lives by coming to the new world (in this case the United States) they worked hard and were last to give up on the land.
“It took a man to break and hold a homestead of 160 acres even in the subhumid zone. It took a superman to do it on the arid plains. It could hardly, in fact, be done, though some heroes tried it…Quiet as often as not it was the immigrants who stuck it out and eventually made it. Having gambled their savings and their entire lives for the chance, they were not often driven out by anything short of annihilation. Those who were defeated, and up to 1990 two thirds of those who tried it were, were by the normal course of events in peonage to the banks. A mortgage was more common on a western farm than a good team…The land of the failures went to the banks, and thus onto the market, and often in to the accumulating domains of speculators or large ranch companies. In the end, the Homestead Act stimulated the monopolizing of land that its advocates had intended to prevent.”
I also like this passage because surprisingly it also deals with our present problem in Arizona. At this moment with the Proposition at hand immigrants are not being welcomed in those lands. In this passage selected it clearly mentions that it was usually the immigrant that made the arid lands produce goods. Since they have already gambled all of their savings and lives by coming to the new world (in this case the United States) they worked hard and were last to give up on the land.
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