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was at its greatest, in one year alone over 300 steam- boats were sunk. The Missouri River became known as the "graveyard of steamboats." The Corps of Engineers has been involved in improving the Missouri River since 1824 by removal of snags to prevent the loss not only of property but of numerous lives. Each year one or two snag boats worked the river for the 2- or 3-month summer season. During this time, thousands of snags were removed and those that could not be pulled were demolished by explosives. During the Civil War, Congress chartered the Union Pacific Railroad to move westward across the Great Plains from an initial point on the 100th Meridian in Nebraska to an unspecified junction with the Central Pacific Railroad, chartered in California to construct eastward from the San Francisco Bay area. The Federal Government gave both railroads generous land grants and loaned them, in the form of Government bonds, $16,000 to $48,000 a mile - depending on the difficulty of the terrain. On May 10, 1869, the project was completed, when the two lines met at Promontory Point, Utah. A telegraph wire was attached to the rails so that the blows driving the last spikes were recorded and heard from coast to coast. Extensive areas of lodgepole pine timber in the basin suitable for railroad ties were a boon to the Union Pacific Railroad in its construction of the first trans- continental railroad in 1867-1869. During the next several decades, as railroads fanned out over the basin, "tiehacks" hewed millions of ties from the basin's forests for the construction of railroads. Fence posts, lumber, fuel wood, and coal were among the first products shipped eastward by railroads to settlers on the treeless plains. The early settler relied on water transportation for trade with the outside world. Prior to the railroad, overland transportation was quite slow and unreliable, so that much of the early traffic was by river boat. However, with the coming of the railroads, all of this changed. Their lines stretched across boundless miles of open prairies, bringing the city with its markets and shops within hours and days of the back-country farmer rather than weeks and months, as before. Thus, the railroad played a major role in encouraging and making further settlement possible. Later, and before the turn of the century, the western farmer came to consider the railroad as a bitter enemy, but in the early days he looked on it as an indispensable friend in opening up the wilderness. For the first eight decades of United States history, the Congress refused to accept the colonial precedent of donating land free to all settlers. Statistics show that land sales never brought in more than 10 percent of Government income except for the boom years in 1836 and 1837, but a large segment of the public still believed 24 that revenue from public lands was necessary for the financial stability of the Government. The earliest important supporter of the homestead idea was Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri. In 1825, he made a motion in the Senate to instruct the Committee on Public Lands to make an inquiry into the expediency of donating land to the settlers. He insisted that the original colonial settlements had been made on terms of free land to settlers and that a policy of deriving revenue from the public lands was reactionary. Special and limited land-grant acts were passed by the Congress from 1842 to 1853 whereby donations were made to settlers who were enduring special dangers and hardships of the frontier. After 1840, homestead bills were introduced by congressmen from Kentucky, Alabama, New York, South Carolina, U1inois, and Tennessee. The free-land movement was originaIly non- partisan, but in 1848 it became a distinct party issue involved with slavery, -the outstanding political issue of the time. Sane discussion of the land question often was obscured by the slavery struggle. In 1860, the House and Senate reached agreement and adopted homestead legislation, but President Buchanan vetoed the biII because he doubted the authority of the Congress to give away land to indi- viduals or states. Finally, the Congress adopted the Homestead Act and it was signed into law on May 20, 1862, by President Lincoln. He had held earlier that he was in favor of cutting up the Government lands in parcels so "every poor man could have a home." The Homestead Act made it possible for settlers to acquire farms of 160 acres for a nominal fee. To become a full owner, the settler was required to live on the land and cultivate it for 5 years. Later acts made land even easier to get, especially for Army and Navy veterans. As settlement progressed westward into the in- creasingly arid land, the Congress became more and more aware that a quarter section was not always an adequate farm unit. Some of the changes advocated were obviously the result of selfish interest, but many of them were based on a realistic appraisal of the agricultural situation in the western United States, particularly in the Missouri River Basin. The most obvious fault in the initial Homestead Act was the inadequacy of the acreage given the home- steader. This deficiency was not corrected directly until 1904, but by taking advantage of related laws, the homesteader could increase his holdings by more-or-Iess honorable means. Such laws were the Timber Culture Act, passed in 1873; the Desert Land Act, approved in 1877; and the Timber and Stone Act of 1878. Until 1891, when the Pre-emption Act of 1841 was repealed, the homesteader could file also on a quarter section of land under that law. It was not until the turn of the century that the adverse effects of acreage limitations on the western