possess the westward lands. To find out what was there, we sent men like Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, John C. Fremont, and a gutty one-armed adventurer named John Wesley Powell to be the eyes of the Nation. In less than a century, the United States spanned the continent. Major acquisitions included: the Louisiana Purchase, 1803; the Oregon Compromise, 1846; the Mexican Cession, 1848; and the last great addition to the public domain, the purchase of Alaska, 1867.

As land was acquired, the second challenge was to put people on it and to tie the Nation together in a viable union. This was the era of westward migration, a time when men of vision preached improved transportation and communication. Trails to Oregon and California grew dusty from the passage of covered wagon trains, and the tracks they left behind them became a roadway for the more elegant overland stage. In 1869, the Golden Spike was driven connecting the rails of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific, and creating the Nation's first transcontinental railroad.

Once the frontier was tamed and the land settled, development became our third national challenge. Eastern capital bought up mining claims, and oil derricks sprouted like weeds across prairie land. Cattlemen drove their herds to railhead up the Chisholm trail and cursed the barbed wire stretched to protect the crops of homesteaders. At times the bitterness between the two ways of life boiled over into bloodshed, but free land kept the homesteaders coming, and the cattleman retreated to drier, more rugged lands and made way for fields of waving grain. Settlements became towns and sometimes the towns grew to become cities.

There was so much land, there seemed no end to its bounty. Men killed off the buffalo and then the passenger pigeon, cut over the forest and let the sunlight in to dry up the swamp, plowed the new ground and called it prog

ress.

Then somebody missed the wind whispering through the pine trees and stopped to wonder. Crops failed, springs dried up, gullies scarred the hillsides and the rivers ran muddy red.

As we moved into the 20th century, the Nation was face to face with its fourth challenge. We had to repair our damaged land and save it from the ravages of growing industrialization and helter-skelter urbanization. Great conservation leaders like Theodore Roosevelt accepted the challenge. From the public domain, the United States set aside national parks, national forests and land for wildlife.

Later, conservationists fought the dust bowl and erosion with the Soil Conservation Service and the Agriculture Adjustment Act. The Taylor Grazing Act created the Grazing Service to restore the range, and Bankhead-Jones made it possible to buy back land that should never have been homesteaded. New systems of land management introduced new concepts-terracing, cover crops, rest rotation and sustained yield. Some said it was Government meddling and foolishness, but conservation became a cause and a crusade on both private and public land.

A time of prosperity followed World War II. New, im

proved equipment continued to reduce the need for farm labor, and more farmers moved to the city. The Nation grew inward, filled up the cities and invented suburbia. The workday was no longer from sunup to sundown; forty hours became a week. With money in the pocket and time to spare, every weekend was declared a holiday and people looked for a place to play. Recreation boomed and populations exploded.

Merchants sold mobile campers, vacation guides and canned heat for camp stoves. Public lands were newly discovered by caravans of weekend migrants with dune buggies and four-wheel-drive vehicles, motor bikes and snowmobiles-all designed for cross-country travel. People out for a Sunday drive found traffic jams at picnic areas and public beaches.

Now the fifth challenge was clear: A limited land area had to serve all the varied needs of a fast-growing population. No longer was there an acre of worthless land. The world was finite and the vast public domain was growing more precious every day.

New programs were needed, and Congress enacted new laws and amended some that were not so new. The Recreation and Public Purposes Act of 1926 was amended to make public land available to local agencies to meet recreational and other needs. There was a Classification and Multiple-Use Act, 1964, to authorize an inventory of public lands and identify land needed in public ownership for multiple-use management.

A Public Land Law Review Commission was established in 1964 to make a massive review of public land laws and public land programs to serve as a basis for updated public land regulation. The PLLRC made a total of 137 recommendations after holding numerous meetings and conduct