¹ This review essay will deal with several new volumes under the Arno reprint in the series, The Management of Public Lands in the United States, Paul Wallace Gates and Marion Clawson, eds. (under advisory editorship of Stuart Bruchey). Augmenting the reprints under Gates's editorship are works by Samuel Wiel and Ernest R. Bartley (also issued by Arno Press) and cited in footnote 33. Full citations follow.

Gates, Paul W., ed., The Fruits of Land Speculation (New York, 1979)Google Scholar, not paginated; consists of eight documents and articles, including Henry George, Our Land and Land Policy. Gates, , ed., Public Land Policies: Management and Disposal (New York, 1979)Google Scholar, not paginated; consists of 21 articles by 17 authors, ca. 400 pages. Gates, , ed., The Rape of Indian Lands (New York, 1979)Google Scholar, not paginated; consists of 13 articles by 11 authors, ca. 300 pages. , Gates, History of Public Land Law Development with a chapter by Swenson, Robert W. (New York, 1979), pp. xvi, 828Google Scholar; originally published by the U. S. Government Printing Office (Washington, D.C., 1968). , Gates, Fifty Million Acres: Conflicts over Kansas Land Policy, 1854–1890 (New York, 1979), pp. ix, 311Google Scholar; originally published by the Cornell University Press (Ithaca, N.Y., 1954). Taylor, Paul S., Essays on Land, Water and the Law in California, with an introduction by the author and foreword by Gates (New York, 1979)Google Scholar, not paginated; consists of 17 articles, ca. 400 pages. Robinson, William W., Land in California: The Story of Mission Lands, Ranchos, Squatters, Mining Claims, Railroad Grants, Land Scrip, Homesteads (New York, 1979), pp. x, 291Google Scholar; originally published by the University of California Press, Chronicles of California Series (Berkeley, 1948)Google Scholar.

² Merk, Frederick, “Foreword,” in Ellis, David M., ed., The Frontier in American Development: Essays in Honor of Paul Wallace Gates (Ithaca, 1969), pp. xxvii–xxviiiGoogle Scholar. Merk's essay remains the most penetrating appraisal of Gate's scholarship as a whole. In the same volume is a bibliography of the writings of Gates, consisting only of books and articles in the journals, compiled by Gould P. Colman (pp. 407–10). A supplemental bibliography of works published by Gates from 1968 to 1977 appears as an appendix to the very useful survey article by Bogue, Margaret Beattie and Bogue, Allan G., “Paul W. Gates,” Great Plains, 18 (06 1979), 22–32 (bibliography at pp. 31–32)Google Scholar. Some more recent writings are cited below in notes to this article.

³ See, for example, the extraordinary richness of detail in , Gates, Land Policies in Kern County (Bakersfield, Calif., 1978), passimGoogle Scholar. Similary, much of the effectiveness of , Gates, “Corporation Farming in California” in Billington, Ray Allen, ed., People of the Plains and Mountains (Westport, Conn., 1973), pp. 146–74Google Scholar, derives from the highly detailed analysis given of corporate history and operations in agribusiness.

⁴ , Gates, “The Role of the Land Speculator in Western Development,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 66 (07 1942), 314Google Scholar. The essay is reprinted conveniently in Carstensen, Vernon, ed., The Public Lands: Studies in the History of the Public Domain (Madison, 1963)Google Scholar, a superb collection and one produced much more satisfactorily, from a book-quality standpoint, than several of the Arno Press reprints listed in footnote 1. Highly useful and handsomely produced is a collection of Gates's writings, some of the essays having been revised slightly and several annotated with extensive references to subsequent writings in the field: , Gates, Landlords and Tenants on the Prairie Frontier: Studies in American Land Policy (Ithaca, 1973)Google Scholar.

⁵ , Gates, Land Policies in Kern County, p. 35Google Scholar.

⁶ , Gates, “Problems of Agricultural History, 1790–1840,” in Kelsey, D. P., ed., Farming in the New Nation (Washington, D. C., 1972), pp. 33–58Google Scholar.

⁷ See list in footnote 1.

⁸ , Gates, Landlords and Tenants, pp. 1–2Google Scholar.

⁹ The Illinois Central Railroad and Its Colonization Work (Cambridge, Mass., 1934)Google Scholar, also in a reprint edition, History of American Economy series, William N. Parker and Harry N. Scheiber, eds. (New York, 1972).

¹⁰ Cf. Hedges, James B., “The Colonization Work of the Northern Pacific Railroad,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 13 (12 1926), 311–42Google Scholar; Overton, Richard C., Burlington West: A Colonization History of the Burlington Railroad (Cambridge, Mass., 1941)Google Scholar.

¹¹ Compare Gates's contributions, for example, with the agenda for research set forth in Thomas Le Due, “The Disposal of the Public Domain on the Trans-Mississippi Plains: Some Opportunities for Investigation,” in Gates, ed., Public Land Policies. See also Swierenga, Robert P., Pioneers Profits: Land Speculation on the Iowa Frontier (Ames, 1968), pp. xxii–xxviiiGoogle Scholar. Gates himself provides some trenchant self-criticism along with a useful analytical overview of the study of one region, in “Homesteading in the High Plains,” Agricultural History, 51 (01 1977), 109–33Google Scholar. A more general analysis, with some elements of intellectual autobiography, is , Gates, “Research in the History of the Public Lands,” Agricultural History, 48 (01 1974), 31–50Google Scholar.

¹² , Gates, Landlords and Tenants, pp. 138–39, 232–37Google Scholar.

¹³ Ibid., p. 139. Other Old Northwest studies by Gates students on these themes include Bogue, Margaret Beattie, Patternsfrom the Sod: Land Use and Tenure in the Grand Prairie, 1850–1900, State Historical Society Collections, vol. 34 (Springfield, 1959)Google Scholar; idem; “The Scott Farms in a New Agriculture, 1900–1919,” in Ellis, , ed., The Frontier in American Development, pp. 217–45Google Scholar; Scheiber, Harry, “State Policy and the Public Domain: The Ohio Canal Lands,” this Journal, 25 (03 1965), 86–113Google Scholar; , Scheiber, “Land Reform, Speculation and Governmental Failure: The Administration of Ohio's State Canal Lands, 1836–1860,” Prologue: Journal of the National Archives, 7 (Fall 85–98. A work revisionist as to some Gates themes on a large regional canvas is the classic study byGoogle ScholarBogue, Allan G., From Prairie to Corn Belt: Farming on the Illinois and Iowa Prairies in the Century (Chicago, 1967)Google Scholar. Bogue, also a Gates student, was dissertation director for Swierenga's study, cited in footnote 11.

¹⁴ , Gates, “The Homestead Act in an Incongruous Land System,” American Historical Review, (07 1936), 652–81: Also reprinted in Carstensen, ed., The Public Lands; and in Scheiber, ed., United States Economic History (New York, 1964). In the Arno reprint volume edited by Gates, Public Land Policies, Gates returns to the 1936 article's themes in a major reappraisal, reprinted therein from H. W. Otteson, ed., Land Use Policy and Problems in the United States (Lincoln, Neb., 1963)Google Scholar.

¹⁵ See reprint in Carstensen, ed., Public Lands, pp. 315–40.

¹⁶ Full citation in footnote 1.

¹⁷ , Gates, Fifty Million Acres, pp. 249–94; cf.Google Scholar, Gates, “Indian Allotments Preceding the Dawes Act,” in Clark, John G., ed., The Frontier Challenge: Responses to the Trans-Mississippi West (Lawrence, Kans., 1971), pp. 141–70Google Scholar, reprinted in Gates, ed., Rape of Indian Lands.

¹⁸ “Introduction” in Robertson, Nellie A. and Riker, Dorothy, eds., The John Tipton Papers, Indiana Historical Collections, vol. 1 (Indianapolis, 1942), pp. 3–53Google Scholar, reprinted in Gates, ed.; Rape of Indian Lands.

¹⁹ Young, Mary E., Redskins, Ruffleshirts, and Rednecks: Indian Allotments in Alabama and Mississippi, 1830–1860 (Norman, Okla., 1961)Google Scholar.

²⁰ Gates, “Indian Allotments,” cited in footnote 17. Students of Gates who have written on problems in the history of Indian-white contact and on Indian history include Young, Robert Berkhofer, James Clayton, and Edith Fox.

²¹ Gates, “Introduction,” in Rape of Indian Lands, first page.

²² , Gates, The Wisconsin Pine Lands of Cornell University: A Study in Land. Policy and Absentee Ownership (Ithaca, 1943)Google Scholar. Other studies by Gates of the Morrill Act and college lands include “Western Opposition to the Agricultural College Act,” Indiana Magazine of History, 37 (06 1941), 103–36Google Scholar; and “California's Agricultural College Lands,” Pacific Historical Review, 30 (05 1961), 103–22Google Scholar.

²³ Larson, Agnes M., History of the White Pine Industry in Minnesota (Minneapolis, 1949)Google Scholar; Hurst, James Willard, Law and Economic Growth: The Legal History of the Lumber Industry in Wisconsin, 1836–1915 (Cambridge, Mass., 1964)Google Scholar. Another Gates student, David G. Smith, has published several major works on the lumber industry. Biographical studies of Henry W. Sage by Anita Schaefer Goodstein, and of Erastus Corning by Irene D. Neu, were also products of Gates seminars at Cornell.

²⁴ Gates, History of Public Land Law Development, passim. Gates, “Research in the History,” discusses the author's own work on the 1968 volume and appraises conceptual and evidentiary problems that he regarded as requiring new scholarly efforts.

²⁵ Robinson, Land in California. Compare Gates, “Public Land Disposal in California,” Agricultural History, 49 (01 1975), 158–78Google Scholar. Robinson's book has been.reprinted recently in an inexpensive edition by the University of California Press.

²⁶ , Gates, “Tenants of the Log Cabin,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 49 (06 1962), 3–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar, reprinted in Gates, Landlords and Tenants.

²⁷ Unfortunately, Gates's numerous articles on California land history have not been collected to date; none are reprinted in Public Land Policies or the other Arno volumes. Gates, “Public Land Disposal in California” offers a brief overview and notes citing his essays.

²⁸ Ibid., p. 178, citing , Goldschmidt, “Small Business and the Community: A Study in Central Valley of California on Effects of Scale of Farm Operations,” U. S. Congress, Senate, 79th Cong., 2 sess., Senate Committee Print (Washington, D. C., 1946)Google Scholar. Cf. Paul S. Taylor, “Walter Goldschmidt's Baptism by Fire: Central Valley Water Politics” (1976) reprinted in Taylor, Essays on Land, Water, and the Law in California, not paginated. Gates, “California Land Policy and Its Historical Context: The Henry George Era,” in Four Persistent Issues, Essays on California's Land Ownership Concentration, Water deficits, Sub-state Regionalism, and Congressional Leadership, Institute of Governmental Studies, Publications (Berkeley, 1978), 1–30Google Scholar, assesses land reform issues in California.

²⁹ See, for example, the unfortunately simplistic view in support of the notion that “public land policies had few adverse effects on economic growth, none of them very significant”-which apparently can be stated categorically without attention to the complexities of assessing so long-term a relationship-whereas “there have been no significant studies of the land disposal system's impact upon income distribution, exploring the rate of return received by large speculators compared to those of small speculators or settlers,” in North, Douglass C., Growth and Welfare in the American Past: A New Economic History (Englewood Cliffs, N. J., 1966), pp. 135–36Google Scholar. Elsewhere North writes that “preliminary spadework has not been done” on the relationship o f land policy to growth and welfare. Any reader reviewing even the limited universe of articles representing scholarship on these problems, long predating publication of Professor North's remarks, in the Arno volumes edited by Gates, the notes and citations in Gate's History of Public Land Law, and Carstensen, ed., The Public Lands, will be left to wonder whose spadework (or homework) had not been done.

³⁰ , Gates, “Corporation Farming in California,” p. 169Google Scholar. See also text at footnote 34, infra.

³¹ Taylor, Essays on Land, Water, and the Law. It is most unfortunate that several of the studies reprinted in this volume are nearly illegible, at least in my copy.

³² The logic of organization of this volume, The Fruits of Land Speculation, is puzzling precisely because the selections are so miscellaneous.

³³ Wiel, Samuel C., Water Rights in the Western States (New York, 1979Google Scholar; originally published in San Francisco, 1911). Also appearing now under the Arno logo is Bartley, Ernest R., The Tidelands Oil Controversy (New York, 1979Google Scholar; originally published in Austin, Tex., 1953). Bartley's book offers a careful analysis of the law of submerged lands in the marginal sea, a series of major cases on the issue in American constitutional history, and the great debate that finally led to the federal government's alienation of tidelands resources, in a development parallel to what has occurred historically with resources on the land.

³⁴ , Gates, “Research in the History,” 47–48Google Scholar. Thus, a welcome feature of the Arno volume Public Land Policies, Gates, ed., is inclusion of the classic study by Mosk, Sanford A., “Land Tenure Problems in the Santa Fe Railroad Grant Area” (1944)Google Scholar, not paginated, and of HÖmer Socolofsky's fine study, “Land Disposal in Nebraska, 1854–1906: The Homestead Story,” originally in Nebraska History, 48 (Autumn 1967), 225–48Google Scholar. Exemplary of the kind of painstaking research in local records that Gates argues is indispensable if palpable human and institutional realities that lie behind cold statistical constructs are to be discovered, is the work of his student Decker, Leslie, Railroads, Lands and Politics: The Taxation of Railroad Land Grants, 1864–1897 (Providence, R. I., 1964)Google Scholar, a revisionist study that takes a more sympathetic view than Gate's vis-a-vis administrative problems of the railroad corporations in managing their grants.

³⁵ , Gates, “Research in the History,” 47Google Scholar. Reprinted in Gates, ed., Public Land Policies is the landmark study by another Gates student, Ellis, David M., “The Forfeiture of Railroad Land Grants, 1867–1894,” originally in the Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 33 (06 1946), 27–60Google Scholar. See also, , Gates, “The Railroad Land-Grant Legend,” this Journal, 14 (Winter, 1954), 143–46Google Scholar; and , Gates's wide-ranging analysis in History of Public Land Law Development, 341–86Google Scholar. Among works in other areas of public policy and transport history to come out of doctoral dissertations under Gates are Benson, Lee, Merchants, Farmers, and Railroads: Railroad Regulation and New York Politics, 1850–1887 (Cambridge, Mass., 1955)Google Scholar; Pierce, Harry H., Railroads of New York: A Study of Government Aid, 1826–1875 (Cambridge, Mass., 1953)Google Scholar; Scheiber, Harry N., Ohio Canal Era: A Case Study of Government and the Economy, 1820–1861 (Athens, Ohio, 1969)Google Scholar.

³⁶ Swierenga, Pioneers and Profits; Bogue, Allan, Money at Interest: The Farm Mortgage on the Middle Border (Ithaca, 1955)Google Scholar; A. Bógue, From Prairie to Com Belt, Bogue, A. and Bogue, M., “‘Profits” and the Frontier Land Speculator,” this Journal, 17 (03 1957), 1–24Google Scholar, also reprinted in Carstensen, Public Lands, pp. 369–94. My own analysis of speculation in the Ohio canal lands and its impact on settlement patterns reaches conclusions closer to Gates's; cf. Scheiber, “State Policy and the Public Domain.” See also another work written under Gates: Okada, Yasuo, Public Lands and Pioneer Farmers: Gage County, Nebraska, 1850–1900 (Tokyo, 1971)Google Scholar, forthcoming Arno reprint announced.

³⁷ Gates, “The Homestead Act: Free Land Policy in Operation, 1862–1935,” in Gates, ed., Public Land Policies, not paginated. See also , Gates, “The Homestead Law in Iowa,” Agricultural History, 38 (01 1964), 67–78Google Scholar. , Swierenga, “Land Speculation and Its Impact on American Economic Growth and Welfare: A Historiographical Review,” Western Historical Quarterly, 8 (07 1977), 283–302Google Scholar, provides a full and sympathetic review of some of the newer literature that has been critical of some of Gate's major findings.

³⁸ , Gates, The Farmer's Age: Agriculture, 1815–1860 (New York, 1960)Google Scholar; , Gates, Agriculture and the Civil War (New York, 1965)Google Scholar. Hargreaves, Mary W. M., Dry Farming in the North Great Plains, 1900–1925 (Cambridge, Mass., 1957)Google Scholar; McNall, Neil A., An Agricultural History of the Genesee Valley, 1790–1860 (Philadelphia, 1952)Google Scholar; Ellis, David M., Landlords and Farmers in the Hudson-Mohawk Region, 1790–1850 (Ithaca, 1946)Google Scholar; Colman, Gould P., Education and Agriculture: A History of the New York State College of Agriculture at Cornell (Ithaca, 1963)Google Scholar; and articles by Morton Rothstein, including “America in the International Rivalry for the British Wheat Market, 1860–1914,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 47 (12 1960), 401–18Google Scholar, all represent research originating in doctoral dissertations on agricultural history under Gates at Cornell. Charlotte Erickson's studies of immigrant labor in midwestern agriculture, including “British Immigrants in the Old Northwest, 1815–1860,” in Ellis, ed., The Frontier in American Development, also derive from work originally begun in a different context during doctoral studies under Gates. See , Erickson, American Industry and the European Immigrant, 1860–1885 (Cambridge, Mass., 1957)Google Scholar. On a related theme in land speculation is another Gates-directed dissertation by Cohen, Henry, Business and Politics in America from the Age of Jackson to the Civil War: The Career Biography of W. W. Corcoran (Westport, Conn., 1971)Google Scholar.