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Selecting Land for Farms

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Background

A lone figure stands in open sagebrush pointing at the horizon, and the text below explains why: 1,029,000 acres of central Washington had been surveyed by the Bureau of Reclamation and found fit for irrigated farming under the Columbia Basin Project — and the Bureau needed settlers to claim them.

The Columbia Basin Project was built on the power of Grand Coulee Dam, completed in 1942, which pumped water up from the Columbia River into a vast network of canals crossing the dry plateau of eastern Washington — a region of basalt, clay, and sagebrush that receives fewer than ten inches of rain a year. The irrigation works trailed the dam by a decade; water first reached fields in 1952, with towns across the project area holding celebrations from May through June of that year.

The land the Bureau was hoping to populate had been tried once before. Between 1890 and 1910, when rainfall ran above its long-term average, settlers homesteaded nearly all of it under the federal land acts (which gave 160 acres to anyone who would live and work the claim for five years). When the dry years returned, most walked away — but legal title often stayed in private hands or was transferred to heirs. By the time this leaflet was printed, the Bureau's own accounting showed 78.8% of the suitable acreage still held by private owners. Railroads — which had received enormous federal land grants in the 1870s and 1880s to fund construction of western lines — held another 3.4%.

The Columbia Basin Project Act of 1943, signed by President Roosevelt on March 10th of that year, gave the Bureau authority to buy that private land, replot it as farm units sized to soil quality rather than a fixed acreage, and resell it to settlers — with returning war veterans given first preference. A prospective buyer reading this leaflet would learn they could not lock in a specific farm boundary until the Bureau formally established one, and that the Secretary of the Interior's approval was required at every step.

  • The Bureau's vision in the 1930s had been small family farms for Dust Bowl refugees; World War II delayed the irrigation works, and by the time settlers arrived in the mid-1950s, conflicts between the Bureau and the Department of Agriculture had opened the door to larger operations instead.
  • For historical depth, the Bureau of Reclamation's own history of the project and HistoryLink's essay both trace the gap between the planners' ambitions and what actually took root.

Researched with claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 on May 24, 2026. AI-assisted — verify before citing.

Highlights

  • The halftone photograph shows a single figure in field clothes standing amid low sagebrush, right arm extended and pointing toward the right horizon — the plateau reads as empty and dry.
  • "SELECTING LAND FOR FARMS" is set in a bold, wide-spaced all-caps display face; the subtitle "COLUMBIA BASIN PROJECT" beneath it uses the same face at a slightly smaller size with wider letter-spacing.
  • The opening paragraph uses the phrase "This leaflet is intended to acquaint prospective settlers" — the document self-identifies its audience and format in its third sentence.
  • The section heading "MOST LANDS PRIVATELY OWNED" is underlined and printed in all caps — a formatting convention used throughout to divide the body text into scannable blocks.
  • Land ownership percentages are spelled out in a single sentence: State of Washington 6.1%; railroads 3.4%; counties 2.2%; United States 9.5%; all others 78.8% — a snapshot of how thoroughly private title had accumulated before federal irrigation arrived.
  • The body text is set in a monospace typewriter face — consistent with mid-century government practice of typing camera-ready copy on an office typewriter and then printing from a photographic plate.

Further reading