Desert Tortoise is in a race for survival, and his major opponent is

man.

It's not that men want to do the tortoise in, quite the contrary, but as populations increase and there is more development to support the extra people, the poor, patient tortoise is being crowded out of its native habitat.

The tortoise is slow but tenacious, and its nature is to "hang in there," but its reproduction rate is too low to compensate for the losses the species sustains by man's everincreasing nearness.

It's not that the tortoise is antisocial. He isn't. It's just that no

species of wildlife can stand nose to nose with man and the way he changes the environment. In such a confrontation, the tortoise can only sink into extinction unless man himself does something to reverse the trend. Like the passenger pigeon, the desert tortoise seemed doomed to become the topic of some future scientific paper and be reduced to an ecological statistic in the neverending story of what man has done to the environment.

But some years back the Desert Tortoise caught the attention and interest of the people of California. As a result it was named California's official state reptile. The

designation gave him legal protection, and not a moment too soon. In some parts of the desert, the tortoise had completely disappeared. There were many reasons. Commercial pet dealers had taken many, others died only because irresponsible gunners found them convenient for target practice and still more were lost because their habitat had been destroyed. Today California imposes a fine of $500 on anyone who kills or removes a desert tortoise from its habitat.

Additional assistance for the tortoise came in 1972 when government agencies, academic institutions, turtle and tortoise clubs, conservation organizations and just plain people supported the idea of a desert tortoise natural area.

As more people have encroached into the desert, a special area devoted to the protection of the tortoise became the only way to ensure its survival. Tortoises are as slow about breeding as they are about everything else. Females do not breed until they become about 20 years old. Even then they will not breed if there is an inadequate supply of food.

Neither livestock operators nor off-road vehicle users intentionally destroy tortoises, but their activities often disrupt the animal's reproductive cycle.

This, added to natural mortality and some cases of wanton destruction, has brought about a continuing decline in the population in unprotected areas.

In 1973 BLM set aside 20,000 acres of public land to protect significant wildlife and habitat values, including the habitat of the Desert Tortoise. Before that the area had been used by motorcyclists and other offroad vehicle users as a prime recreational spot, and the population of Desert Tortoise was dramatically dwindling.

Today the public is still concerned about the welfare of the Desert Tortoise. One group of citizens has formed a "Desert Tortoise Committee, to support the establishment of a Tortoise Natural Area. They have raised more than $43,000

by selling ceramic tortoise pins and necklaces, and a T-shirt depicting a tortoise saying, "I may be slow... but I get there." The Committee's only pay is satisfaction.

The part of the desert that has been established as the natural area has the highest density of desert tortoises known. Inside the area the tortoises average 200 per square mile. A single square mile area has an estimated 1,000 to 2,000 tortoises. Outside the area populations average a less dramatic 20 animals per square mile.

The 20,000 acre site is located north of California City and is just southwest of the Rand Open Area in the Rand Mountains, an area heavily used by off-road vehicles.

As plans were made, $135,000 was set aside in 1976 for use in the area by the Bureau of Bakersfield District. An additional $45,000 plus many man-months of BLM labor has been assigned to the area this year to supplement the original funding. This money will be used to provide management of the area, including the development of an interpretative program. This is the only area in the United States set aside for the protection of the desert tortoise.

A diverse plant community contributes to the high population of Desert Tortoises in this area. It is covered with a creosote bush scrub community and has over 160 species of plants including 104 that are annuals. The annuals are the tortoise's bread and butter, the staple of its diet. The ample food supply makes the area atractive to the tortoises.

The natural area will benefit other species of wildlife as well as the tortoise. There is a high density of Navaho ground squirrels, an animal designated as "rare" by the California Department of Fish and Game, in the area. Other protected species in the area include the prairie falcon, the burrowing ow! and the desert kit fox.

While the desert tortoise will be the key species under management, the entire biological community will benefit from the man

agement program.

The management program has been designed by BLM, but will be implemented in the area under cooperative agreement with the California Department of Fish and Game. Authority for cooperative management comes from the Sikes Act which directs the Secretary of the Interior, through the Bureau of Land Management, to develop wildlife conservation programs with State Game agencies. The desert tortoise natural area has been developed to maintain a natural density and diversity of flora and fauna. This will be achieved by habitat protection, maintenance and rehabilitation. To accomplish the objective, the Bureau has stopped offroad vehicles from using the area, eliminated unauthorized grazing, increased the available vegetation for wildlife, rehabilitation of areas disturbed by livestock and vehicles, acquired some private land, and managed public use. Ongoing research programs will monitor how well the tortoise is doing in his newly protected environment.

The entire 25-mile boundary has now been fenced. The fence is designed to keep animals and machines out of the area. . . not to keep the wildlife in.

BLM is planning an interpretative display and visitor use center. A contract for its design has been awarded. The displays will tell something about the area's ecology and provide information about the various species found there. Nature trails, parking areas and sanitation facilities are being planned. Plans are also being made to involve the public in the management of the area.

A biologist has been hired to help with providing visitor information and to implement the habitat management plan developed by BLM.

The question of the Desert Tortoise's survival will eventually be decided. With the help of the many citizens and organizations that have rallied to his support, he may get enough of a leg up to crawl over the finish line, in this, we hope the last race he shall ever have to run.

In addition to bringing a new era for the management of the public domain, the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976 repealed the Homestead Act of 1862 in all of the public land states except Alaska. At the moment, the exception for Alaska is more theory than substance. There has been no homesteading in Alaska since 1969 when the Secretary of the Interior suspended all public land disposals in the State pending a settlement of the land claims of Alaska's native people. This suspension was later incorporated into the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1972. No one is now willing to make an estimate of when, or if, public lands in Alaska will be opened to homesteaders.

When the Homestead Act was passed, Alaska was still a Russian possession, and the Law was drawn for those States and Territories that would later be incorporated into the lower forty-eight States. Within those States it had a 114-year run as one of the most successful pieces of social legislation in our Nation's history. Now it has been allowed to die because its era has long passed, and it could no longer serve a useful function in western affairs.

The Homestead Act was signed into law by President Abraham Lincoln on the same day that the Emancipation Proclamation became effective. In their own way, each of these actions changed the course of our Nation's history.

The significance of the Homestead Law is best appreciated when examined through the perspective of time. It was not the sudden inspiration of some genius of statecraft, but the result of patient work by the political figures of that day. It was also the result of what politicians like to call "a ground-swell of public opinion." It grew out of the needs and aspirations of those who lived at the grass roots of the American political system.

During the time it was operative,

PAUL HERNDON

Office of Public Affairs

Origins of a Dream

If we try to trace the concept of free land to a source, it soon gets lost in the shadows of history, but the proposition that free land should be given to those who need it was being debated in Congress by the time New York made the first cession of western land to the Federal Government.

At first, support came from all sections of the country, but as passions heated up over the issue of slavery, southerners recognized that a 160-acre farm would not support a social order based on slavery, and homesteading soon became a political issue between the North and the South. During the election of 1860, Lincoln's support of homesteading contributed as much to his election as did his opposition to slavery.

His rival, Stephen Douglas, also recognized the appeal of homesteading and tried to assume a prohomesteading stance during the campaign, but the Democratic party had been been discredited on the homestead issue when President Buchanan vetoed a homestead bill a few months before the election.

The Homestead Bill of 1860 was not the first brush with the idea of homesteading public land. The first

universal homestead proposal had been submitted to Congress by Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri in December of 1825. From then until the homestead law was finally enacted, there was never a session of Congress that did not have some form of homestead proposal pending.

Reaching a Consensus on Specifics

By the time Congress started to debate the homestead bill in 1862, the proponents of the bill had generally agreed to limit homesteads to 160 acres. This was thought to be a viable unit for a family farm-what a man and his sons could cultivate with enough left over for pasture and other needs. It was not, as the bill's southern opponents had correctly surmized, enough land to make it profitable for the homesteader to own slaves.

Outside the South, farming was generally thought to be a family enterprise, but there had been some differences as to what could be considered a viable economic unit. A petition for free land submitted to Congress in 1812 had offered the opinion that "no man

ought to have more than 200 acres of land." Some of the earlier versions of homestead legislation proposed limitations of 80 acres. The House Committee on Public Land had recommended such a limit in 1828, and Congressman Robert Smith of Illinois had introduced a resolution calling for donations of 80 acres to actual settlers in 1844, but eventually the consensus settled on 160 acres. Nevertheless there were, even then, prophets who warned that 160 acres of land would not be enough to support a farm family west of the 100th meridian unless there were provisions for irrigation. Time was to prove that they were, at least, partially right.

There was another point on which all proponents of homesteading seemed to agree that land be given only to the bona fide settler the man who intended to live on the land and bring it under cultivation. In part, this consensus came from a common belief of the time in the virtue of honest toil, and that the cultivation of the land was man's noblest enterprise, but it was also meant to foil the speculator.

To the settler, it seemed that wherever he went to clear and cultivate land, he found that the best land was already owned by the speculator. A rocky hill-side, or perhaps swampland he could buy di