US Presidency
1910

We have now 731,354,081 acres, confined largely to the mountain ranges and the arid and semiarid plains. We have, in addition, 368,035,975 acres of land in Alaska. The public lands were, during the earliest administrations, treated as a national asset for the liquidation of the public debt and as a source of reward for our soldiers and sailors. Later on they were donated in large amounts in aid of the construction of wagon roads and railways, in order to open up regions in the West then almost inaccessible. All the principal land statutes were enacted more than a quarter of a century ago. The Homestead Act, the preemption and timber-culture act, the coal land and the mining acts were among these.