By 1934, the grim picture of a shriveling land base and an economically
deprived people was clearly drawn. Two-thirds of the Indians were either
completely landless or did not own enough land to make a subsistence living.
The Indian estate had shrunk from 138 million acres in 1887 to 52 million acres.
This 86-million-acre land loss came in four ways: 38 million acres of surplus
land ceded after allotment, 22 million acres of surplus land opened to white
settlement, 23 million acres of fee patented land lost, and 3.4 million acres of
original and heirship allotments sold. By 1934, federal officials had carved
246,569 allotments out of 40,848,172 acres on roughly 100 reservations. Many
tribes were left with land assets that were not usable because of
"checkerboarding" and complicated land titles, overgrazing and erosion, or
lack of irrigation. ¹

The government's policy had been to break up reservations, give Indians
title to individual tracts of land, and allow them to sell or lease that land. This
policy, an Interior Department study noted, created "a race of petty landlords"
and of small capitalists who were conditioned to continue their idleness by
the unearned income they derived from the sale or lease of capital assets. ²

Allotment forced many Indians to lease their lands and made them depen-
dent on rental income. It caused 100,000 Indians to lose their land because they
alienated it after receiving fee patents. Heirship policies so subdivided Indian
lands among multiple owners that they were no longer economically viable
units and the only way to get a return was to lease it. One 160-acre allotment
made in 1887 would by 1985 pass to 312 heirs. The largest holding was four
acres and the smallest was .0009 acres (the yearly income for the owner of this
plot was less than one cent). In a scathing indictment of federal policy, a 1934
Interior Department study concluded, "The Indian Service, under the allot-
ment and heirship system, has been irresistibly driven to the adoption of a
policy of liquidation." ³

As Indians disposed of their allotments they were replaced by whites
moving onto the reservation so that by 1934 a checkerboard pattern domi-
nated maps of allotted reservations. While whites steadily consolidated their
holdings into viable farming and grazing units by purchasing or leasing
allotments, Indian lands became more divided. The Indian Reorganization
Act of 1934 would try to reverse the checkerboard pattern and consolidate
what was left of the Indian estate.

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