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Show 244 HISTORY OF PUBLIC LAND LAW DEVELOPMENT in which to make their payments after declaratory statements had been filed. "Our poorest class of people now hardly get their shanty built" before the year is up and they have to "hire their money at extortionate rates." Wentworth urged Justin Butterfield, the Commissioner of the General Land Office, to have his most experienced "Pre-emption clerk" draft a bill to extend the time for payment but did not fill in the length of the extension. The period of grace which Pierce and the early Buchanan were willing to grant might thus have been written into law had Butterfield and Wentworth pushed their proposals.65 When the Land Commissioner announced that settlers on alternate sections of land within the primary grant to railroads were not entitled to preemption even by paying the double minimum price, Congress rushed through a measure to reverse his Whiggish decision.66 In 1853 it allowed settlers to pay for their double minimum land with military bounty warrants plus $1.25 an acre.67 A measure of considerable importance to settlers in California and Louisiana allowed preemption rights to persons who had lived on and improved land withheld from sale because of a private land claim that was later declared invalid by the Supreme Court.68 In 1854 Congress allowed settlers who had lived on and improved land, subsequently withdrawn from entry for a railroad land grant and then later released, to preempt it at the ordinary minimum price.69 Unsurveyed Lands Opened More important than all these measures- in that its provisions were to affect a much 65 Letter of John Wentworth, Feb. 27, 1850, to Butterfield, in Miscellaneous Letters A, GLO Files, National Archives. 66 Act of Aug. 2, 1852, 10 Stat. 27. 67 Act of March 3, 1853, 10 Stat. 244. 68 Act of March 3, 1853, 10 Stat. 244. 69 Act of March 27, 1854, 10 Stat. 269. larger number of people-was the action of Congress in 1853 authorizing preemption on unsurveyed lands in California for one year. (The land commissioners had been recommending for years that preemption should extend to unsurveyed lands everywhere, but Congress took no step in this direction until 1853.) Another important provision in this act allowed persons who had preempted land before to enter a second claim in California.70 On March 1, 1854, preemption on unsurveyed land in California was extended for 2 additional years. Other newly developing territories and states were anxious to have the same privilege. On July 17, 1854, it was extended to Oregon and Washington Territories; on July 22, 1854, to Kansas and Nebraska Territories; and on August 4, 1854, to Minnesota Territory.71 Not until 1862 was the right of preemption extended to settlers on unsurveyed public land in all states and territories. In that year, with the newly adopted homestead privilege available only on surveyed land and with the government officials following a general policy of not offering arable land suitable for farming at public sale, preemption took a new lease on life because it was the only route to ownership on unsurveyed land. For the next 30 years preemption was to be a major factor in moving land from government to private ownership in the Great Plains, in California, and in timbered regions of the Lake States and the Far West.72 During the years 1855-58 when the government was not pushing public lands onto the market and Buchanan was actually saying that they should be reserved for settlers, preemption had a marked revival. In parts of Iowa, Wisconsin, and Minnesota where the lands had not been offered at public auction, no private entry was permitted and the only way one could purchase land from the govern- 70 Acts of March 3, 1853, and March I, 1854, 10 Stat. 246, 268. 71 10 Stat. 305, 310, 576. 72 Act of June 2, 1862, 12 Stat. 413. Section 3 of this act repealed the Graduation Act of 1854. |