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Show 328 HISTORY OF PUBLIC LAND LAW DEVELOPMENT the hills which were "neither flooded by overflow nor poorly drained," were obtained as part of the 3,348,013 of swampland that the state secured. This quantity was 11 percent of its entire area. The state paid its agents $10 for each section they selected. The story is told that one such agent judged as swampland all tracts over which a boat could pass. He drove a work animal "hitched to a canoe across thousands of acres" of pinelands at fairly high elevations, listed his selections and, though contested by the Federal government, they were finally patented to the state. Some of the cypress land being accessible by water had undoubtedly been stripped of its trees before the grant was made. Before 1860 timberland was selling for as low as 5 cents an acre-one writer has said that the less accessible of the pineland would not bring a cent an acre as late as 1876-though the better located tracts might bring from 25 to 50 cents an acre. It was thus possible for a purchaser to acquire a full section of virgin timber for as little as $32. Though efforts were made to limit the amount of swampland individuals could purchase, like all such efforts by the Federal government, they did not succeed.27 Iowa's selections of swamplands were the most controversial and made the most difficulty for officials of the General Land Office. The state agents went about the task very slowly, and had made so little progress by 1858 that a Federal officer estimated that it would take them 8 years more to complete their task at the rate they were going. After selection, the state turned the lands over to the counties for their management and disposal; some counties, not satisfied with the 27 John Hebron Moore, Andrew Brown and Cypress Lumbering in the Old Southwest (1967), pp. 60 ff., offers information concerning logging on the swamplands of the Yazoo Delta when the lands were in little demand and went for low prices. Also see Nollie Hickman, Mississippi Harvest. Lumbering in the Long Leaf Pine Belt, 1840-1915 (University, Miss., 1962), pp. 68 ff. original selections, identified other tracts as swamplands and sent lists of them in for approval. This necessitated the land officers working over plats and field notes again, although they had previously been scrutinized carefully. Even if they found no justification for the selections, they still had to approve them because among the many instructions sent to local officers from Washington was a statement that "the affidavits of county surveyors and other respectable persons" were to govern the selections, no matter how widely they differed from the original field notes.28 In their anxiety to select as much land for their states as possible the agents went far beyond the intent of the law and the instructions of the Land Commissioner in segregating tracts as swampland. One list of selections containing 1,052,389 acres in Missouri was found to contain only 64,220 acres that could be justified even by a liberal interpretation of the information in the plats and field notes; the remaining 988,169 acres were reported as dry and arable.29 The surveyor general for Arkansas, who was charged with scrutinizing the selections of that state, declared that one list of swampland selections was "situated amongst and embracing portions of the Ozark Mountains" and that the field notes had shown them to be "too mountainous and hilly for cultivation."30 The following table indicates the extreme slowness with which the segregation of swamplands from public lands proceeded. It is therefore not at all surprising that, among the hundreds of thousands of people rushing westward to find land on which to settle and gain a right of preemption, many squatted upon lands that were later claimed to be swamp, particularly if it is recalled that numerous selections were only wet in the spring season. Squatters and, indeed, investors in wild land preempted or made cash entries on 28 H. Ex. Doc, 35th Cong., 2d sess., Vol. II, No. 2 (Serial No. 997), p. 169. 29 S. Ex. Doc, 35th Cong., 1st sess., Vol. I, No. 2 (Serial No. 1023), pp. 236-37. u Lokken. Iowa Public Land Disposal, p. 191. |