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Show LAND GRANTS FOR RAILROADS AND INTERNAL IMPROVEMENTS 365 by the Act of 1864) for each mile of authorized road. Neither the Central Pacific nor the Union Pacific nor any of the latter's branches was given the privilege of selecting lieu land beyond the primary grant area as was allowed in all the state grants of the fifties. From the outset it seemed likely that the financiers promoting the Rock Island Railroad would gain control of the Union Pacific, as they subsequently did. Such an eventuality was unacceptable to an equally aggressive group promoting the Burlington Railroad, as it is known today. This group succeeded in having added to the Pacific Railroad Act of 1864 an amendment allowing it to extend its line from the Missouri River to the 100th meridian in Nebraska and giving it a 200-foot right-of-way and 20 sections per mile of public lands but not allowing it the bond subsidy the Pacific roads enjoyed. A unique feature of the amendment for the Burlington grant was that it mentioned no lateral limits for the selection of the lands. Since its grant overlapped that of the Union Pacific substantially, which antedated it, and both roads were required to make their selections from the odd numbered sections and clearly had no lieu land possibility, the Burlington would not be able to gain more than one half the land within the 40-mile strip. Either it would lose a considerable portion or it must have the privilege of making selections more than 20 miles from the railroad. At first, the Department of the Interior withdrew land from private entry more than 20 miles from the line to make sure the Burlington would get the amount of land to which it was entitled, but a later Secretary reversed this action. In 1871, a third Secretary of the Interior again reversed his predecessor, declaring that the Burlington was not restricted laterally in selecting its lands. Partly because of the delay in coming to this decision and the desire of the Burlington's officials to concentrate their locations as much as possible on the better and more humid lands of eastern Nebraska, the railroad was forced to go as far as 100 miles from its line to find available land.74 Railroad Holdings Mushroom Provision was made in the Pacific Railroad Act of 1862 that all lands not sold or otherwise disposed of within 3 years after the completion of the road "shall be subject to settlement and preemption, like other lands, at a price not exceeding one dollar and twenty-five cents per acre, to be paid to said company." If these words had any meaning at all it was that the company must sell all the land it received, in the case of the Union and Central Pacific, by 1872 or they would be subject to preemption by any settler on them at $200 for a quarter-section. While this section was a sop to the homestead element, which was troubled at the withdrawal of such large quantities of land from preemption and homestead entries, it lent itself to a very different interpretation because of its vagueness. As the courts were later to hold, railroad companies "disposed of" their lands by placing a blanket mortgage on them, thereby preventing their reversion to the public domain. In other cases, the courts declared that reversion of unearned grants was not automatic for failure to conform to the require- 74 John A. Caylor, "The Disposition of the Public Domain in Pierce County, Nebraska" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Nebraska, 1951) p. 40, found that the Burlington selected over 15,000 acres in Pierce County, next to the northern tier of counties, more than a hundred miles from the line. Richard C. Overton, Burlington West. A Colonization History of the Burlington Railroad (Cambridge, Mass., 1941) and his Burlington Route (New York, 1965), are indispensable for western railroad history. For a somewhat similar instance where a Wisconsin railroad route was changed but the land grant, already selected, was not changed, thereby making for a "distinct separation between the location of the line and that of its donation" see Rae, "Railway Land Subsidy Policy," pp. 83-84. The new line was shorter than the old by 45 miles and would be entitled to 172,800 acres less but Congress was persuaded in 1869 to allow the company to retain the greater acreage. |