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Show LAND GRANTS FOR RAILROADS AND INTERNAL IMPROVEMENTS 371 Legislature and the support of land reform and anti-railroad elements everywhere now joined in battle with the railroads. To resist the several hundred ejectment suits brought by the railroads against the settlers who already had government titles to their lands, Jeremiah Black and Wilson Shannon were employed to carry the issue to the Supreme Court. After dreary years of wrangling, the Supreme Court in 1875 declared the two railroads had no right to the Osage land, and settlers were once again assured of their improvements.86 They had gone through a decade of turmoil, ejectments, deep excitement and uncertainty, but ultimately regained the lands they had already bought once.87 Railroad Troubles in Kansas Unusual land grants were made to railroads in Kansas which planned to build through the Indian Territory to Texas. An Act of July 25, 1866, gave the Kansas and Neosho Valley Railroad (later the Missouri River, Fort Scott and Gulf) a 200-foot right-of-way and alternate odd numbered sections of public lands for 20 miles on each side of its line from Kansas City to the boundary of Indian Territory. If odd numbered sections were not available even numbered sections could be taken. The even numbered sections within 10 miles of the road which were not thus selected were to be sold at no less than 861 have traced this conflict in more detail in Fifty Million Acres, pp. 194-222. 87 The settlers on the Des Moines River lands of Iowa, it will be remembered, were compelled to buy their titles twice and to be involved in far longer title confusion as a result of the carelessness of Congress in preparing legislation, of the confusing decisions of the General Land Office, and of long delays in the courts. Congress appropriated $200,000 as compensation for persons whose entries had been accepted for the Des Moines lands and whose patents were later invalidated because the land had long since passed to the state. C. H. Gatch, "The Des Moines River Land Grant," Annals of Iowa, Third Series, Vol. I (January 1895), 639 ff. $2.50. Bona fide settlers on the land at the time of the grant were protected in their rights. The railroad was authorized to build its line through Indian Territory, was given the same 200-foot right-of-way through Indian reserves on which a general right-of-way reservation had been retained by the government. On other reserves the act stipulated that the railroad "shall procure the consent of the tribe or tribes interested, which consent with all its terms and conditions shall be previously approved and indorsed by the President. . . ." Twenty sections per mile were granted through Indian reserves whenever the Indian title was extinguished, provided that the ceded lands became a part of the public lands of the United States. Most important was Section 10 of the Act of 1866 giving the railroad permission to negotiate with, and acquire land from "any Indian nation or tribe, authorized by the United States to dispose of lands for railroad purposes, and from any other nation or tribe of Indians through whose lands said railroad may pass, subject to the approval of the President." A final extraordinary provision declared that whichever of the three railroads-the Fort Scott, the L.L. & G., or the Katy-reached the Indian Territory first should gain the privilege of building through it and have the right-of-way and the land grant. Out of this awkwardly phrased law came a number of controversies that were to wrack Kansas politics for years. The Fort Scott Railroad employing some of the country's ablest lobbyists in and out of the government secured bounty bond subsidies amounting to $750,000, a state grant of 125,000 acres from Kansas' half million acres of internal improvement land, and the much desired Federal grant. It also desperately wanted the Neutral Tract, through the center of which its line was projected. It negotiated secretly with the Cherokees for possession of the 800,000-acre tract and after a veritable donnybrook with other interests, secured a treaty providing for the sale of the tract to it |