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Show USE AND ABUSE OF SETTLEMENT LAWS, 1880-1904 471 ture entries. In addition 782 entries were "held for cancellation," hearings were ordered on 781 entries, legal proceedings were recommended on 22, and 5,000 were suspended, waiting investigation by the agents.24 In his final report before he was displaced by Sparks, McFarland warned that with the rapid alienation of the public lands "the time is near at hand when there will be no public land to invite settlements or afford citizens of the country an opportunity to secure cheap homes." He deplored the vast stretches of land which had been acquired by evasion of the law and without compliance with the requirements of settlement and cultivation. Wasteful dissipation of the lands should cease and that could only be assured by rewriting the land laws to prevent fraud and evasion. Timber-lands should be appraised, the most valuable set aside as forest reserves and the balance offered, as wanted, at their appraised value. He recommended specifically the establishment of a forest preserve on the headwaters of the Missouri and Columbia Rivers in Montana Territory.25 If Cleveland wanted to find a thoroughgoing reformer who would be interested in rooting out corruption, able to withstand the pressure of special interests, and in sympathy with the agrarians who were anxious to halt the rapid alienation of the public domain to large interests, he could not have done better than to choose Sparks to head the Land Office. But Cleveland and the leadership of the Democratic party 24 Ibid., pp. 146-47. Agnes Larson has summarized the reports of two of these special agents in Minnesota in her History of the White Pine Industry in Minnesota (Minneapolis, 1949) , pp. 290-95, 390-96. In addition to the agents investigating entries under the settlement laws there were 44 agents protecting the public timber who reported in 1884, 627 cases of trespass of which 352 were recommended for prosecution. 2hLand Office Report, 1884, pp. 17-19. were Bourbon conservatives, as Horace S. Merrill has ably pointed out. Consequently the nomination of Sparks as Commissioner of the Land Office is not easy to understand. It is clear that Cleveland and Secretary of the Interior Lucius Q. C. Lamar wanted honest administration, insofar as it could be obtained through the swarm of Democrats who, after the elections, displaced Republicans as surveyors general, registers and receivers and as long as it did not jeopardize the popular following of the Party in the West. But Sparks was no Bourbon, though he was a strongly partisan Democrat. His difficulty was that, unlike McFarland, he tried to cut through the web of deceit, mismanagement, and special influence that had made possible the outrageous frauds his special agents were uncovering; in so doing he struck hard at influential interests who clamored for his removal.26 Sparks had been in office only a short time before he had established himself as the most energetically reformist and apolitical Commissioner of the Land Office. He lashed out right and left at corrupt elements taking advantage of the loopholes in land legislation, of which there were many. He accused his predecessors of conducting the Office "to the advantage of speculation and monopoly, private and corporate, rather than the public interest ...." Thousands of claims involving millions of acres of land had been annually passed to patent, he asserted, "upon the single proposition that nobody but the government had any adverse interest." The special deposit system (by which it was possible to select an obviously valuable tract of land in a wholly 28 In his efforts to show the Bourbon character of the Democratic leadership Horace S. Merrill, William Freeman Vilas, Doctrinaire Democrat (Madison, Wis., 1954) , did not find it necessary to mention Sparks. By 1887 there had been almost a clean sweep of Republican surveyors general, registers and receivers. See the Official Register of the United States, 1883, and 1887. |
