History of public land law development

page 472

472 HISTORY OF PUBLIC LAND LAW DEVELOPMENT unsurveyed area, pay for a special survey, file an entry on the land and later have the deposit returned in the form of scrip that was subject to entry on unoffered land) he found was subject to gross abuse, as McFarland had earlier brought out. Corrupt elements took advantage of it to make "erroneous, fraudulent and incomplete surveys . .." Spanish and Mexican land claims which had long since needed more careful administrative and judicial scrutiny-especially several of the more dubious claims- under Sparks were given a critical examination. In the past, Congress had tended to disregard settlers' interests in favor of influential persons. Grants of a few leagues had been blown up by smart lawyers into holdings vastly larger and, with weak defense by the government, had been patented. Surveys which in no way conformed to the provisions of the original grant and which allowed the inclusion of more of the choice land than was intended had been accepted by the Land Office and the courts, almost without protest. Mineral rights had been approved along with surface rights, contrary to the provisions of Spanish land law, which reserved them to the Crown. Railroad land grants which his predecessors had shown no inclination to look upon critically, particularly aroused Sparks' ire. He felt the Office had been altogether too sympathetic to the railroads in many cases where settler interests were involved and that it ought to have demanded that the grantees either build their lines within the time allowed or give up their great donations. That some of the policies he criticized had been commenced by his own party when last it was in control of the government may not have occurred to him. The practice of withdrawing all public land along a vaguely determined route within a strip of territory from 20 to 80 miles wide and reserving all the lands within that area for decades without any sign that the railroad would finally be con- structed, in his opinion, constituted a premature and unauthorized action that "arbitrarily and cruelly" deprived settlers of their rights. A number of railroads had received lands to which they were not entitled under a strict interpretation of the law, and extraordinary liberality had been shown in determining the mileage for which they were entitled to receive land. In numerous cases involving conflict of settlers' and railroads' rights, and even involving government rights, the Land Office had favored the railroad. Sparks even charged his predecessor with working his staff around the clock in its last days to fill out patents to a southern railroad which had not earned the land. Under the caption "Fraudulent Land Entries" Sparks included in his report extracts from registers, receivers, and special agents which throw much light on the mad scramble for lands. Perhaps the most informative statement related to the breakdown of respect for public law:27 The idea prevails to an almost universal extent that, because the government in its generosity has provided for the donation of the public domain to its citizens, a strict compliance with the conditions imposed is not essential. Men who would scorn to commit a dishonest act toward an individual, though he were a total stranger, eagerly listen to every scheme for evading the letter and spirit of the settlement laws, and in a majority of instances I believe avail themselves of them. Our land officers partake of this feeling in many instances, and if they do not corruptly connive at fraudulent entries, modify their instructions and exceed their discretionary powers in examinations of final proof. The marshaling of hired hands to make entries which, when patented, were conveyed to the employer was becoming a widely used method of acquiring more land than the settlement laws allowed to an individual. Less than one-tenth of the land in the Duluth district in Minnesota Land Office Report, 1885, p. 50.