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Show USE AND ABUSE OF SETTLEMENT LAWS, 1880-1904 487 Homestead scrip; other "notorious frauds" were being discovered, and a number of convictions won; the greater part of western Nebraska was said to be again illegally fenced, and one company in New Mexico was said to have fenced 1,079,000 acres of public lands. The investigating agents were swamped with reports of misuse of the public land laws, 1,501 entries were held for concellation, 921 were cancelled, and 5,468 cases were pending. Hermann took pride in the fact that although misuse was increasing so also were collections from fines, judgments, settlements, and sales of confiscated logs. The total collected in 1902 was $284,078 or nearly $100,000 more than the cost of maintaining the investigating staff. The Commissioner could report that the 8,000 acres of public lands of Jesse D. Carr in Oregon and California had finally, as a result of a court order, been cleared of its illegal fencing. An agent who had investigated fencing on public lands in Nebraska reported that to protect their illegal fences, cattlemen had hired "thousands upon thousands" of "loafers, tramps, railway graders, negroes" to file homestead entries along their lines. If the entries were suspended, cattlemen would demand a hearing, appeal from the Commissioner to the Secretary, then to the courts. All this would take a number of years and meanwhile they would maintain their fences. The agent called the homestead law a dead letter in Nebraska where it was "openly boasted that a genuine, legal homestead entry" had not been made for some time. The agent was not prepared to go as far as this though he did say that only a small part of the entries being made were legal. A letter of President Theodore Roosevelt written in 1902 throws some light on the fencing question that was giving him great difficulty. He had ordered taking down the fences "of a very great and very arrogant corporation. This has to be done; yet at the same time I find that near by there are two or three hundred small fellows who would be homesteaders in fertile country but who cannot afford to take up only 160 acres when it needs 40 acres to support a steer and who have therefore fenced in enough for 100 head- have fenced in 400 acres-who live in a one-room sawed cabin. The equities of the case as regards these genuine settlers are different, but the law is [unfortunately] the same, and how to enforce it with the minimum of hardship offers a not altogether easy problem. I shall have to take a little time about it and probably get assistance from Congress but it will be done." It is not altogether clear that Roosevelt was prepared to follow through on this boldly announced position for when a prominent Senator was charged with enclosing 47,000 acres of public lands the President permitted the matter to drag on for years and only toward the end of his administration was effective action taken.70 Another Roosevelt comment worth quoting relates to illegal use of the Timber and Stone Act to acquire a valuable tract to sell to a lumber company. The letter was in response to remarks in an Idaho paper critical of the administration's forest policy and complaining that homesteaders could obtain only a small price for the re- 70 Letter of May 5, 1902, to Hamlin Garland, in Elting E. Morison, The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt (8 vols., Cambridge, Mass., 1951) , 3:257; T. A. Larson, History of Wyoming (Lincoln, Nebr., 1965) , pp. 380-83. Unfortunately Letters offers little information concerning the spate of land problems coming up in 1901-1909. In President Roosevelt's State of the Union Message of Dec. 2, 1902, it is stated that there had been little interference with illegal enclosures in the past "but ample notice has now been given the trespassers, and all the resources at the command of the Government will hereafter be used to put a stop to such trespassing." Richardson, Messages and Papers of the Presidents, (1904), X, 527. |