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Show EARLY EFFORTS TO PROTECT PUBLIC TIMBERLANDS 559 laws was the extraordinarily poor financial support Congress gave to this most important branch of the government which had jurisdiction over the vast resources of the country. They would also have agreed that Congress had been exceedingly careless in drafting legislation affecting the public lands, had left great loopholes for fraud and abuse of the laws, and had been exceedingly slow in providing remedial legislation.79 While deploring his arbitrary action in ordering the suspension of all entries for further investigation and his suspicious attitude towards all wishing to file applications for land, Sparks' successors followed up his policy toward depredations of the public lands. They asked for more funds for investigating agents, pressed indictments and suits for the recovery of stolen timber or its stumpage value, and urged the repeal of the Timber and Stone Act. The Timber Cutting Act was said by the Acting Commissioner in 1889 "to have 79 Dunham, Government Handout, pp. 124 ff. Dunham (pp. 142-43) brings out the erosion of the better employees of the Land Office and their employment at much better salaries by railroads, corporations and law firms. Former Commissioner Williamson, for example, was taken on by the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad at a salary of $10,000 whereas his salary as Commissioner had been $4,000. A. T. Britton became one of the most successful lawyers practicing before the Department and Henry N. Copp became the prolific writer of guidebooks for settlers and miners; his Copp's Land Reporter was indispensable for attorneys dealing in public land matters. Equally serious was the fact that staff members of the Land Office had been able to transfer to other departments of the government at salary increases of $700 and $800. In 1881 the salaries of bureau chiefs in Interior ranged from $3,500 for the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, $4,000 for the Commissioner of the General Land Office, $4,500 for the Commissioner of Patents and the Commissioner of Railroads, who had the smallest staff, $5,000 for the heads of the Pension and Census Bureaus and $6,000 for the head of the Geological Survey. The latter was an acknowledgement of the great skill and distinguished position of Major John W. Powell. Official Register of the United States (2 vols., Washington, 1881) , 1: passim. opened the flood-gate to the unlawful procurement of timber from public lands and has resulted in the destruction of some of the finest forests in the world." A Federal judge characterized this act by saying it was "very loosely and unskillfully drawn, and abounds in unnecessary and indefinite phrases and clauses of the and-so-forth" variety that made it susceptible to much abuse.80 President Harrison's Land Commissioner, Lewis A. Groff, after reading over the reports of the office since 1881, noted the ever increasing destruction of public forests without authority and without anything more than token compensation being paid to the government for the plundering. He came to two conclusions: (1) publicly owned timber was being rapidly exhausted, and (2) existing laws were wholly inadequate to protect the public lands from unlawful appropriation. He was aware of the demands by the emerging conservation movement for the temporary withdrawal of all timberlands from any form of entry to allow for a careful study of possible future policies toward them and of the proposal to have the Army assigned to protect the public forests from further plundering, but did not comment on them. Instead, he recommended the repeal of, or the enactment of strict limitations in, the Timber Cutting and Timber and Stone Acts so that mountainous land needed for watershed protection would be retained in government hands and that timber in mining districts would be cut only for actual needs. The Commissioner expressed his thoughts so awkwardly that one has to dig for meaning in his reports but he seemed to be saying what his predecessors in the Land Office had been saying for years: timber in the mining districts should not be cut in the wholesale fashion it had in the past. However, none of the Commissioners, including Groff, came up with any concrete suggestion mC,LO Report, 1889, pp. 58-60. |
