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Show ADMINISTRATION OF THE PUBLIC FOREST LANDS 585 sugar pine land in the Coast States. Most large absentee investors could keep their hands clean by dealing through agents, attorneys, landlookers and cruisers who would assemble tracts of thousands of acres with funds provided them in advance and would then convey to their clients. The local agents took the risk of using dozens, even hundreds, of dummy entrymen to make homestead applications and to file entries under the Timber and Stone Act for worthless land; they later succeeded in having these tracts included in the forest reserves so they could be exchanged for lieu scrip, which was then used to secure heavily timbered land outside the reserves. Every effort to have the Timber and Stone Act repealed had proved abortive and there was not much prospect of preventing dummies from being used to file entries on surveyed land as Congress was unwilling to vote funds to provide sufficient investigating agents to prevent fraud. Testimony presented in thousands of land cases and the reports of the Land Commissioners show that there were more fraudulent entries under the Timber and Stone Act than under any other law from 1891 onward except for the homestead law. Some entries, sufficiently investigated to confirm the use of fraud, were rejected, but many others went to patent. H. H. Schwartz, chief of the investigating agents of the General Land Office, estimated, probably too conservatively, that five-sixths of the 12 million acres of public lands that had gone to patent under this law by 1909 had been speedily transferred to corporations or individual investors in timberland. He estimated at $240 million the value of the land for which the government had received only $30 million. One single investor, Thomas B. Walker, acquired 700,000 acres of heavily timbered land in northern California, a large part of which, Schwartz estimated, had been secured under the Timber and Stone Act. He cited another instance, relating to the C. A. Smith Lumber Company, which was charged with shipping out "trainloads of women schoolteachers . . . from Minnesota" to file timber and stone entries in Oregon. All such entries were fraudulent, for the persons filing were required to swear that they were not making the entries for others.61 Despite continued evidence that the Timber and Stone Act had long since outlived its usefulness, Congress took no action to repeal it. The law required that the lands "may be sold ... at the minimum price of $2.50 an acre" but in fact they sold for only $2.50. After November 30, 1908, by order of Commissioner Fred Dennett, lands and the timber on them were to be appraised and sold at their actual value.62 By this time, however, there were "very few timber lands of any value left" outside the forest reserves and such scattered unsold tracts as remained were unsurveyed and not open to timber and stone entries.63 Abuses of Forest Lieu Act Congress, the Land Office, the Forest Service, and the western states all had 61 Persons associated with the C. A. Smith Lumber Companies were indicted for flagrant abuse of the Timber and Stone Act, among the charges being that they had brought trainloads of women school teachers to Oregon to make entries for them. The case was carried successively through the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals which cancelled 38 patents to 6,000 acres. There is much on the illegal activities of the Smith Companies in Oregon and the Hyde and Benson group in the redwood lands of California in H. H. Schwartz, "The Timber and Stone Act, and the Commutation Clause of the Homestead Act," in "Report of the National Conservation Commission," 1909, S. Doc, 60th Cong., 2d sess., Vol. 12, No. 676 (Serial No. 5399), Vol. 3, pp. 387-402, esp. 392, 396, 398-99; Bureau of Corporations, The Lumber Industry (Washington, 1913), Part 2, pp. 55, 57 ff. 62 Bureau of Corporations, The Lumber Industry, Part l,p. 263. 63 Secretary of the Interior, Annual Report, 1909, Vol. 1, p. 69. How frequently it happened that action to stop abuse was not taken until the bulk of the best lands had gone to private ownership! |