History of public land law development

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640 HISTORY OF PUBLIC LAND LAW DEVELOPMENT ment and without costing more than the original 25 cents an acre paid when the application was made.10 On contested cases it was found that little or no attempt had been made to irrigate the land being claimed and that many of the claims were for land obviously not desert. By 1883 McFarland had had enough of frauds under the Desert Land Act and saw no other solution than repeal. He was at the same time advocating repeal of the Preemption, Timber Culture, and Timber and Stone Acts which were also being fraudulently used. It took Commissioner Sparks to make the public aware of the frauds being committed under the Desert Land Act. He found that nonresident dummies, including women, were being used by improvement and cattle companies to gain title to large areas and that officials of the Land Office had seriously relaxed requirements to ease the path to ownership for such interests.11 For example, the Union Cattle Company and the Goshen Hole Ditching Company, both owned by groups of which Thomas and Frank Sturgis were the leaders, had ownership of 55 desert land entries in Wyoming, 51 of which had been proved up and for which the final certificates had been issued in the 2 weeks before Sparks assumed charge of the Land Office. Sworn testimony had been presented showing that ditches had been constructed and ownership of ample water rights obtained to make possible raising crops on the land, though no crops had as yet been produced. Investigation, however, brought out that the few observable ditches were mere plow furrows and were neither useful nor intended to be so. Of the 55 mtrymen, seven lived in Wyoming, seven in New Jersey, 30 in New York, and 11 in Massachusetts. Testimony based on interviews with nine of these "foreign entrymen" revealed that they had filled out the applica- 10 GLO Annual Report, 1883, p. 8; 1884, p. 8. 11 Report, 1885, pp. 73-75. tions "to oblige a friend," never considered that they had any interest in the lands or in any water rights, and that one officer of the companies was a final witness in 20 cases, a second officer was witness in 49 cases, and Thomas Sturgis was witness in 19 cases. Three of the claims were established on good grassland. In Arizona the surveyor general reported "the woods are full" of speculators resorting to "all manner of schemes ... to gratify the gambling propensities of the age in which we live, and I fully believe more perjury is committed" under the Desert Land Act than at any previous time in the history of the territory. Residents of St. Louis, Peoria, Chicago, and other eastern cities appear among the entrymen seeking to take advantage of the law as "sharpers and speculators, most of them alien to our soil." He urged that rigid settlement requirements be included in the law to prevent the use of dummies by the cattle companies.12 In contrast to the Commissioner's view that the Desert Land Act was being so flagrantly violated by speculators, land companies, and cattlemen that it should be repealed, the Governors of four western territories-Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, and Utah-were convinced the measure was a godsend, making possible economic units of land for grazing, if not for irrigation farming. The Governor of Wyoming even went so far in his annual message of 1883 as to invite the attention of men wishing to enter the cattle industry to the opportunity of acquiring a total of 1,120 acres with 12 GLO Annual Report, 1887, pp. 503-507, 522-24. For Thomas Sturgis' part in the cattle industry see John Clay, My Life on the Range (Norman, Okla., 1962), passim. Most historians of the range cattle industry have given attention to the fencing question but allot little space to the processes by which cattlemen gained ownership of their large acreages, other than to say that they bought from others. It was practically impossible for large ownerships to be established in the range cattle states except through perversion of the land laws.