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Show 418 HISTORY OF PUBLIC LAND LAW DEVELOPMENT tinuing to offer lands. Timberlands were not open to cash purchase in the South before 1876, and huge areas in California, Idaho, Oregon, Washington, and part of Minnesota being unoffered, were never open to unrestricted entry. Consequently speculators in timberlands had to find other means to acquire tracts that contained heavy stands of the white pine of Minnesota, the redwood and sugar pine of California, or the Douglas-fir of Oregon. The only way to acquire large tracts of tim-berland in these areas was to abuse the settlement laws. Private ownership of some of the choicest of the redwood lands in California, which conservationists and recreation leaders are now trying to include in a national park, was achieved, said the Public Land Commission of 1879, through misuse of the settlement laws in the 1870's. Members of the Commission visited the redwood region "and saw little huts or kennels built of 'shakes' that were totally unfit for human habitations, and always had been, which were the sole improvements made under the homestead and pre-emption laws, and by means of which large areas of red-wood forests, possessing great value, had been taken under pretenses of settlement and cultivation which were the purest fictions, never having any real existence in fact, but of which 'due proof had been made under the laws." 56 Officials of the General Land Office ascribed more chicanery, more misuse, to the preemption law than to any other public land laws prior to 1880. We have seen how critical they were of it in relation to entries in the years before the Civil War, especially in Louisiana. It has also been seen that Land Commissioner Burdett had little use for the Act of 1841 and the amendments which extended its provisions to unsurveyed lands. In 1874 Burdett tried to convince Congress that "pine and fir b*GLO Annual Report, 1874, pp. 6-7, and GLO Annual Report, 1875, pp. 9-11. lands" should no longer be subject to homestead and preemption and that they should be appraised and proclaimed for sale at not less than their appraised value. In the light of the quality of the appointments then being made by the Land Office and the ease with which appointees were influenced by special interests, one may well wonder whether a system of classification and appraisal of timberlands at that time would have improved the existing system. Burdett suggested land classification again in 1875, some years before a better known and somewhat broader proposal was made by Major John L. Powell.57 In his report of 1875 Burdett called preemption "an obsolete Law" that opened the way to the frauds "by which the choicest of the lands are gathered into the hands of a few, to be held for prices far above that fixed upon them by the Government." "Large tracts of coal lands-valleys and streams which control the values of large tracts of surrounding country-are continually gathered into the hands of a few persons, who are able to employ agents willing to make the pretense of settlement, on which they can justify to themselves the false affidavits requisite to the success of their frauds. Since the discontinuance of the system of offering lands at public sale, the pre-emption system has become, and is now, peculiarly the speculators' law as contradistinguished from the settlers."58 Generally associated with the complaints and criticisms of the various abusive practices was the suggestion of the Commissioners that the lands, whether timber, mineral, or grazing should be sold in large tracts. Some observers thought of the fraudulent use of the land laws, like the degrading use 57 "Report of the Public Lands Commission," H. Ex. Doc, 46th Cong., 2d sess., Vol. 22, No. 46 (Serial No. 1923), p. xxxii. 58 S. S. Burdett first presented this judgment in a communication to the Senate Committee on Public Lands, and included it in his Annual Report, 1875, p. 17. |