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Show history was wanted well before the Commission had in hand the other studies it was arranging. Consequently, this study 1 hough it may appear long has very little on Indian lands, their allotment, management, and sale; very little on state lands; and nothing on the town site legislation, which all merit full investigations. Mineral land laws are treated by Professor Swenson in a separate chapter of this book. Specialists may recognize other areas where more attention might well have been given. There was no intention of displacing Donaldson's The Public Domain, Hib-bard's History of the Public Land Policies, Robbins' Our Landed Heritage, or Peffer's The Closing of the Public Domain. These works all have their strong points and should continue to be used for background information, public opinion on land proposals, and congressional discussions leading to the adoption of measures. Where these and other works on public land policies are particularly good on various phases of the land problems I have not felt it necessary to reproduce them or to rework their treatment. I have been more concerned with the functioning of the land system, the way it affected those seeking land ownership whether farm makers, speculators, lumbermen, livestock men, or town promoters. Since the constantly stated purpose of the land system and its individual laws was to make land available to the "actual settler," other than in the early years when the need for revenue counted heavily, I have tried to keep this in mind and to weigh the successes and failures according to the degree to which they contributed to that end. This history of the framing and administration of public land policies is not primarily or even largely concerned with individuals. They have been mentioned only when they have been influential in shaping policy. The early chapters of this study were read by Dr. E. Louise Peffer of the Hoover Institute and Professor Vernon Carstensen of the University of Washington. Both raised numerous questions which called for reconsideration of interpretations, emphasis, and allocation of space. Their appraisals were of much value and only the pressure of time prevented the submission of the later portions to their critical examination. Needless to say they have no responsibility for any errors or other weakness in the treatment. Three of my graduate students, Thomas Jones, Stephen Strausberg, and Yasuo Okada were asked to investigate certain aspects of public land policies. With aid provided by the Public Land Law Review Commission they were able to work through major documentary collections in the National Archives and in Tennessee, Indiana, and Nebraska. A summary of Thomas Jones' study appeared in the Tennessee Historical Quarterly, Spring 1968, as "The Public Lands of Tennessee." Strausberg's study has developed into a detailed examination of the application of the public land laws in Indiana. While he was working through the enormous files of the correspondence of the General Land Office and the Treasury Department, he unearthed numerous letters bearing on questions I was writing on at the time and contributed a good deal to my treatment. Okada selected for his intensive study six townships in Gage County, Nebraska, a county whose deed records I had used some years ago in a hasty fashion to trace the land accumulations and rental policies of America's greatest landlord, William Scully. Here Okada applied the microscopic method of research in land history that Joseph Schafer had written about but never fully utilized. He came up with some very important data and a fresh treatment of the operation of the public land system where legitimate large-scale speculation and homesteading existed side by side. |