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Show 96 HISTORY OF PUBLIC LAND LAW DEVELOPMENT familiar with Spanish or French, in which practically all the documents were written, but the boards were authorized to employ persons to translate such documents into English.2S The Act of 1805, and similar measures adopted later to apply to Florida and California, were excoriated by land claimants for compelling them to prove at considerable expense and trouble the validity of their rights to land before commissions and, later, courts. Undoubtedly some hardships did result but they were caused by the fact that confused, ill-defined, overlapping, and inadequately documented but valid claims or rights were intermixed with fraudulent claims. The land system in all the territory the United States acquired from Spain had been very loosely managed. Permissions to settle or to use land for specific purposes had been given apparently without thought that permanent rights were being conveyed. The policy of administrative officers, ol Congress, and later of the courts was to be generous, increasingly generous, but at the same time to eliminate claims not based on law, customs, or equity. From the outset of American control there appeared abundant reason to doubt the authenticity of many grants in Louisiana Territory. Silas Bent, government surveyor, reported that the records of his office had "undergone a revolution, there has been Leaves cut out of the Books and others pasted in with Large Plats of Surveys on them . . . the dates have been evidently altered in a large proportion of the certificates, Plats have been altered from smaller to larger, Names erased and other incerted and striking difference in collour of the Ink etc. ..." He had not found one survey to agree with the time certified on the record; even the marks on the trees were much younger than the documents implied. Bent expressed the view that the large claims from a square league to a million acres were generally fraudulent. "Yet the Combination in favor of them is strong and Powerfull and by their Opulence and influence may perhaps be able to bear down all those who dare to come forward and state facts respecting them___"24 John W. Monette, who found land speculation a central theme in western history, many years later wrote of the swarms of land jobbers-"lynx-eyed speculators"-who, having failed in their visionary schemes elsewhere, descended upon Louisiana when the territory was transferred to the United States. Claims and evidences of title were to be raked up from old records, musty documents, antiquated titles, concessions, settlement-rights, transfers, entails, and every species of oral and written evidence of title, real and factitious. Claims of this character were eagerly sought by the land speculator, and as freely produced by the needy Creole, and the avaricious fabricator. An active commerce sprung up between the artful land-jobbers and the docile, unlettered settler; titles, complete and incomplete, were multiplied in endless variety; and, before the close of the year 1806, the several Recorders' offices . . . were filled with the accumulated titles and claims to land filed for record.25 Claims in the Territory of Missouri Until 1812 Congress dealt with claims in Orleans and Louisiana Territories in the same acts but thereafter conditions called for special measures applying to one or the other individually. In 1812 the Territory of Orleans-now enlarged-was admitted into the Union as the State of Louisiana, and the former Territory of Louisiana was made the Territory of Missouri. Let us proceed with 23 2 Stat. 325 ff. 24 Bent to Jared Mansfield, Surveyor General, Oct. 5, 1806, Carter (ed.), Territorial Papers, XIV, 13. Antoine Soulard, last surveyor of the Spanish period, explains away such changes as Bent observed in the records in a letter to the Land Commissioners of Nov. 5, 1806, ibid., pp. 29-33, but says nothing of the marks on trees. Soulard's explanations were not accepted by Gallatin who observed that Soulard had antedated documents and that he had refused to testify under oath concerning his activities under the Spanish Government. Ibid., p. 71. 25 DeBow's Review, Vol. 8 (New Orleans, May 1850), 400. Lemont K. Richardson, "Private Land Claims in Missouri" (Master's thesis, Cornell University, 1953), pp. 32 ff., shows the excited scramble for claims and grants in Missouri. |