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Show 118 HISTORY OF PUBLIC LAND LAW DEVELOPMENT Mexico should be confirmed. Another section provided that titles up to 160 acres should be confirmed to persons who had been in continuous adverse possession of the land for 20 years.94 Under this act spurious, forged, and antedated claims to 33,500,000 acres, out of a total of 35 million that had not been finally passed upon, were rejected.95 Private Arizona Land Claims Confirmed in , New Mexico, Colorado* Number of State Claims Confirmed Acreage Confirmed Arizona Colorado New Mexico 95 6 504 295 1,397 9,899 ,212 ,885 ,021 a "Report of the Public Lands Commission," Senate Documents, 58th Cong., 3d sess., Vol. 4, No. 189 (Serial No. 4766), p. 140. Donation Act of 1850 and Similar Grants Three years before Britain and the United States had agreed on the 49th parallel as the northern boundary of the Oregon coun- 94 26 Stat. 854-62. 95 Harold H. Dunham, Government Handout. A Study in the Administration of the Public Lands, 1875-1891 (New York, 1941), pp. 24, 212ff. William A. Keleher, Maxwell Land Grant (Santa Fe, 1942), does not criticize the confirmation of the Maxwell grant but Herbert O. Brayer, in William Blackmore: the Spanish-Mexican Land Grants of New Mexico and Colorado, 1863-1878, pp. 18 note, 130 note, seems to accept the Dunham treatment in part. Cf. Jim Berry Pearson, The Maxwell Land Grant (Norman, Okla., 1961), passim. For the efforts of George W. Julian, the abolitionist land reformer of the fifties and sixties, to reopen questionable private land claims in New Mexico which had been approved by commissions and courts while acting as Surveyor General of that territory see R. Hal Williams, "George W. Julian and Land Reform in New Mexico, 1885-1889," Agricultural History, 41 (January 1967), 71-84. Julian was not trying to apply an outdated and geographically obsolete land system to a semi-arid state but was applying inflexible moral standards to the land claims and to land entries that were not upheld by the prevailing group in the territory. try, Americans who had migrated to the region south of the Columbia drafted an act to provide for a territorial government in which any man was allowed to hold 640 acres wherever he wished to establish a claim. In the 1840's efforts were made to induce Congress to sanction and legalize such 640-acre claims in the jointly held territory, but Congress was not prepared to go so far. To the distress of Oregonians, Congress in the organic act providing for the government of Oregon Territory nullified "all laws heretofore passed in said Territory of Oregon making grants or land, or otherwise affecting or incumbering the title to lands. . . ."96 However, members of Congress later relented out of a sense of obligation to the pioneers who had risked all in migrating earlier to the disputed country. The Donation Act of September 27, 1850, provided for grants of 320 acres to all white American citizens or those who intended to become citizens and who had resided in Oregon Territory and cultivated the land 4 years; wives were to have an additional 320 acres "to be held by her in her own right. ..." All white male citizens or intended citizens who emigrated to the territory between December 1, 1850, and December 1, 1853, and who occupied and improved land for 4 years and who took an oath that the land was not intended for others were to have 160 acres or 320 acres dependent on their marital state. Land reformers like Greeley and Senator Isaac P. Walker of Wisconsin opposed section grants as being altogether too much land for ordinary farmers to use and as contrary to the land limitation ideas they fostered, but Congress seems to have thought of the grant as a reward for patriotic action in somewhat the same way the armed occupation grants to emigrants to Florida were planned. The people of Oregon were anxious to have their rights made alienable earlier than the 4 years the law allowed, for they were uniquely valuable in that for some years "Act of Aug. 14, 1848, 9 Stat. 323. |