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Show PRIVATE LAND CLAIMS 119 no other lands were to be available for purchase until surveys were made, offices opened for acceptance of preemption entries, and the lands offered at public sale. Later legislation allowed settlers to commute their donation rights to cash purchase for $1.25 an acre after residence of 2 years, a period subsequently reduced to one year.97 Donations of Land in Washington and Oregon* State Number Acreage Oregon Washington 7,432 1,011 2,614,082 306,795 " "Report of the Public Lands Commission," Senate Documents, 58th Cong., 3d sess., Vol. 4, No. 189 (Serial No. 4766), p. 140. Nearly 4 years after Congress had shown its liberality to residents of and emigrants to Oregon it voted to donate 160 acres to each male white resident of New Mexico who resided there on January 1, 1853, and to male white citizens or intended citizens of the United States who emigrated there by January 1, 1858. According to the Public Land Commission of 1904, only 4,640 acres had been approved for patent under this act.98 Still another general donation that is analogous to the settlement grants of Oregon and Washington was the measure of August 4, 1842 "to provide for the armed occupation and settlement of the unsettled parts" of Florida. Any person the head of a family or 18 years of age who had settled or would settle within one year on land, reside upon and improve it for 5 successive years, would be entitled to 160 acres.99 These armed occupation donations were not segregated from the private land claims. 97 James M. Bergquist, "The Oregon Donation Act and the National Land Policy," Oregon Historical Quarterly, 58 (March 1957), 17-47. 98 Act of July 22, 1854, 10 Stat. 308; S. Doc, 58th Cong., 3d sess., Vol. 4. No. 189 (Serial No. 4766), p., 140. 99 5 Stat. 502. Final Accounting The view has been expressed that it would have been better for the United States to have looked more critically upon the claims of anterior governments, to have judged the claims by Spanish and Mexican law, to have insisted that confirmation should only be conceded where the proof was clear that conditions of the grants had been fulfilled. Others have maintained that the United States might better have purchased, possibly by condemnation, the largely undeveloped lands of the Chouteau, the McDonogh, the Forbes, the Picos, and other families with large claims and made them a part of the public domain, thus avoiding the long and bitter strife that wracked California and New Mexico, retarded their growth and economic progress, and inflicted heavy legal costs on both the claimants and society generally. Anglo-Saxon supreme sensitivity to property rights prevented any such action. All claimants, large and small, were given every conceivable opportunity to prove their rights to land. A final accounting of the acreage of confirmed private land claims shows 34 million acres to have been confirmed in 19 states.100 The significance of the private land claims lies not only in their acreage and location, which made them highly desirable because of their actual or potential great value, but also in the fact that those slow to be confirmed, and many others never to be confirmed, delayed the extensions of surveys and the opening of surrounding lands to entry and settlement and long retarded the permanent development because of the area in question. The appearance of claims in the 20th century and the demands of squatters upon long-since confirmed claims for rejection of their titles on the ground of new discoveries of fraud in the title holders are late illustrations of problems that seemed to many to have no end. 100 Public Land Statistics, 1966, p. 6. |