OCR Text |
Show 170 HISTORY OF PUBLIC LAND LAW DEVELOPMENT to settlement and sale under the usual taws. Instead, considerable portions of these lands were ceded in trust to be sold for the benefit of the Indians. No preemption rights were permitted on the Chickasaw lands and a provision was included in the Chickasaw supplementary treaty of October 22, 1832, which suggested that combinations at the sales should be prevented so that the Indians might get a fair return. "The Chiefs," so the treaty states, "still express fears that combinations may be formed at the public sales where their reserved tracts of land shall be offered for sale, and that they may not be sold so high as they might be sold, by judicious agents at private sale." Other plans for the sale of the trust lands were to be considered by the chiefs and submitted to the President for his approval.65 Thus was laid the basis for sales of Indian land negotiated entirely outside the public land laws, where special interests could prevail. A minimum price of $3 an acre was to be charged for the trust lands, subject to ^eduction as recommended by the Indians. Other parts of the lands of these Creeks and Chickasaws were to be granted to chiefs, subchiefs, and other members and under certain conditions these allotments were to be made alienable. The Creek Treaty of March 24, 1832, stated that all intruders on the lands being ceded and divided into allotments in Alabama "shall be removed therefrom in the same manner as intruders may be removed by law from other public land." This provision obviously was quite meaningless; the government had long since given up efforts to remove intruders from public land and was in the process of forgiving them for past intrusions by conceding preemption rights to them. However, the Creek lands could not be obtained by preemption. Through these Indian treaties a number of million acres of land passed to private ownership not by means of the statutory land laws but under provisions written into the treaties 65 See the Chickasaw Treaties of Oct. 20 and 22, 1832, Charles J. Kappler, Indian Laws and Treaties (3 vols., Washington, 1904), II, 358, 363. with Indians and ratified by the Senate. It is worthy of note that individual allotments and cessions in trust were made again in the 1850's in Kansas and resulted in further large alienations of land outside the general land laws.66 Speculative groups from the East and the South converged on Mississippi and Alabama at the sales of these Indian lands. Mary Young found that 57 individuals and groups acquired 3,019,486 acres or an average of 52,973 each. In addition, 613,859 acres were acquired by those who purchased blocks of 2,000 to 10,000 acres. Another group of 61 individuals and partnerships or companies- and there was a good deal of overlapping in these lists-acquired 1,480,709 acres. It should be added that 40 percent of the latter was sold after the period covered in this chapter. We may summarize the speculative purchases in Alabama and Mississippi before the Civil War as amounting to between 6,400,000 and 7 million acres. These figures, of course, do not include the state land nor the sales of railroad land. A considerable part of this land was assigned on the land office books, indicating that it was being bought for settlers but, of course, they had to pay tribute to the middle man. Nowhere, not even in Illinois, was there such a large amount of land bought for speculation as at the sale of these Creek and Chickasaw allotments. Demands for Reforms By the early forties criticism of the growing "monopoly" of the public lands was being expressed by George Henry Evans and his associates in the National Land Reform Association. Evans declared that every man had a natural right to a portion of the earth for his maintenance, that the public lands belonged to the people, and that title should be based on use, not purchase. He wanted land sales to be made to actual settlers only and to 66 See esp. the treaty with the Chickasaws of Oct. 20, and 22, 1832, Kappler, Indian Laws and Treaties, II, 341, 358, 363. |