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Show 196 HISTORY OF PUBLIC LAND LAW DEVELOPMENT Proportions of Land Available at Graduation Prices that were Sold" Amount Percentage of Percentage of Total Price Available Amount Sold Amount Available Graduation Sales s .121/2 25,114,353 14,035,444 55.8 54 .25 6,485,827 3,623,669 55.6 14 .50 11,540,920 3,450,058 30 13.5 .75 15,654,148 2,946,244 18 11.5 1 .00 18.765,759 1.564,441 8 6 a Crandall, op. tit., p. 87. fered lands in Wisconsin, Iowa, and Minnesota Territory that attracted such investors. In these areas the bulk of the sales at $1.25 an acre were made. In the three big years- 1854, 1855, and 1856-Iowa alone provided 35, 51, and 24 percent of the sales at $1.25; Wisconsin 10, 19, and 22 percent, and Minnesota 19 percent in 1857. Period of Accelerated Disposal The period of 1847 to 1861 was one of great activity in the disposal of public land as the table on page 277 in the chapter on military bounty lands shows. Not only did cash and warrant entries reach high figures but, in 1850, Congress began donating land to aid in the building of railroads. The same year it turned over to the states swamplands which they were permitted to do with as they wished, though the grant was intended to aid them in building levees and in draining wet land. When finally selected, the swamplands amounted to 63,931,000 acres. By 1861 an estimated 50 million of them had passed into private hands.44 The total of swamplands ^ This estimate is based on the analysis of the Illinois swampland disposal of Margaret Beattie Bogue in Patterns From The Sod. Land Use and Tenure in the Grand Prairie, 1850-1900 (Springfield, 111., 1959); and my own research in the records of swampland disposal of the States of Indiana, Louisiana, and California at Indianapolis, Baton Rouge, and Sacramento; and in the records of the Illinois Central Railroad. None of the other railroads, except possibly the Hannibal & St. Joseph, was able to dispose of a part of their lands so advantageously in the fifties as did the Illinois Central. disposed of, lands sold at $1.25 and at graduation prices, and lands entered with military warrants during the years 1851 to 1860 may be estimated at about 144 million acres. In this same period the acreage of land in farms in the public land states increased from 98,214,000 acres to 153,893,000 acres, or roughly an expansion of 55 million acres. Some of the privately owned land not recorded as in farms by 1860 was doubtless being improved but had not yet attained the status of a farm from the viewpoint of the census taker. Probably the greater part of the land not in farms, 40 million to 45 million acres, was held by speculators. Although the Land Office Commissioners were sure that the larger part of the land going to patent through graduation sales had been acquired by persons not planning to develop them, we cannot examine the degree to which their opinion is correct without making minute studies of the county deeds. But for the sales at $1.25 an acre and the acquisitions with military warrants we need make no such investigation-it was not necessary for the speculators to work through dummy entrymen, and their purchases were out in the open. In 1849, before graduation had been enacted, Thomas Ewing, Secretary of the Interior, former Senator from Ohio, and himself a large investor in public lands, included in his annual report a fatuous statement concerning the distribution of the public lands; it suggests either that he knew little of public land administration or hoped to play |