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Show 202 HISTORY OF PUBLIC LAND LAW DEVELOPMENT In these communities they set up their big new mills. Others were buying timber for speculation, reasoning that with the great influx of settlers into the prairies the demand for timber would soon bring even the more remote pinelands into keen demand. Prominent among the lumbermen who acquired land in Michigan in the late forties and fifties were Edmund, John, and Roswell Canfield (10,014 acres), John Burt, William Sanborn, and Heman Jones (19,530 acres). Samuel F. Hersey of Bangor, Maine, started his purchases in Michigan in 1854 with 10,000 acres and then moved on to the St. Croix Valley of Wisconsin and Minnesota, where he joined with Isaac Staples, another Maine lumberman, in building a big mill at Stillwater; he was said to have invested with his partner $300,000 "in our midst."56 In Wisconsin such well-known leaders in the lumber trade as Abner Coburn, Henry Hewitt, Jr., Isaac Staples, and Samuel A. Jewett were actively entering pineland either for their mills or as a speculation. The firm of Cadwallader Washburn and Cyrus Woodman illustrates the zeal with which those interested in stumpage were pushing their acquisitions. Washburn began his purchases in 1847 at the Mineral Point office in southwestern Wisconsin where by 1854 he had bought 30,480 acres. By 1853 he had entered 7,890 acres in the Willow River and LaCrosse districts. His partner Woodman obtained 41,000 acres in the Mineral Point district, 32,916 acres in the LaCrosse district, 5,835 acres in the Hudson district, 13,000 acres in the Stevens Point district, and 9,000 acres in Minnesota. After the Civil War both men added to their possessions so that their total entries came to 159,000 acres. In addition they invested in and cared for 21,000 acres for other members of their families. Minnesota was first opened to sale and settlement in 1849. By 1854 government land sales were booming. Warner Lewis, surveyor general for the district, warned that the unexampled rapidity with which Iowa and Minnesota were being settled was creating a demand for timber and that depredations on public land were becoming common. He urged that the lands be offered at sale as soon as possible-a view not at all supported by the settlers, who were hopeful that a homestead law would be enacted.57 During the busy years 1854-60, 49 individuals and partnerships bought 282,000 acres in Minnesota. The populations of Minnesota and Kansas Territories were burgeoning, but despite their rapid growth, political factors were to keep them out of the Union until 1859 and 1861, though the Census of 1860 showed them to have much more population than Florida had entered with in 1845. They were a menace to Democratic proslavery control of Congress and of the country and had to wait. The census takers found 18,181 farms in Minnesota containing 2,711,968 acres and undoubtedly there were more tracts in the process of being made into farms. Kansas, where one writer maintains the residents were more absorbed with claim making and bushwacking than with farm making, had 10,400 farms containing 1,778,400 acres listed in 1860. The speed with which the public domain was passing into private ownership and the large acquisitions by speculative interests and land grant railroads caused reformers to advocate restricting purchases of public land to actual settlers. Practically all the public lands in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois had been entered, less than 2 million acres remained in Iowa, and very little in Mississippi and Alabama, except longleaf pinelands which were unwanted; thus land hungry pioneers were pushing the frontiers farther and faster into new areas in Kansas, Nebraska, Minnesota, California, and Oregon. They were preceding the surveyors and the agents who were negotiating treaties for Indian land. 66 St. Croix Union, Oct. 10, 1856. 67 S. Ex. Doc, 34th Cong., 3d sess., Vol. II, No. 5, Part 1 (Serial No. 975), Oct. 13, 1856, p. 252. |
