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Show 246 HISTORY OF PUBLIC LAND LAW DEVELOPMENT before 1862 in this way: (1) Preemption was a step toward freeing public land sales from the emphasis on revenue and toward achieving the West's ultimate objective of free lands. (2) It eased the anxiety of settlers before the auction, provided they could raise the funds to prove up and pay for their claims. (3) It allowed settlers moving on to public land after the auction a full year from the filing of their declaratory statements in which to make improvements and to raise funds for their purchases. Where postponement of the public sale was won, or where there was a long delay in bringing land to public sale, it provided an even longer period (until 1862). (4) The law offered a handy device by which a man could put his tag on a piece of land without making major improvements, and thus enabled him to speculate in a small way. (5) It lent a color of respectability and freedom from punitive action to persons cutting wood on public land for fueling the many steamboats plying the western rivers, and to small lumbermen logging in the pineries of Michigan and Wisconsin, where stories of "the big 40" have abounded ever since. (6) The necessity for requiring some form of proof that settlement and inhabitation had been carried out as the law prescribed, and the ease with which these conditions could be evaded by false testimony contributed to the growing disrespect for land law enforcement that reached its extreme in later years. Throughout their history the preemption acts were abused by many people who acquired land fraudulently under them. They doubtless contributed to the accumulation of large holdings but it is too easy to dwell on this side of the story. Ethan Brown's indignant expose of the frauds in the use of "floats" in Louisiana and stories of misuse of preemption in the forties and fifties, combined with the irregularities in the administration of preemption after 1870, should not blind us to the constructive side of the story. Thousands of settlers moved to ownership of small farms through preemption of unimproved, even un- surveyed land. Preemption as a promise of preferential treatment for the settler put the government on the side of the farm maker, encouraged many who might otherwise have remained hired hands or tenants to move up the ladder of ownership, and, like free homesteads, was an inducement to migration, a factor accelerating the westward retreat of the frontier. Almost from the inception of the new national government, preemption was the device through which the public auction with its competitive bidding was resisted and gradually made a mere formality. The auction system brought the government little or no increase in minimum price for land. It was retained long after it had become a useless and time-consuming method of opening land to settlement. First through special preemption acts, next through general acts applied only retrospectively, then by a general prospective measure applicable first only to surveyed land and later to unsurveyed land, the West won a series of victories over the opposition of the more conservative and revenue-minded representatives of the older states. But well before these measures were enacted the West had devised claim associations to accomplish its ends, that is, to make sure there would be no competitive bidding against local settlers and small speculators. In the South these associations protected the interest of powerful speculating land companies. The West was anxious to gain permanent prospective preemption as a shield and as a psychological recognition of the hardships its people were undergoing in pioneering but the practical effect of the Act of 1841 was not of great importance. It did give status to pioneer settlers and served as public notice that the harsh treatment of squatters was no longer to be tolerated. Squatting had come into its own as a legal and honorable step in the pioneering process toward farm ownership. Preemption was abused in the years before 1860 but on the whole the fraudulent operations made possible by the provisions of the Act of 1841 do not appear to have been |