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Show MILITARY BOUNTY LAND POLICIES 279 Minnesota, and Kansas, where large quantities of land were engrossed by capitalists with warrants. It was said that they neither developed their land nor would they sell after 1857 because of the fall in prices. Oliver Hudson Kelley, who later became famous as the founder of the National Grange, expressed this resentment in 1863:84 The law which allowed non-residents to patch up the country with land warrants, entailed upon some portions of our State [Minnesota] a curse not yet removed. There are thousands of acres yet held by non-residents that have never had a farthing expended upon them for improvements, and their owners continue to pay taxes in the vain hope that the lands may yet rise in value, and then be sold to advantage. Fortunately the land warrants were located upon the most inferior portions of our State and but very little of these portions can find cash customers at two dollars per acre until the government lands are all secured; and unless some unforseen inflation of real estate should occur, much of the land never will bring the first cost and taxes up to the present time. It was this experience that later made the western Representatives and Senators oppose the agricultural college act (Morrill Act) because it proposed to give scrip to the states. Western Representatives feared the scrip would likewise be used by speculators in large blocks, and of course they were quite right. On the other side of the ledger must be placed the obvious fact that though speculators were enabled to engross much larger acreages by virtue of the issuance of the warrants, settlers also had the opportunity to acquire lands at lower prices than they would have paid otherwise, and part of their funds were freed for the purchase of farm implements and livestock. The warrants reduced the cost of land in the years before the Graduation Act, which lowered the price of all land available for private entry and unsold for 10 or more years after being offered. Dealers in land warrants flourished in all large centers, buying and selling warrants at a few cents an acre profit. For example, Thompson Brothers whose "Bank Note Reporter" was one of the most reliable, provided the following quotations on the different warrants in May 1859: 40-acre warrants were bought at $1.00 per acre and sold for $1.10; 80-acre warrant quotations were 88 and 92 cents; 120-acre warrants, 78 and 82 cents; and 160-acre warrants, 82 and 85 cents. The price in western land office towns was commonly 3 cents an acre above New York or Washington prices.85 Dealers and buyers ran considerable risks in purchasing land warrants for many had been secured from the War Department by persons falsely claiming relationship to deceased soldiers. In such cases caveats were entered against the delivery of the patents. In 1856 there were 59,190 warrants on which caveats had been filed, thereby suspending further action on patenting. Nor was forgery of assignments uncommon, nor were assignments that did not conform to the requirements established for the protection of the warrantee by the General Land Office. Many warrants had to be returned to the warrantees for proof of assignment after they had been accepted for entry at a western land office and transmitted to the Commissioner in Washington. All such difficulties involved the registers and receivers in additional correspondence, the entryman was delayed in getting title to his land, and the broker was compelled by the guarantee he had given to carry the warrant back to the original owners for proper certification of assignment. Notwithstanding all these difficulties, Cyrus Woodman, one of the most extensive land brokers in the West, through whose hands went hundreds of warrants, said that the shinplasters and other paper that passed as currency in the West were so unreliable that receivers often declined to accept them and in consequence speculators pre- 35. 84 Commissioner of Agriculture, Report, 1863, p. 85 St. Paul Pioneer & Democrat, May 12, 1859, quoting Thompson Brothers. |