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Show 320 HISTORY OF PUBLIC LAND LAW DEVELOPMENT Since 1803 Congress had accompanied its grants to states with the injunction that the land should not be sold for less than the government charged for its land. This restriction was applied to the internal improvement grants but no restriction was put on the size of tracts the states could sell or the total amount individuals could acquire. The grant was expected to be disposed of quickly to make available funds with which the states could press forward the many enterprises they had either undertaken or planned in the boom years before 1837. The fixed size of the state improvement grants prevented any long drawn out disputes about the quantity of lands, such as arose from the Swamp Land Acts with their indefinite characterization of "swamp" lands, though there were to be controversies between railroads and states over selections. The states were permitted to make selections from surveyed and unappropriated land on which there were no other claims. Selecting agents could not precede the surveyor-as settlers could in some states by 1853 and 1854. Settlers on public lands who had not yet preempted their land were encouraged in Indiana and Iowa to allow the states to select their claims since the lands would then be sold to them on credit, and by agreement at the government price of $1.25 an acre. Where there was anxiety for early title the selecting agents could promise that the state would obtain its Federal patent and give state title to individuals faster than the Federal government could prepare and transmit patents to individuals. Congress prescribed no specific conditions to make certain that the 500,000-acres grants would be used for internal improvements and states were careless if not willfully negligent in carrying out the measure. Iowa directed that the grant should be diverted to educational purposes. To make sure that no later legislature would change the appropriation of these lands the people of Iowa wrote into their constitution that the proceeds should be "a perpetual fund, the interest of which, Short leaf pine lands in Arkansas. Many acres passed into private ownership as "swamplands." U.S. Forest Service together with all the rents of the unsold lands . . . shall be inviolably appropriated to the support of common schools . . . ." One writer maintains that in accepting the constitution of Iowa, Congress in effect gave consent to the diversion.3 Kansas also endeavored, in the Wyandotte constitution, to provide that the 500,000 acres of internal improvement land should be used for education but state officers thought better of the matter in 1866 and appropriated the income from their sales to four railroads. The railroads were assigned the returns from 12,500 acres for each mile of line, or practically double the per mile grant given to the Santa Fe Railroad for its line across the state. 3 Roscoe L. Lokken, Iowa Public Land Disposal (Iowa City, 1942), pp. 158-66; Matthias Nordberg Orfield, Federal Land Grants to the States with Special Reference to Minnesota (Minneapolis, 1915), p. 102. |