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Show GENERAL GRANTS TO STATES 321 Furthermore, the lands were mostly in the eastern third of the state, whereas the Santa Fe lands were in the central and western third and were less desirable. The agent in charge of the sales was lax in permitting large tracts to go for low prices; consequently the four railroads moved in and bought the balance to enable them to get the rising price which construction might bring to them. One historian of Kansas land policies has characterized the state administration of the internal improvement land as "irresponsible and inefficient" and that in diverting a balance of $8,000 and 4,600 acres to the school fund Kansas acted "in violation of the mandate of congress."4 Alabama, Nevada, Oregon, and Wisconsin were not deterred by any qualms from appropriating the income from their grants for education. Nebraska conveyed its internal improvement lands to nine short line railroads ranging from 6 to 50 miles in length, allowing 2,000 acres for each mile. Also two counties were each given 1,000 acres for the construction of bridges.5 It may have been the tendency of the states to divert income from internal improvement grants to education that led Congress in 1889 in the Omnibus Act for the admission of North and South Dakota, Montana, and Washington to provide that, in lieu of the usual grant for internal improvements, an equivalent amount of land was to be given for specifically mentioned institutions and the 500,000-acre provision of the Act of 1841 was repealed. This same Omnibus Act also declared that the grants for institutions were given in lieu of any claim the states may have had for any swamp and saline lands within their boundaries.6 4 Thomas LeDuc, "State Administration of the Land Grant to Kansas for Internal Improvements," Kansas Historical Quarterly, XX (November 1953), 545-52; Daniel W. Wilder, The Annals of Kansas (Topeka, 1875), p. 436; Gates, Fifty Million Acres (Ithaca, N.Y., 1954), 252n. 5 Addison E. Sheldon, Land System and Land Policies in Nebraska (Lincoln, Nebr., 1936), p. 213. 6 Act of Feb. 22, 1889, 25 Stat. 681. Swamp Land Acts Next on the list of general acts granting lands to the states are the Swamp Land Acts of 1849, 1850, and 1860. For years there had been desultory discussion of the great quantities of swamp, overflowed, relatively inaccessible, and seemingly unwanted lands in Louisiana, Arkansas, Illinois, and Wisconsin. If Congress could grant land for the building of canals, roads, river improvement, and railroads could it not give swamplands to the states for their drainage? Louisiana, with nearly a third of its land swampy and unsuited for cultivation, was the first state to be given these waste, unhealthful, and unwanted lands. Louisiana did not demand them as a right, in the way some states had demanded the cession of all the remaining public lands within their borders, nor did the opposition in Congress question the constitutionality of such a grant. Congress had no plan to build levees or in any way to improve the land and there was little or no feeling among the members that it should do anything to make these lands suitable for settlement. It was quite willing to donate the lands to Louisiana for there appeared no prospect that they would bring in any revenue to the United States. Representative John H. Harmanson of Louisiana, in explaining the purpose of the act, declared somewhat optimistically that the state and its citizens had constructed levees to shut out the flood waters of the Mississippi and its tributaries for a distance of 1,400 miles at a cost of $20 million. Several million acres had already been reclaimed and he estimated there were 5 million additional acres that might be made usable if the land were given to the state. Questioning of the proposal centered almost entirely on the phraseology of the measure, which some critics thought altogether too broad, too easily interpreted to include most of the unsold land in government hands. It passed the House on February 24, 1849, and the Senate 2 days later.7 7 Cong. Globe, 30th Cong., 2d sess., pp. 592, 594. |