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Show 338 HISTORY OF PUBLIC LAND LAW DEVELOPMENT lateral^-or none at all-thereby incurring heavy losses.48 In the early period states made little or no effort to classify or appraise their lands or to create effective administrative agencies to manage them. The sale of the swamplands produced limited results in the way of drainage or the construction of levees because the administrators of the lands permitted huge areas to pass into private hands, frequently to persons close to officers in political and economic ways.49 The experience of Louisiana with its state lands rounds out the story of the accumulation of land by speculators and lumber interests in that state. As soon as the state had selected and gained approval of part of the more than 9 million acres it was ultimately to receive under the Swamp Land Act, it began selling them to raise funds for levee construction. Most of the influential planters such as William W. Pugh, Francis Surget, Frederick Stanton, Stephen Duncan, Levin Marshall, and members of the Barrow family increased their holdings through purchases, generally at $1.25 an acre, of a few hundred or thousand acres. Largest of the purchasers in the fifties was John Slidell who acquired 65,154 acres in his own name and 17,266 acres in partnership with others. Six other purchasers acquired from 20,000 acres to 37,000 acres, including the New Orleans, Mobile and Chattanooga Railroad which obtained 32,122 acres. In the eighties when northern lumbermen were making a concerted drive to acquire the best of the remaining pine and cypress bearing land in public ownership, mill owners and timberland dealers from Detriot, Saginaw Bay, Chicago, Green Bay, and other places cruised the swamplands of Louisiana, made many large purchases and forced the southern lumbermen to move fast to safeguard their supplies. The largest private holding of swampland in Louisiana was that of Jabez B. Watkins of Cameron Parish and Lawrence, Kansas, where Watkins ran a bank lending funds on farmland at 7 to 12 percent interest. Watkins purchased 1,269,371 acres of swampland, 12,860 acres of the Louisiana Confederate Military Bounty Grant of 1886, which may well have been specially selected swamplands, in addition to 145,000 acres of United States land. Mortgages on these lands constituted 30 percent of the capital of his bank.50 The 14 next highest buyers acquired among them 540,000 acres. Arkansas, with 7,686,575 acres of swamplands in the possession of the state and great need to construct levees and drain its better lands, had an opportunity to show what good work could be done by a state administering this bounty. Instead its record revealed careless, bordering on corrupt management, levees that were deceptively built and unable to withstand heavy flood pressures, scrip fraudulently issued, and administrative confusion.51 A recent California historian has found little to praise and much to condemn in that state's administration of its large school and swampland grants. Not only was the state administration woefully inefficient but its record was constantly marred by corruption. State officials soon became large holders of state lands by using the inside information their office made available to them. They permitted associates to hold land for a down payment to the state of less than a cent an acre until the demand forced prices up. Then they were able to sell their contracts for a big increase in price over the state minimum **lbid., pp. 103-117. 49 Ibid., pp. 42-86; Orfield, Federal Land Grants to the States; Gerald D. Nash, "The California State Land Office, 1858-1898," The Huntington Library Quarterly, 27 (August 1964), 347 ff.; Bogue, Patterns from the Sod, Land Use and Tenure in the Grand Prairie, 1850-1900. 60 Allan G. Bogue, Money at Interest: The Farm Mortgage on the Middle Border (Ithaca, N.Y., 1955), p. 198. 51 Robert W. Harrison and Walter M. Kollmorgen, "Land Reclamation in Arkansas under the Swamp Land Grant of 1850," Arkansas Historical Quarterly, VI (Winter 1947), 369 418. |