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Show GENERAL GRANTS TO STATES 339 without having taken any risk or made any significant investment. Large purchasers of swamplands are even shown as opposing and preventing the inauguration of drainage measures.52 Few states felt bound to effect drainage of the swamplands and instead used them for such other purposes as were exciting attention. Consider the experience of Minnesota which received 4,706,591 acres. When the lands were being selected the people of the new states were more concerned about railroads than drainage; consequently the legislature granted 7 sections of swamplands for each mile of railroad constructed to a number of companies; for a line that became a part of the Great Northern Railroad it gave 10 sections per mile. It also voted lands for road construction, for an insane asylum, a deaf and dumb school, normal schools, a state prison, and a river improvement company.53 Gradually an increasing sense of responsibility in public administration and a wider interest in the purposes for which the grants were given contributed to improved management of state lands. Also, in later enabling acts Congress prescribed minimum prices below which the lands were not to be sold, or else it required that they be appraised, offered at public auction and sold at no less than the appraised price. Leases were limited to 5 years; Oklahoma mineral land sales were required to be made to the highest bidder in sealed bids.54 The result was that the later states have built up large endowment funds for the support of common schools, universities, and other state insti- 62 Nash, "The California State Land Office, 1853-1898," The Huntington Library Quarterly, 27:347-56. 53 Ben Palmer, "Swamp Land Drainage with Special Reference to Minnesota," University of Minnesota, Studies in the Social Sciences, No. 5 (Minneapolis, 1915), pp. 90 ff. 64 Orfield, Federal Land Grants to the States, pp. 49-51. tutions. Thus the State of New Mexico reported in 1966 that it had $299,079,150 in permanent funds derived from its various land grants of which $239,088,287 were for common schools and $36 million for the University of New Mexico, a military institute, and two schools for the handicapped. The total income from lands and endowment that year was $33,520,908. The State of Washington reported an income from timber and land sales, royalties and easements from its public lands for the biennium 1954-56 of $10,725,786, to be allocated to the various purposes for which the grants had been given.55 Other states have also done well. In fact, one can say that the newer states have done as well as has the Federal government in the management, sale, and leasing of public lands. Detailed historical studies are needed of the management and disposal of the public lands of these newer western states on a scale comparable to those prepared by Addison E. Sheldon on Nebraska, Roy Lokken on Iowa, and Matthias Nordberg Orfield on Minnesota.56 55 Commissioner of Public Lands, Thirty-Fourth Annual Report (1956), p. 50. 66 In addition to the detailed examinations of state land policies I have mentioned I should include Jerry O'Callaghan's monograph on "The Disposition of the Public Domain in Oregon," which was published as a committee print of the Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs, United States Senate, 86th Cong., 2d sess., November 1960. It has a chapter on the grants to Oregon. Sanford A. Mosk in his fine study of "Land Policy and Stock Raising in the Western United States," Agricultural History, XVII (January 1943), 14-30, examines the public land policies of Arizona and New Mexico. He found that attempts to prevent speculative purchasing were unsuccessful and that in Arizona much the larger proportion of the tracts sold went to the large livestock interests. The scattered character of the educational lands naturally made their management and sale more difficult than grants which could be located on more desirable tracts. |