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Show 362 HISTORY OF PUBLIC LAND LAW DEVELOPMENT Thomas A. Hendricks, Commissioner of the General Land Office, refused to withdraw lands along the lines of the projected railroads before the land grant measures of 1856-57 had passed both Houses. However, he quickly ordered the withdrawal by telegraph when Congress acted, even before the President had signed the measures. It was later charged that 78 million acres were thus ordered withdrawn; this meant that most of the remaining public lands of Iowa and large portions of those in other states to which grants were made, were for years unavailable to settlers desiring to preempt them or to investors wishing to buy and to anticipate the railroad. Restoration of the withdrawn lands to entry might have followed fairly promptly had not the Panic of 1857 brought to a halt the operation of most of the companies, including the location of their lines and the selection of their lands. By 1858, 18 million acres had been restored, though this was only a small part of the total of withdrawn lands. The question of preemption rights established on lands withdrawn but not yet selected by railroads was generally decided in favor of the settler though he was compelled to pay the double-minimum price if on the government-reserved sections.65 Transcontinental Rails Grants to states for railroads by no means ended at the conclusion of the Pierce administration, although thereafter popular attention was given increasingly to proposals for railroads through the territories to the Pacific. Congress had promised land grants aggregating 27,878,772 acres for 50 railroads whose total length was 8,647 miles. Included were railroad routes extending to the western borders of Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, and Minnesota, any one of which might serve to connect with a Pacific rail- road.66 Two of these roads were instrumental in completing two transcontinental. The promoters of the Rock Island Railroad acquired leadership in the Union Pacific. James J. Hill, after he had acquired the St. Paul and Pacific line in Minnesota, was able to use its grant of 3,272,691 acres to push his Great Northern Railroad westward without further aid in land. The Great Northern has commonly been regarded as a line that was built without Federal aid, but this is not entirely correct. Not only did one of its components, the St. Paul and Pacific, gain one of the largest of the early grants but, because of a strange quirk of law and a Supreme Court decision, in compensation for land it lost in North Dakota, it was permitted to enter 65,000 acres of public land along its line in any state through which it was built, in blocks not larger than 640 acres. The total of its holdings were small compared with the huge grant of the Northern Pacific, its major rival, but it was sufficient to provide credit for a considerable part of the cost of getting the entire line started.67 While western members of Congress seem to have been concerned about grants for rail- ff. 65 Rae, "Railroad Land Subsidy Policy," pp. 33 56 Ibid., p. 57. Rae points out that of the grants made in 1856 and 1857, 33 had been located, two had been rejected by states, and 10 in the South had elicited no action so far as the states were concerned. 67 When Congress made the grant to Minnesota in 1857 it was for a railroad to extend to the western border of the territory which at that time was the Missouri River. The next year when Minnesota was admitted the boundary was changed to the Red River, about 136 miles farther east. Interior officials held that the grant only extended to the Red River and allowed settlers to homestead and preempt land within the primary area between the two rivers. Finally, in 1891 the Supreme Court reversed the decision, declaring that the railroad was entitled to land between the two rivers that was not in Indian reservations at the time of the grant. Since the land the railroad was now entitled to had long since been entered and much of it patented, Congress came to the rescue and allowed the railroad to acquire indemnity land as above indicated. 137 U.S. 628; 16 Stat. 588; John B. Rae, "The Great Northern's Land Grant," Journal of Economic History, XII (Spring 1952), 140-45. |