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Show LAND GRANTS FOR RAILROADS AND INTERNAL IMPROVEMENTS 367 -one half the land within a strip 12 miles wide with the privilege of selecting lieu land 9 miles farther from the road) to select lieu lands to which they were entitled from either or both the odd and even numbered sections between the 15- and 20-mile limits of the road. Furthermore, the act authorized the relocation of the three roads without modifying in any way the locations of the grants.78 On July 26, 1866, Congress granted to Kansas 10 odd numbered sections for each mile of railroad to extend from Junction City in a southeasterly direction to the southern boundary of Kansas and allowed it to select lieu lands between 10 and 20 miles from the line without specifying odd sections. Like the Iowa roads, the Kansas road was permitted to select both odd and even sections in the lieu area. In his study of "Kansas and the Homestead Act," Lawrence B. Lee found that in one of the townships in Morris County the Missouri, Kansas and Texas Railroad received part or all of 27 sections-15,440 acres altogether-instead of getting only half of the land in this particular township. Again, Congress had breached the policy of allowing the grantee states or railroads to select only the alternate sections of land.79 Later, in 1873, the West Wisconsin Railroad was permitted to select 20,000 acres of odd numbered sections commingled with its 78 13 Stat. 95. There were many cases of settlers who took up land in good faith, improved it, and made applications for entry which were accepted by the local officers, only to be rejected by the General Land Office on the ground that the lands were a part of the railroad grants. Heavy pressure to legalize such erroneous entries and to compensate the railroad with selections elsewhere resulted in numerous bills of a local application and a general Act of June 22, 1874. This latter allowed the railroads to select equal amounts of lands elsewhere within the primary grant, which meant even sections for the railroads receiving grants on or after 1862 and odd numbered sections for roads which received grants earlier. Rae, "Railway Land Subsidy Policy," pp. 69, 153 ff. 79 14 Stat. 289; Lee, "Kansas and the Homestead Act" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 1957), pp. 84-86. even sections to compensate for a quantity of land it had lost because of the delay of the Land Office in ordering the lands withdrawn from entry.80 With the privilege of selecting land remote from the benefited railroad, the right to select both odd and even sections in certain instances, and to retain the original selections when the route was changed, the relation of construction to the double-minimum price for reserved lands became even more tenuous. Finally, the Pacific railroads given land by the Acts of 1862 and 1864 were allowed no lieu fringe beyond the primary grant area in which they could locate indemnity lands. These changes suggest that members of Congress were moving away from the notion that a principal justification of land grants for railroads was that, in addition to contributing greatly to the development of the West, the construction of the railroad would enable the government to sell the reserved sections for the double-minimum and thereby recover all that otherwise it would have received from the sale of all the land.81 None could deny that Congress had made up in 1862 and 1864, at least in part, for the long delay of the fifties in taking action that would encourage the building of one or more railroads to the Pacific, for in these two acts some 2,720 miles of railroad rights-of-way and 34,560,000 acres of public lands were given away. This was only the beginning, however, for the bars were down. Com- 80 Rae, "Railway Land Subsidy Policy," p. 188. 81 Overton, Burlington West, p. 170, first brought out the point that under the Act of June 2, 1864, in lieu of place grants not obtained, both odd and even numbered sections cculd be selected between the 6-and 20-mile limit and shows that the Burlington in Iowa gained more than 100,000 additional acres as a result of this change. It might be added that the changes above referred to, still further reduced the possibility of the government's gaining any considerable return from reserved lands. See Gates, "The Railroad Land-Grant Legend," Journal of Economic History, XIV, 143-46; Rae, "Railway Land Subsidy Policy," p. 68. |