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Show 368 HISTORY OF PUBLIC LAND LAW DEVELOPMENT munities which had not previously been promised aid for railroads now began actively lobbying for their favorite enterprises which sometimes cut across the demands of lobbyists for other Pacific railroads. The result was a series of laws granting rights-of-way and lands both to corporations and to states. Although the corporation grant was generally used where territories were involved, some grants were given to corporations wholly within a state and others were given to corporations operating within two adjacent states. Grants to states were frequently for the completion of links in an interstate railroad. Samuel C. Pomeroy, Senator from Kansas, constant promoter of the city of Atchison in which he had major investments, and prototype of Senator Dillworthy in Mark Twain's scornful Gilded Age, was highly successful in securing railroads for his home town through land grants and government loans. For a time he made his community the most promising on the Missouri. The Atchison and Pikes Peak Railroad, later the Union Pacific, Central Branch, and still later a part of the Missouri Pacific system, received a Federal loan of $16,000 a mile for its construction to the 100th meridian, and a land grant that it interpreted to be 1,280,000 acres but which dwindled to 223,141 acres when Pomeroy's influence ended. Finally, it won over rival groups the right to buy the unallotted lands in the Kickapoo reserve amounting to 123,832 acres at SI.25 an acre.82 For the Atchison and Nebraska Railroad-today a part of the Missouri Pacific lines-county bond aid to the amount of $700,000 and 12,841 acres of the Nebraska internal improvement lands were secured. The third railroad which Pomeroy brought to his hometown was the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe. County bond aid for $950,000 was obtained for it. In Kansas, the 340,180-acre Potawatomi reserve was secured for $1 an acre (which in 5 years had returned $646,784 with the remaining portion valued at $507,366). Pomeroy's greatest triumph came in 1864 when he obtained for the Santa Fe from Atchison to the western border of Kansas a land grant of alternate sections for a depth on both sides of 10 miles with the privilege of lieu selection up to 20 miles from the road.83 The Santa Fe Railroad, not having the benefit of the Act of 1864, which doubled the grants per mile from 10 sections to 20 for the Union Pacific, the Burlington in Nebraska, and the Kansas Pacific in Kansas, had to be content with its 10 sections per mile. Since public lands in the eastern third of Kansas had been sold or otherwise disposed of by the time the railroads were able to select their lands, both the Santa Fe and the Kansas Pacific lost land that would have brought them the largest returns, but the latter lost most because it did not have the privilege of selecting lieu lands. Furthermore, more land had already been entered along the line of the Kansas Pacific than along the line of the Santa Fe. The Santa Fe, on the other hand, was privileged to select all the odd sections within a belt 40 miles wide for a distance of about 180 miles in the most eastern holdings of the public lands, in a great bulge of territory from Cottonwood Falls to Spearville. After the selections were made it was seen that the Kansas Pacific had received 3,925,791 acres or 71 percent of the full amount of 20 sections per mile from Kansas City to the western border of Kansas, whereas the Santa Fe had received the full amount of its grant. We have the statistics by years of the land sales of these two railroads, from 1868 for the Kansas Pacific, and from 1871 for the Santa Fe. They throw much light on land values, and on the role of the railroads in colonizing the Great Plains. The land grant railroads gave their purchasers generous terms and were the most important source of credit for settlers at this time.84 82 Gates, Fifty Million Acres. Conflicts Over Kansas Land Policy, 1854-1890 (Ithaca, N. Y., 1954), pp. 134 ff. The land grant was a part of the Pacific Railroad grants of 1862 and 1864. 83 Act of March 3, 1863, 12 Stat. 772; Gates, Fifty Million Acres, pp. 143 ff. 84 Gates, Fifty Million Acres, p. 271. |