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Show LAND GRANTS FOR RAILROADS AND INTERNAL IMPROVEMENTS 375 significant, the railroad was forced into bankruptcy in 1873-75. It was then reorganized and with new capital it was pushed to completion in 1883. Because of the huge size of its land grant- 23 percent of North Dakota, 15 percent of Montana-which was brought into market and sold very slowly, and because the company delayed in taking out its titles and making its lands taxable, the Northern Pacific Railroad came under a concerted attack by agrarians, anti-railroad people, and heavy taxpayers who wanted to have their burden shared. Nevertheless, as James B. Hedges has shown, its officials had pressed their search for buyers, both abroad and in the older parts of the United States, and had contributed greatly to directing emigration to the lands along their line.95 The third transcontinental to receive a land grant was the ill-fated Atlantic and Pacific. West of Memphis this railroad was to follow the 35th parallel route which had been favored by the Pacific Railroad Commission. The Act of July 27, 1866, granted the Atlantic and Pacific a 200-foot right-of-way through the public lands from Springfield, Missouri, to the Canadian River in Indian Territory, thence across several Indian reservations and the panhandle of Texas. It was then to follow the 35th parallel to Albuquerque, to the Colorado, and continue by the most practicable route to the Pacific. A branch was authorized from the Canadian River to Van Buren (Fort Smith), which would give direct connections with Memphis. The terms of the grant were the same as those given the Northern Pacific: alternate odd numbered sections for a distance of 40 miles on each side of the line in territories (in states for a distance of 20 miles) with a 96 James B. Hedges, "The Colonization Work of the Northern Pacific Railroad," Mississippi Valley Historical Review, XIII (December 1926), 311-42; David M. Ellis, "The Forfeiture of Railroad Land Grants, 1867-1894," ibid., XXXIII (June 1946), 27-60. lieu area 10 miles beyond. Since a considerable part of the Atlantic and Pacific was projected through Indian territory it was provided that the "United States shall extinguish, as rapidly as may be consistent with public policy and the welfare of the Indians, and only by their voluntary cession, the Indian title to all lands falling under the operation of this act and acquired in the donation to the road named in the act." Southern Pacific officials were already a power in California and extraordinarily effective in lobbying in Washington. They succeeded in having a provision added to the Atlantic and Pacific charter and land grant authorizing it to join the new route to the Coast at the California boundary, thus providing connection with San Francisco. For its route to the Colorado, the Southern Pacific was promised the same 20 sections per mile that the Atlantic and Pacific was to receive in states. This grant of 1866 to the Southern Pacific occasioned some of the sharpest fighting between the settlers and the railroad, a struggle that was later to be dramatized in Frank Norris' The Octopus. Atlantic and Pacific officials were hard pressed from the outset to raise the necessary funds to push construction forward and earn the land grant. The Missouri portion of the line was completed early but the land it was entitled to select had previously been picked over and was not the best. The A. & P. absorbed a predecessor railroad which had its own land grant in the even sections. A favorable interpretation by the Land Office permitted the A. & P. to select both odd and even sections, which again outdated the notion that the government would recover from the reserved sections the equivalent of what, without the grants, it would have received for all the land.9H The acquisition of the even sections in 96 William S. Greever, Arid Domain. The Santa Fe Railway and its Western Land Grant (Stanford, Calif., 1954), p. 28. |