History of public land law development

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378 HISTORY OF PUBLIC LAND LAW DEVELOPMENT were given 10 sections for each mile of this road with the privilege of selecting lieu lands in an indemnity area 10 miles farther, thereby making it possible for the state to establish such conditions as it wished concerning the railroad and the disposal of its land. Less than a year earlier Congress had given to the Placerville and Sacramento Valley Railroad Company the same 200-foot right-of-way and 10 sections of land for each mile of its line, then projected into the foothills of the Sierra Mountains, without the intervention of the state. At the request of the Legislature of California both grants were forfeited in 1872 and the lands were restored to entry.103 The last of the railroad grants to be mentioned and one of the best known because it created many problems and was later forfeited and administered by the Federal government, was given for a railroad to extend northward from a point on the Central Pacific, later located at Davis in Sacramento Valley, California, to Portland, Oregon. This railroad, known as the California and Oregon, later came into the control of the Southern Pacific. It was given 20 odd sections per mile with the privilege of selecting lieu lands within an indemnity area between 20 and 30 miles from the road. An Act of April 10, 1869, extended the time for filing assent to the act and added the famous homestead clause about which so much was to be heard: The lands granted . . . shall be sold to actual settlers only, in quantities not greater than one quarter section to one purchaser, and for a price not exceeding two dollars and fifty cents per acre. A similar provision was included in an act extending the original 1853 grant of the Little Rock and Fort Smith Railroad, in the extension of the grant of an Alabama Railroad, and in an Act of May 4, 1870, donating lands for a railroad to connect Portland, Oregon, with Astoria.104 These homestead clauses were 103 Ellis, "The Forfeiture of Railroad Land Grants," p. 39. 104 Acts of April 10, 1869, May 4, 1870, and March 3, 1871, 16 Stat. 46, 47, 94, 580. added to the land grants in the pious hope that they would be enforced, but without exception they met only callous neglect by railroad officials and there is no known evidence of government officers in the 19th century trying to enforce them. Delay of the Oregon and California, as the line from Portland to the California border (where it connected with the California and Oregon) was now called, in completing its construction and in selling its lands, and discontent with its rates, led to a strong movement for forfeiture of all its land grant. This was going too far for many members of Congress. Instead a compromise was worked out in 1888 whereby the land along the uncompleted portion of the line from Portland to Astoria was forfeited, amounting to 810,880 acres. A year earlier the Oregon and California railroad had been completed to the California border where it united with its California counterpart to give through connections from Sacramento to Portland. Thereafter, the Oregon and California paid little heed to the requirement in the Act of 1869 for sale in small tracts at no more than $2.50 an acre. Of 813,000 acres sold by 1908 only 127,000 had been sold as the law required. By then it had ceased to make any sales, for what was left of its 3,728,000-acre grant was steep-sloped and altogether un-suited for farming but covered with enormously heavy stands of Douglas-fir which was coming into demand. Clashing interests finally resulted in the forfeiture of the grant and the return to Federal ownership of 2,891,000 acres. The O. & C. and Coos Bay (wagon road grant) forfeited lands later became the basis of the forest management program of the Bureau of Land Management.105 Texas, which had retained all the public lands within its borders, was generous to railroads, granting them 35,191,738 acres, 105 David M. Ellis, has told the story of the O. & C. lands in "The Oregon and California Railroad Land Grant, 1866-1945," Pacific Northwestern Quarterly, XXXIX (October 1948), 253-83.