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Show 412 HISTORY OF PUBLIC LAND LAW DEVELOPMENT Minnesota Homestead Entries Year Original Final 1863 1864 1865 1866 1867 1868 1869 1870 1871 1872 1873 1874 1875 1876 1877 1878 1879 1880 1881 1882 1883 1884 1885 2,299 ____ 3,258 3,972 3,789 2,985 2,946 913 3,389 1 ,344 3,025 1,603 3,899 1,453 3,908 1,493 3,299 2,124 2,959 2,871 2,463 3,368 2,664 3,203 1,678 2,401 4,986 2,645 5,669 2,485 5,191 1,915 1,742 2.050 2,279 2,409 2,739 Compiled from Donaldson, Public Domain, and "Report of the Public Land Commission." The great abuse of the law was centered in unoffered areas where only through settlement laws (homestead, preemption, and timber culture) could tracts be acquired. In each of these states large amounts of railroad, state, and speculator-owned land were being sold and made into farms, but homesteads were contributing, though in a smaller way, to the new farms being created. The percentage of original homestead entries to 1880 that were completed by 1885 is as follows: Michigan, 51; Wisconsin, 63.2; Iowa, 60; Missouri, 46. In California where land monopoly or concentration of ownership almost unexampled for the United States was being established in the midst of a burgeoning population, the scramble for land of all the General Land Office in the sixties and early seventies to offer such timberland as was in demand. kinds, arable, irrigable, or timbered, was intense. The six or seven hundred owners of inflated Mexican land claims containing 8,850,000 acres of the choicest valley land were but slowly breaking up their tracts while numerous new ownerships of even larger size were being created by the reckless buying of offered lands on which Congress had refused to place limitations. A large part of the nearly 5 million acres were bought in great chunks by speculators. Furthermore, the state swamplands which included much of the best land in the San Joaquin and Sacramento Valleys, and the state college and school lands which Congress had permitted the state to select from tracts not open to cash or warrant entry, were swept up by the same parties. As Gerald Nash has shown, the breakdown of California's administrative machinery, the prevalence of corruption, and the poor drafting of legislation were responsible for the fact that most of the school lands, internal improvement land, and swamplands went into the hands of speculators and politicians, not farmers. With the better part of the confirmed claims, the offered lands and state lands in the possession of individuals and groups of capitalists holding for a rise in value, it is easy to understand why Henry George found California an ideal region in which to develop his single tax concept. It is also understandable why, with the pressure on the land supply, the people should resort to the homestead and preemption laws to gain title in the rapidly growing state whether their object was to gain ownership of land for farms, ranching, or timbering. When the machinery of surveying could not keep ahead of demand people were quite willing to pay for the cost of surveying, as the law allowed, when they wished to anticipate the official surveyor. Also understandable, in view of the pressure for land, is the fact that a higher proportion of those making original homestead entries carried |