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Show 422 HISTORY OF PUBLIC LAND LAW DEVELOPMENT contract system and of the 16 surveyor general positions and the concentration of all responsibility for surveying in the hands of one official who would assign staff members to do the necessary work.62 Powell and the National Academy of Sciences went a step further, maintaining that the rectangular system of surveying and dividing lands into quarter-sections which had worked so well in the humid regions east of the 100th meridian was not suited to the semi-arid region where ownership of a waterhole or tract along a stream might control the grazing of thousands of acres in its rear, and where breaking up natural drainage areas did serious harm. Nor was it suited to the high mountain country where minerals were being mined. The First Public Land Commission Congress had gone on piling land law upon land law-altogether 3,500 of them- frequently without considering how later legislation might affect or be quite out of harmony with earlier laws which were not repealed. Laws intended for permanent application had been supplemented with "innumerable statutes, local in their application and temporary in their intended form." Rights had accrued under these 62 The early reports of the Commissioner of the General Land Office and the correspondence of the Commissioner in the National Archives are replete with instances of defaults, fraudulent surveys, and the necessity of redoing them. For the situation in 1877 see GLO Annual Report, 1877, pp. 9-10; Cong. Record, 45th Cong., 3d sess. p. 1205; letter of John W. Powell, Nov. 1, 1878, in H. Misc. Doc, 45th Cong., 3d sess., (Serial No. 1861), Vol. I, No. 5, pp. 16-18. Powell wrote: "Many millions of acres have thus been parcelled without the slightest necessity, the lands being worthless, and the landmarks have been allowed to perish, and all useful results have perished with them." Two years later Land Commissioner N. C. McFarland charged that "lands of no present practical value and on which there are no settlers have been largely surveyed; . . . applications for surveys are fraudulently prepared by or through the instigation and management of deputy surveyors. . . ." Land Office Report, 1881, p. 6. local and temporary laws which were rarely repealed and "extended over the entire public domain." Furthermore, the looseness of most general laws had obliged the officials of the Land Office to draft elaborate specifications interpreting their meaning and explaining in detail how the registers and receivers were to carry them out. Conflicting interests rising from the ambiguities and incongruities of the statutes had long since begun to swamp officials at every level, from the register through the Commissioner, the Attorney General, the Secretary of the Interior, and even the President.63 Overwhelmed with its burden and understaffed, the Land Office fell far behind in rendering its decisions, posting books, and completing and delivering patents. In 1879 the movement for reform, strongly supported by members of the National Academy of Sciences, came to a head. One measure proposed to abolish the 16 surveyor general posts and to unite the responsibility for all surveying, except that of the Great Lakes, in the United States Geological Survey in the Department of the Interior. Another measure, introduced simultaneously, provided for the creation of a public land commission to codify existing land laws respecting survey and disposal, to recommend a system and standards for the classification of public lands as irrigable, arable, timber, pasturage, swamp, coal, mineral, and others as seemed proper, to draft a proposal for surveys adapted to the economic use of the various classes of 63 "Preliminary Report of the Public Land Commission/' 1880, H. Ex. Doc, 46th Cong., 2d sess., Vol. 22, No. 46 (Serial No. 1923), p. vi; Harold H. Dunham, Government Handout. A Study in the Administration of the Public Lands, 1875-1891 (New York, 1941), passim. For circulars of instructions to the registers and receivers, opinions and decisions of the Attorneys General and Commissioners of the General Land Office see Henry N. Copp, Public Land Laws with the Important Decisions and Opinions, and Thomas Donaldson, The Public Domain. |