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Show HOMESTEADING, 1862-1882 427 would protect them and keep adjoining land out of speculators' hands.74 Had the commission given more time to taking testimony from people in the region where the bulk of homesteading was being made in 1879 its recommendations might have been considerably different and the report would have provided the historian with more insight into the way the homestead law was working. In California, where Mexican land claims had given rise to long years of controversy over their validity, size, boundaries, and the taxes due on them, one finds more frankness in some of the comments concerning the owners of these claims than later historians have been inclined to show. The Los Angeles register, for example, maintained that the lands in the private claims should be segregated speedily in order to free public lands in their vicinity for entry and development. "It is always for the interests of the private claimants not to segregate, because they have the use of the public domain for stock purposes." Wasson stressed that the Spanish and Mexican grants "were conditional, and did not pass the absolute fee or title" which was dependent on continued occupation.75 The San Francisco receiver brought out that in California the preemption law was used to hold land for years, but without gaining title, to keep it from others. Sheepmen would file a preemption entry on a water hole and when the entry "ran out" without proving up another employee would file on the tract. He reported there were sections in southern California where as many as 15 different filings had been made. The only evidence of occupation was a shanty erected to conform to the requirements of the law. The cost of filing a preemption entry was only S3, whereas the cost of a homestead filing was $16.76 Another California land officer declared that operators of lumber mills had used their employees to file declaratory statements for heavily timbered lands, had cut off the timber, and then abandoned the entries. He argued that only through sale could the government expect to receive any fair return from public lands.77 Galen Clark, who was appointed by the State of California to manage the Yosemite grant, expressed the view that the timber-land up to elevations of 5,000 to 6,000 feet in the Sierra Nevada Mountains should be sold for not less than $2 an acre. All timber at higher elevations should never be sold but might be given to the State of California on express condition that it should be forever inalienable and that strict laws should be enacted for its protection. Without this protection the forests would doubtless be destroyed by cutting and fire and the resulting floods would render uninhabitable much of the valley land.78 A former register of the Humboldt, California, land office urged that no more scrip should be issued, for most previously issued "had been conceived in fraud, and located under the rules and regulations of the Land Department without authority of law." He and other witnesses alluded to the Soldier's Additional Homestead, the Valentine, and the Sioux Scrip which had been interpreted by the land officials as subject to use on any nonreserved, non-mineral land whether surveyed or not. It was these forms of scrip that brought high prices in comparison with the agricultural college scrip and the military bounty land warrants, which could only be used on surveyed land. A Nebraska respondent added that counterfeit scrip was in circulation; he cited the use of 200 counterfeit 111M., p. 325. "Ibid., p. 87. 76 Ibid., p. 38. 77 Ibid., p. 88. ™Ibid., p. 43. |