OCR Text |
Show HOMESTEADING, 1862-1882 the failure of Williamson and his predecessors to touch upon sensitive questions and he was troubled by the ambiguities and incongruities of land legislation. The fact that before his appointment to the commission his work had made him familiar with land problems in the Interior Basin doubtless strengthened the commission's emphasis on the problems of the area west of the 104th meridian. The contents of Donaldson's The Public Domain are well summed up in his subtitle, "Its History, with Statistics, with references to the National Domain, colonization, acquirement of territory, the survey, administration and several methods of sale and disposition of the Public Domain of the United States, with sketch of legislative history of the land states and territories, and references to the land system of the colonies, and also that of several foreign governments." In the usual bland fashion of government documents, the main portion raises no questions, answers few, and provides little or no information about the way the land system was actually functioning, save that statistics and documents are provided. Yet the detail has been and is today useful, for nowhere else in print can one find much of it. Donaldson was able to get the staff of the Land Office to compile data which had not been included in the annual reports though they too are literally crammed with information. An example is the table showing the annual number and acreage of all original applications for and final entries of homesteads. The reports had only provided the acreage of original entries, without the number of entries and without information about final entries. Donaldson apparently intended The Public Domain to be a great compendium showing from what origins the public land system had evolved, with attention to the political considerations that had led to some of the important measures, such as 431 the Homestead Act, and providing data concerning the acquisition, donation, grants, sales, and other routes to private and state ownership of land. Although it is not easy to reconcile some of his data with other data found in the annual reports of the Land Office, the discrepancies are not serious, and, the meticulousness with which part of the compilation was prepared makes the reader ready to conclude that where differences do exist, his data are the closest to being correct. On occasion Donaldson erred seriously. It is not correct to assume that Congress abandoned sales for revenue as it moved toward a general preemption law (p. 215). Not even with the adoption of a free land grant to homesteaders in 1862 was revenue abandoned, nor has it been abandoned today. The long extract purporting to be Stephen A. Douglas' account of how the first railroad land grant was enacted is far from the truth as even a brief study of the Congressional Globe would have made clear. One writer has shown that Donaldson committed six important errors in one sentence concerning the grants of the saline lands to the states when they were admitted.85 Another writer who had occasion to rely heavily on The Public Domain called it "a scrapbook of land legislation intermingled with some original thought and many inaccuracies" but he conceded that it had filled "a vital need. . . ,"86 E. Louise Peffer warned that Donaldson had "to be used with caution; it contains many inaccuracies." Donaldson's first edition, completed in 1880 and published that year, was revised 86 M. N. Orfield, Federal Land Grants to the States with Special Reference to Minnesota ("University of Minnesota Studies in the Social Sciences," No. 2), p. 90. 88 Robbins, Our Landed Heritage. The Public Domain, 1776-1936, 29In. Robbins reproduced Donaldson's error concerning the abandonment of the revenue feature; E. Louise Peffer, The Closing of the Public Domain. Disposal and Reservation Policies, 1900-1950 (Stanford, Calif., 1951), 12n. |