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Show 432 HISTORY OF PUBLIC LAND LAW DEVELOPMENT and printed in a second edition in the serial documents in 1881.87 The following year Congress authorized the printing of 8,500 additional copies of The Public Domain with a supplement to include all laws passed prior to the adjournment of the session of 1882-83. This was interpreted by Donaldson to authorize him to add a vast body of regulations, instructions, forms and blanks, and excerpts from the reports of the Commissioner of the Land Office, to bring his statistics up to 1883 and to include some data quite irrelevant to the general subject in a third edition. Not only were all officers, timber agents, clerks, messengers, and laborers given space with their salaries, but all Indian reservations, their acreage and the denomination of missions located on them, the number of each tribe, the names of the agents and both their mail and telegraphic address and 50 pages of specimen field notes of surveys were also included. One may well wonder what Hol-man thought of this portion of the completed Public Domain, in view of his judgment of the first part.88 87 H. Ex. Doc, 46th Cong., 3d sess., No. 47, Part 4 (Serial No. 1975), 544 pp. including index. 88 Donaldson's expanded third edition appeared, as in 1881, with the same title, The Public Domain. Its History with Statistics (Washington, 1884), H. Ex. Doc, 47th Cong., 2d sess., Vol. 19, No. 45, Part 4, "with addenda to June 30 and December 1, 1883." It is this expanded edition with a much larger printing that is usually cited. The first 516 pages are identical with the 1881 edition save for the numerous insertions after chapter headings instructing the reader to see pages in the addenda which bring the data up to June 30, 1882 and 1883. It also contains a map of Indian Territory that was not included in the 1881 edition. Found here is the famous map showing the primary area of the railroad land grants in which the railroads were to have alternate sections, and the indemnity area where they could make selections for land they lost in the primary area. In its original form as published in Donaldson, the 14" by 28" map makes sense but when compressed to 3" by 5" and the distinction between primary and secondary or indemnity areas obliterated, it is deceptive. For Robert S. Henry's attack upon the compressed map and historians who had made use of it without The longer supplementary part of the revised edition of The Public Domain is in numerous places very different from the bland analysis one finds in the first part. Donaldson here discarded all caution that bureaucratic rules of language dictated and adopted an extremely polemical tone, arguing, condemning, cajoling, exaggerating, and even resorting to questionable language in denouncing acts of Congress. He may have been battling in a good cause, which was the reform of the land system to safeguard the remaining public lands for actual settlers, cattlemen, lumbermen, miners, and mining companies from pernicious speculators, but the extreme way in which he expressed his views did little to soothe the feelings of those eager to profit from the existing system. For example, the Act of June 22, 1876, reopening southern public lands to cash sale after a public offering was called "a mere subterfuge," a cunning device to pass a cash or private sale law, a "farce" (p. 545). The repeal Act of 1876 and another measure allowing the purchase of mineral land in the South "do violence to the views of the majority of the people, are for the use and benefit of capitalists and speculators, and are against sound public policy" and should be repealed (546). He spoke of the "present useless and vicious disposition and cash sale laws" which undoubtedly were working badly but sales under them, if we exclude the preemption law, were at least above board and not marred by fraud, as was use of the Preemption Act. He declared that "1,120 acres to a person under the several laws is now the rule," for which he had no evidence other than a few scattered entries (533). Twice he indicated there were only 5 million acres of "purely agricultural lands" remaining in the West giving a clear explanation of it see his "The Railroad Land Grant Legend in American History," Mississippi Valley Historical Review, XXXII (September 1945), 171-94. |