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Show 436 HISTORY OF PUBLIC LAND LAW DEVELOPMENT TBI Cm Or NEW BABYLON OS PAPER. private purchaser with cash, scrip or warrants, or by a homesteader. This was more than half the entire acreage sold since 1789. Included were 3,600,000 acres in the Central Valley of California, 6,582,000 acres in Michigan, 3,600,000 acres in Wisconsin, 3,113,000 acres in northwestern Iowa, 1,835,000 acres in Missouri, some 10 million acres in the eastern parts of Kansas and Nebraska, and 47,726,851 acres in the five public land states then in the Confederacy. Some of these lands were to be selected for public purposes or by railroads and thus the amount open to unrestricted purchase was reduced. In view of the great outcry against the offering of public land during the Buchanan administration, it is surprising to note that within 10 days after President Lincoln signed the Homestead Act he ordered into market 4,422,700 acres in the Willamette Valley of Oregon and 834,263 acres in Wisconsin. In 1863, 3,004,000 acres in the Territory of Washington, 39,039 acres in Michigan, and 145,000 acres in Kansas were ordered to public sale and in 1864, 3,696,000 acres in Minnesota were proclaimed for sale. The failure of Congress to include in the homestead law a provision that would reserve the remaining public lands for actual settlers in small tracts and Lincoln's orders proclaiming 11,930,000 acres open to unrestricted purchase are fair evidence that the new administration had no intention of withholding land from investment and speculative purchasing and seemingly had no thought that the public lands were not to be a source of revenue in the future.2 Further large sales were ordered by Lincoln's successors. In 1866, 6,423,984 acres "principally pine lands" in northern Wisconsin were proclaimed for sale. This brought all the remaining unappropriated public land in Wisconsin into market, subject to unlimited purchase.3 Land was first offered at public auction in New Mexico and Colorado in 1870 when 1,644,388 acres in New Mexico and 143,000 in Colorado were opened to purchase. At the same time 861,000 acres that had been withdrawn from sale in Kansas to allow railroads to make their selections were restored to unlimited purchase.4 In 1872 "valuable timber lands" in Minnesota comprising 277 townships or something over 6 million acres were ordered to sale at the Duluth, St. Cloud, and Taylor's Falls offices.5 In summary, we may say that an area the size of Ohio was added to the land open to unrestricted entry after 1862. One of the first new areas to attract the attention of speculators and capitalists, who demanded that it be opened to unlimited entry, was the Sioux Reserve west of St. Paul in Minnesota. After the crushing of the Sioux uprising of 1862, the Indians were removed from the reserve and Congress rushed through a measure to provide for the disposal of the lands at their 2 The acreage of offered land is given in the Annual Report of the Secretary of the Interior, 1862 (p. 30), 1863 (p. 11), and 1864 (p. 30); the remaining unsold land of the various states is given in the GLO Annual Report, 1867, p. 367. For our purposes, these figures are only useful for those states in which the surveys had been completed or were approaching completion. (See App. B). 3 GLO Annual Report, 1866, pp. 26-27. * GLO Annual Report, 1870, p. 176. 8 GLO Annual Report, 1872, p. 26. |