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Show AN INCONGRUOUS LAND SYSTEM appraised value, presumably to actual settlers. Since the appraised price for the more attractive land was well above the government minimum there were few sales, to the distress of the local land officers, whose fees were slight. Also, it appears, the register and receiver wanted to acquire select lands in the tract. They urged Joseph S. Wilson, Commissioner of the General Land Office, to declare the Sioux lands open to unrestricted entry and they secured the support of the two Minnesota Senators. Wilson was agreeable and 310,000 acres were opened to entry in 1867 in large or small tracts, in apparent violation of the spirit of the Act of March 3, 1863, which provided that the right to buy the land should be limited to "actual bona fide settlers."6 The lands, called by a recent writer a "speculator's paradise," were well located on or close to the Minnesota River and offered good opportunities for farming. Ignatius Donnelly, then a Minnesota Representative and later to be a Populist leader, did his best to have the order revoked and was successful in having lands on which there were settlers who could not pay up withdrawn from sale. Fifty men of capital, both absentees and residents of Minnesota, each bought from 750 to 16,917 acres for a total of 159,202 acres. Among these large purchasers were the register and receiver who, guided by the field notes and plats of the surveyors to which they had access, scattered their 3,500-acre purchases in small select tracts.7 An argument frequently offered in opposition to the homestead bill was that its enactment would seriously hurt land values in the older states by drawing people to the West, would reduce the value of the many military bounty and land warrants still outstanding, and would be grossly un- 437 6 GLO Annual Report, 1867, p. 94. 7 William J. Stewart, "Settler, Politician, and Speculator in the sale of the Sioux Reserve," Minnesota History, XXXIX (Fall 1964), 85-92. THE CITY OF NEW BABYLON IK FACT. From A. D. Richardson, Belond the Mississippi, 1867 fair to those who had in the past bought lands in the West. President Buchanan had dredged up these arguments in his veto message, borrowing them from speculators, land and warrant dealers, and conservatives who feared any change. That similar arguments had been used against reduction in the price of land, preemption, and graduation, and had always been proved wrong may not have occurred to him or to his advisers. Suffice it to say here that there was no appreciable reduction in land values in the older states that can be attributed to the homestead law. The value of the land warrants was already down well before free homesteads were enacted, and land values in the West seem not to have been affected.8 Those people who still clung to the notion that the public lands should be a source of revenue to the government feared that free homesteads would reduce the government's land revenue which, next to customs, had been the most important source of revenue except for the Federalist and early Republican years, and the war 8 One hundred and sixty-acre land warrants were quoted on March 9, 1860, at 75 cents an acre; on Nov. 5 at 88 cents; on Jan. 14, 1861, at 70 to 75 cents; on May 23, 1861, at 65 cents; on Feb. 27, 1862, at 61 cents; and on July 31, 1868, at $1.12. Quotations are from the New York Tribune and business correspondence too numerous to cite. |