OCR Text |
Show 438 HISTORY OF PUBLIC LAND LAW DEVELOPMENT years of 1814-17.9 Their fears were exaggerated. It took 72 years for the public lands to produce an income of $170 million; after homestead it took only 48 years following 1862. Sales of public lands began to pick up slowly from the low point of 1862, reaching $4,020,000 in 1869, or a greater sum than was received in the excellent year 1857. During the seventies there was a decline in land revenues, and then came a boom in land sales in the eighties that exceeded the record of any previous period save that of the thirties. Actually the big increase in income from public lands has come in the 20th century when land sales, stumpage sales, and mineral leases have produced a gross income that has exceeded by 12 times the total income of all sales to 1862.10 After every period of expansion and speculative purchasing there were many million acres of land in unsteady hands insufficiently provided with funds to carry them over long periods of time. Consequently, such owners were forced to liquidate their holdings, not infrequently in poor years when prices were low. This fact has led some writers to maintain that investors could make more profit in other forms of investment than in lands. Their evidence, however, is based on records of those individuals and groups which were forced to liquidate their investments at the wrong time.11 9 Historical Statistics of the United States (Washington, 1960) , p. 712. 10 Ibid. "A study of the John Grigg estate of 124,000 acres in Illinois, the Miles and Elias White entries of 165,000 acres, and the Easley & Willingham entries of 300,000 acres in several states of the Upper Mississippi, all of which were intended as credit transactions for settlers or for early resale to farm makers, and the 500,000 acres that Cornell University came to own, mostly in the pineries of Wisconsin, shows that it took close to a generation to dispose of lands entered at the height of a period of great speculation and to come out well. The difference between these and many other cases and Speculative purchasing of land revived before the Civil War was over, reached a high point in 1870-72, and then declinced during the long depression which set in after the Panic of 1873. Contributing to this upward movement of speculation between 1864 and 1872 was the Agricultural College or Morrill Act of 1862. By this act non-public-land states became entitled to receive scrip in lieu of the land that was given to the public land states to aid in the establishment of colleges at which agricultural sciences and mechanical arts would be taught. States were to receive 30,000 acres of land, or its equivalent in scrip exchangeable for land, for each Representative and Senator they had in Congress. Thus New York received 990,000 acres in scrip, Pennsylvania 780,000, and so on down to Delaware, Kansas, and Oregon which only received 90,000 acres. A total of 7,830,000 acres in scrip was thus distributed to the states, though the southern states were not to receive their share until some time after the war. This scrip was subject to more restrictions than military warrants. It could not be used by settlers to preempt their claims, after July 27, 1868, only three sections in a township could be entered with it, and no more than a million acres could be entered in any one state. In consequence its market price was below that of the warrants. The lowest price for which states sold their scrip was 42 cents, 50 to 60 cents being the more common price, and after 1870 when demand for land was large, the price rose to a dollar or more an acre. With such prices prevailing, it is understandable why speculators and lumbermen rushed to purchase the scrip and to enter huge tracts of land with it. The 10 largest entries with the those Swierenga has examined in Iowa is that the latter were all to turn over their investment at a good return in 2 to 3 years. Robert L. Swierenga, "Pioneers and Profits. Land Speculation in the Iowa Frontier" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Iowa, 1965), pp. 291 ff. |