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Show 440 HISTORY OF PUBLIC LAND LAW DEVELOPMENT try in California where there might be small meadows useful for a grazing homestead or even, if there were water, for one or more small farms. After 1879 when the deposits became both assignable and available as advance payments on land that otherwise could be entered only under the settlement laws, the certificates took on value well in excess of the $1.25 an acre. Immediately, the requests for surveying increased and the accompanying amount of deposits mounted, reaching $941,741 in 1880; $1,749,547 in 1881; $2,134,175 in 1882; $437,949 in 1883; and $549,854 in 1884-a total of $5,813,368. Large Holdings Through its interpretation of the three acts the Land Office broadened the area in which the surveys could be ordered and permitted the assignment of certificates issued before the Act of 1879, a privilege it had not specifically sanctioned. Commissioner Sparks characterized the Act of 1879 as having been in no way "advantageous to the public service. On the contrary, it has been an unmixed evil. It has promoted unnecessary and improvident expenditures, premature and worthless surveys, the corruption of public officers, and the unlawful appropriation of vast bodies of the most valuable unsettled public lands." The surveys were extended into areas where settlement would not normally have gone, notably into valuable timber-lands such as the redwood lands of Hum-boldt County, California, and once they had been surveyed they were subject to entry under the Homestead and Timber and Stone Acts.14 The huge size of larger holdings acquired after the Homestead Act was adopted is almost breathtaking. William S. Chapman entered a total of 631,000 acres in California in addition to large areas of swamp and school lands obtained from the state. Francis Palms, the millionaire Detroit lumberman and dealer in pine lands, entered with Frederick Driggs 412,260 acres in Michigan and Wisconsin. William E. Dodge, manufacturer, mining magnate and lumberman and a prominent philanthropist in his later years, joined with George B. Satterlee and Thomas F. Mason to enter 254,000 acres in Michigan and Wisconsin. Isaac Friedlander, a partner in numerous transactions with William S. Chapman, entered 214,000 acres. Miller and Lux, the West Coast's leading livestock firm, took over much of the Chapman lands, entered an additional 181,000 acres of Federal lands and built up their holdings to more than a million acres in California, Oregon, and Nevada. In Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota lumbermen and timber and mineral land speculators bought up the last remaining stands of timber on public lands. In Minnesota Thomas B. Walker built up his great empire of timberland, having entered 166,000 acres in that state. Ultimately he was to own 700,000 acres in a number of states. Other large purchases in Minnesota were made by Calvin Howe, 105,000 acres; John "Land Office Report, 1885, pp. 13-15, 161-71. A later Commissioner was convinced that in heavily timbered sections of Washington some settlers could find land suitable for farming and relaxed the rigid position of the Land Office. Land Office Report, 1889, p. 45. |