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Show AN INCONGRUOUS LAND SYSTEM 447 from the four lumbering states of Maine, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota voted 12-2 against repeal. Senators from the same states voted 4-4 on repeal. Omar Conger of Michigan, who in the previous Congress had voted against repeal, admitted that the lumber operators of his district did not approve of his stand and were actually waiting in Florida, Louisiana, and Arkansas to buy the southern lands as soon as they were open to entry. In 1876 he abstained from voting.25 Nathan B. Bradley, owner and operator of one of the largest mills in Bay City, Michigan, voted against repeal. Six years later he began buying longleaf pine land in Louisiana and before the sales were closed had entered 111,000 acres. The Act of June 22, 1876, repealing the prohibition of public land sales in the five southern states provided that the remaining lands should first be offered at public sale and thereafter be opened to private entry in lots of any size. This step was clearly running counter to the position of the land reform element, but the excuse was the same as was urged for offering land in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Colorado, Michigan, and Washington after 1862: the land was timbered, was being stripped of its major resource by timber thieves, and the cost and trouble of protecting it was so great that offering the land at public sale appeared the best solution.26 In 1879 the Commissioner of the Land Office announced that all the public lands of Florida, Arkansas, and Mississippi had been surveyed and offered and the balance of unoffered land, except for some mineral reservations, would be put up for sale shortly.27 There 25 Cong. Record, 32d Cong., 1st sess., June 5, 1874, p. 4634; ibid., 44th Cong., 1st sess., Feb. 15, June 7, 1876, pp. 1090 and 3655. 28 See the justification of Commissioner N. C. McFarland for the offering of 3 million acres in the Duluth Land District of Minnesota in the fiscal year 1883, GLO Annual Report, 1882, p. 27. 27 GLO Annual Report, 1879, pp. 221-22. was no immediate rush for the southern lands, not at least until the threat of prosecution induced some parties to buy the land on which they had been cutting timber, nor, indeed, did there appear any letup in timber stealing. Sales in the years 1876 to 1879 in these five public land states amounted to only 35,277 acres. But by 1880 circumstances had changed. Representatives of northern millmen whose timber resources in Michigan and Wisconsin were approaching exhaustion now appeared at the land offices and were cruising the woods for likely stands of timber. Among the large acquisitions were the purchase of 100,000 acres in Arkansas by the Lindsay Land and Lumber Company of Rock Island, Illinois, a company in which Frederick Weyerhaeuser had a substantial interest; the 136,000 acres in Mississippi purchased by Delos Blodgett of Grand Rapids, Michigan; and the 109,000 acres in Louisiana purchased by Franklin H. Head of Chicago. All of these and many other northern lumber interests bought directly from the Federal government, from the railroads, the states, and from other private owners. Southern Timberlands No longer could the southern millmen and loggers expect to find an adequate supply of logs available to them on government land at the cost only of cutting. To provide logs for future operation they now had to buy timberland from the government or stumpage or land from the northern timber barons. They could be sure that the new breed of northern owners would not tolerate the alleged cutting on their land that the government had permitted on public land. Consequently, they had to join in the rush to acquire the better stands of timber. Commissioner Williamson's statement of 1876 that "an acre of good pine land is worth about . . . $30" is surely somewhat absurd-there is little |