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Show 450 HISTORY OF PUBLIC LAND LAW DEVELOPMENT ous other groups acquired large tracts by buying from others at second hand.ai During these last years of public land sales when rich, timbered lands were the major attraction, rumors of special privileges being extended to favored individuals at the pinery land offices began to circulate. A device that had been used in prairie land offices before the Civil War now came into common use in the pinery land offices. The register and the receiver or their clerks would be promised some substantial benefit by a timber speculator if they would agree to withhold certain townships of land from private sale until interested parties could cruise them. A flagrant and well-documented instance of this occurred at the Eau Claire, Wisconsin, office in 1865-69. Henry C. Putnam, well-known dealer in pine lands, was clerk in the office at a time when Francis Palms of Detroit, Henry W. Sage and John McGraw of Ithaca, New York, Ezra Cornell, the millionaire telegraph contractor and founder of Cornell University, and numerous other wealthy investors in pine lands, most of them experienced in the lumber industry, were searching for choice pine land on the Chippewa and attempting to omit the numerous poor tracts. Through Putnam they found it possible to hold land for a time, without making a legal land entry. Charges were soon brought against the Eau Claire "Pine Land Ring," as the group working through Putnam was called; an investigation was held and though no indictments or dismissals were brought, Putnam was ordered excluded from access to the entry volumes. The same practice existed at most if not all the pinery land offices. Isaac Stephen-son, a millionaire lumberman operating in both Michigan and Wisconsin where he 311 have traced some of these large holdings to purchases from speculators who bought in the five states from 1882-88, in "Federal Land Policy in the South," loc. cit., pp. 323-25. Largest Gash Sales including Preemptions Outside the South (Acres) Year California Colorado Kansas Michigan Minnesota Nebraska Oregon Washington Wisconsin Dakota Territory 1883______________ 359,803 141,434 62,012 241,364 738,345 116,889 147,073 248,305 338,434 1,496,788 1884______________ 435,313 180,139 72,948 202,036 397,979 184,725 154,438 322,620 160,330 2,159,398 1885_____......... 369,559 171,401 132,725 25,822 145,478 298,748 119,083 136,348 56,659 1,196,691 1886______________ 326,403 252,598 396,234 47,778 110,702 477,596 114,824 96,885 131,845 705,060 1887______________ 606,387 287,487 1,012,345 85,137 330,217 620,936 137,934 95,367 200,076 672,135 1888______________ 769,797 651,276 986,789 47,543 147,123 635,600 140,483 107,769 50,003 474,324 From GLO Reports. |