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Show AN INCONGRUOUS LAND SYSTEM 451 entered with associates 137,000 acres, indiscreetly told of a practice that enabled the registers and receivers to withhold land desired by favored lumbermen-who naturally compensated the officials well. He speaks of the "unscrupulousness" of the land officers whose rule it was, when a non-favored individual tried to enter lands, to declare that they had already been entered. The officer had "a list of 'dummies' always at hand who were put down as the purchaser of the property, which was afterward sold at a neat profit to himself and his co-conspirators who supplied the money. The foundations of not a few American fortunes were laid in this reprehensible fashion." Whether Stephenson was a beneficiary of such practices is not clear but it is likely that most successful lumbermen resorted to them.32 But after all, the lumbermen who organized to prevent competition at a public sale were doing nothing that settlers had not been doing since the first appearance of the claims associations. The fact is that western society held Federal ownership in little regard; few people questioned the right of the citizen or the lumberman to take timber from public lands, to agree not to bid against others at the public sale, even to sign affidavits that land being entered under the Preemption and Homestead Acts were intended for farms when they really intended to sell to lumbermen as soon as the patent was issued. A Wisconsin Congressman, in line with these views, declared that the true government policy toward lumbermen was to allow them "to use a portion of the timber" on public lands "without stint, as a sort of bounty for the hardships they have undergone in piloting the way to this country."33 32 Isaac Stephenson, Recollections of A Long Life, 1829-1915 (Chicago, 1915) , p. 120. For the methods of frustrating competition at the sales at Eau Claire and the influence of the pine land ring, see Gates, Wisconsin Pine Lands of Cornell University, pp. 107 ff. James Willard Hurst in Law and Economic The West and Land Matters As long as western members of Congress were writing land legislation they thought the West wanted, and as long as Interior and Land Office administrators were interpreting and administering those laws in a way satisfactory to the West, allowing always for flexibility, there was little conflict between the Washington authorities and western people. But if the administration became inflexible and threatened to interpret laws in a way the West did not like, it could, and on a number of occasions did, incur the wrath of the West- which brought about the discharge of the Federal timber agents, the dropping of John Wilson as Commissioner of the General Land Office in the fifties, the dismissal of William A. J. Sparks, Cleveland's Commissioner of the General Land Office, and it struck hard at Gifford Pinchot's conception of conservation. As the West increasingly had its way in land matters, it came to have affection for the old land system and although parts of it seem to us irreconcilable with new measures, the West preferred to retain them. It wished to keep preemption, long a basic feature, although preemption no longer seemed necessary after homestead had been adopted. The West was willing to abandon cash sales in newly surveyed areas but not for lands long since proclaimed for sale. It approved of the railroad land grants begun in 1850, and did not become opposed to them until the railroads made themselves so obnoxious by their discriminatory rate structures and unwillingness to pay taxes on their land grants as to arouse a crusade for forfeiture of their grants. Land granted to the states for education, canals, or railroads continued to be sold at the government minimum or above long Growth: The Legal History of the Lumber Industry in Wisconsin, 1636-1915 (Cambridge, Mass., 1964) , acknowledges collusion at public sales in Wisconsin. 33 Hurst, Law and Economic Growth, p. 96. |