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Show 460 HISTORY OF PUBLIC LAND LAW DEVELOPMENT had been arbitrarily and cruelly denied, that railroads had been permitted more land than they were entitled to, that inadequate evidence had been accepted from the railroad for losses to be made good by indemnity selections, and that settlers on railroad lands had lost their improvements through an improper interpretation of the law. Sparks said that the Land Office and the courts had permitted railroads to challenge settler claims "at every point and in every stage, until it became easier for claimants to buy the land from the railroads." Authority to take timber from "adjacent" lands had been grossly abused, especially by the Northern Pacific, which had gone far afield to cut commercial timber. Sparks repeated earlier estimates that 100 million acres were withdrawn. His trenchant and well-publicized criticisms and his proposals for reform focused congressional attention upon land problems, as no administrator of the General Land Office had succeeded in doing, and produced results. By 1887 a total of 21,323,600 acres had been restored to entry, the claim of the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad for 1,500,000 acres for the extension of its line to San Francisco had been revoked, and Congress, needled by the clamor for reform which Sparks' report had stimulated, had authorized the administration to institute suits against railroads to which lands had been erroneously conveyed if they would not, on demand, reconvey them.58 Cancelled preemption and homestead entries on erroneously conveyed lands were to be reinstated and President Cleveland ordered the claims of settlers found to be on lands claimed by the railroads to be given more careful consideration by the General Land Office.59 wAct of March 3, 1887, 24 Stat. 556; GLO Annual Report, 1885, pp. 26-46. 59 John B. Rae has well summarized Sparks' work and the reforms he achieved in "The Development of Railway Land Subsidy Policy in the United States," pp. 291 ff. Sparks' wholesale suspension of entries to allow adequate time for investigation and prevent fraudulent ones from going to patent, together with his disagreement with his superior, Lamar, on a legal matter, led to his resignation in 1887. His successor was not motivated by the same crusading spirit and reformist ideas, but was shocked at the extent of illegal entries made for second parties. In 1888 he summarized what were in a substantial measure the results of Sparks' extraordinarily active labors in restoring lands to entry. Included in this table were 2,108,417 acres within the primary grant area of the railroads, 21,323,600 acres of railroad indemnity lands, and 28,253,347 acres of forfeited railroad grants, or a total of 51,685,364 acres. In addition Sparks had recommended that 2,331,187 acres be recovered by legal action and that 54,323,996 acres of grants be recovered through forfeiture. As has been shown, Congress adopted a much more restricted measure than Sparks recommended which led to the forfeiture of only a small part of this total.60 Parallel with the movement for forfeiture of unearned railroad land grants and the restoration of the withdrawn lands to entry was agitation for and the final enactment of a measure to require that lands earned by railroads through construction should be taxable whether or not the railroads had paid for the cost of surveying and whether or not the patents had actually issued. In a series of decisions the Federal courts had declared that lands to which railroads were entitled because of construction but which were not patented or land on which the costs of surveying had not been paid were not subject to taxation. To railroads not originally required to pay the cost of sur- 80 John B. Rae, "Commissioner Sparks and the Railroad Land Grants," Mississippi Valley Historical Review, XXV (September 1938), 211 ff.; GLO Annual Report, 1888, p. 17. |