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Show AN INCONGRUOUS LAND SYSTEM 461 veying by the terms of their grants, Congress extended this requirement in 1876. Thus, companies could keep their large grants from taxation for as much as 20 years, even though they had contracted away the land on credit. The Kansas Pacific, for example, was paying taxes in Kansas and Colorado in 1886 on only 963,809 acres, whereas it had gross sales of 3,542,713 acres, some of which had been cancelled. It was charged by the Junction City Union of August 12, 1882, that tax exemption of most of its lands was saving the railroad $250,000 annually. Resident owners along its route who had patents to their land felt the discrimination which made it necessary for them to bear a heavier burden of taxation. The settler element in Kansas and Nebraska now combined with the land reform group led by William S. Holman of Indiana and Lewis Payson of Illinois to remove from the railroads this valuable privilege. Measure after measure was introduced into both Houses of Congress. They passed the House but the Senate was obdurate or insisted on amendments unsatisfactory to the House until 1886, by which time pro-railroad sentiment was waning. On July 12 the two Houses managed to reconcile their differences and Cleveland signed a bill providing that no lands to which railroads had claim by reason of their grant and construction were to be tax exempt, except for those locations where surveys had not been extended.61 Alien Ownership Restricted Coinciding with the movement for the forfeiture of the land grants was the swiftly rising demand for action to prevent the remaining public lands from falling into the hands of aliens and, if possible, to force 81 24 Stat. 143; Gates, Fifty Million Acres, pp. 265 ff.; Leslie E. Decker, Railroads, Lands and Politics. The Taxation of the Railroad Land Grants, 1864-1897 (Providence, 1964), passim. the breakup of large holdings already established by them. This anti-alien movement had its origin in dislike of the English and Scotch capitalists who were pouring millions of dollars into the cattle ranching business in the 1880's and were acquiring millions of acres of land, and in outright hatred of William Scully who had purchased close to 200,000 acres of land in Illinois, Kansas, Nebraska, and Missouri and was applying the practices of an Irish landlord in his relations with his hundreds of tenants. Efforts to tax his rent roll came to nothing. The next step was to make alien ownership illegal. The newspapers, agrarian-oriented or otherwise, gave widespread publicity to the anti-alien movement. It reached a climax in 1887 to 1895 when each of the states in which Scully's land was located adopted measures prohibiting alien landownership. In two acts Illinois prohibited further acquisition by aliens and tried to prevent alien landlords from requiring tenants to pay the taxes assessed upon the land they rented. Nebraska, Kansas, and other states also took action and in 1887 Congress adopted an act "to restrict the ownership of real estate in the Territories to American citizens."62 "The Great Objective ..." Land reformers and conservationists were now sufficiently in the saddle to put through a series of measures that drastically changed the public land system. In May and July 1888, two measures were adopted by which land sales in the five southern states were 62 Gates, Frontier Landlords and Pioneer Tenants (Ithaca, N.Y., 1945) , pp. 34 ff. The anti-alien movement was stimulated by the practice of foreign-owned cattle companies which enclosed with land to which they had patents a larger acreage of public land. For English and Scotch investments in the western cattle business see Maurice Fring, W. Turrentine Jackson and Agnes Wright Spring, When Grass was King (Boulder, Colo., 1956), and W. Turrentine Jackson, The Enterprising Scot (Edinburgh, 1968) . |