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Show 468 HISTORY OF PUBLIC LAND LAW DEVELOPMENT In 1885 when William A. J. Sparks became Commissioner of the Land Office, Lucius Lamar, Secretary of the Interior, and Grover Cleveland, President, the settlers began to get relief. Authorized by the Act of February 25, the President issued his famous order requiring "that any and every unlawful inclosure of the public lands ... be immediately removed" and forbidding any person or corporation "from preventing or obstructing by means of such inclosures, or by force, threats, or intimidation, any person entitled thereto from peaceably entering upon and establishing a settlement or residence on any part of such public land ... ."13 Fourteen months later Sparks reported that 375 unlawful enclosures of public lands containing 6,410,000 acres had been brought to the attention of the officers, proceedings to compel removal of fences had been recommended in 83 cases, involving 2,250,000 acres, and final decrees ordering removals had been obtained in 13 cases involving 1 million acres. In 47 cases involving 350,000 acres fences were removed without resort to the courts.14 A believer in pitiless publicity, Sparks listed in his report of that year every individual, partnership, and company against whom proceedings had been recommended by his office or by other parties, the decrees, if any, and the acreage from which the fences had been removed, and the penalties exacted. Most prominent cattlemen were involved in one way or another but many had their indictments quashed. Sparks entertained no great assurance that once the fences were down the small man, whether settler or stockman, would be any better off for he reported that intensive efforts to control access to streams through land ownership enabled the larger stockmen to dominate about the same area they previously had 13 Proclamation of Aug. 7, 1885, Richardson, Messages and Papers of the Presidents, VIII, 308-309. 14 Land Office Report, 1886, p. 97. fenced.15 Thereafter, intermittent efforts were made to have the illegal fences removed but without much success. Fifteen years after Sparks left office Theodore Roosevelt had to start all over again to remove the fences which either had not been removed or had been put up again. Problems of Land Commissioners In the eighties the General Land Office was also receiving serious complaints about the abuse of the preemption law and the commutation clause of the homestead law, which permitted individuals to commute their homesteads to preemption and pay for them at $1.25 an acre after 6 months of presumed residence. Evidence of the misuse of these measures was piling up in complaints from settlers and land officers in the field and brought the Land Office officials to believe that only by repeal of the Preemption Act and extension of the period before a homesteader could commute his entry to a cash entry could the public lands be saved for actual settlers. There might have been another solution had the patronage system not been so firmly established for the staff and field employees of the General Land Office and had Congress been willing to grant to the Office the number of inspectors and other agents necessary to give rigid scrutiny to all entries. But Congress and the public generally seemed to prefer low-salaried, incompetent public servants, at least in the field, and allowed the Land Office a staff altogether inadequate to handle the enormous burden it faced. As early as 1871 the Commissioner of the General Land Office-ignoring the increasing inflexibility in the land system which resulted from the reluctance to offer newly surveyed lands in the area beyond the 97th meridian at cash sale-urged that preemption, having been displaced by 15 Report, 1886, pp. 97-98, 455-72. |