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Show USE AND ABUSE OF SETTLEMENT LAWS, 1880-1904 469 homestead as the favored means of gaining ownership of land, was no longer necessary and should be consolidated with it. Two years later Land Commissioner Willis Drummond declared that "The many frauds which occur under the preemption laws, almost universally in the interest of speculators, offered solid ground for repeal."16 Thereafter the Commissioners continued to urge upon Congress the repeal of all preemption laws, holding that homestead offered actual settlers all that preemption did and at slight cost for fees if they remained on the land 5 years, that preemption cases were piling up and threatening to overwhelm the work of the Land Office, and that mining, timber, cattle, and speculative groups were using the measure to build up large holdings. Drummond's successor, Williamson, took a slightly different tack in 1877, recommending that neither preemption nor homestead should apply to timbered or other nonagricultural lands, but he failed to recommend how classification was to be achieved.17 McFarland in 1882 reported that the correspondence coming from the registers and receivers and special agents sent into the West to supplement their investigations of entries "indicate that a material proportion of the preemption entries now made are fraudulent in character, being chiefly placed upon valuable timber or mineral land, or water rights, and made in the interest and by the procurement of others, and not for the purpose of residence and improvement by the professed pre-emptor."18 The Commissioner maintained that both homestead and preemption were settler measures and to keep both was to maintain a double system necessitating the employment of two sets of machinery to receive entries, two agencies of adjudgment, and duplicate sets of ]fS Report, 1871, pp. 27-31; Report, 1873, pp. 8-10. 17 Report, 1877, p. 35. 18 Report, 1882, p. 8. records, thus piling up obligations for an over-extended office staff, adding to the burden of the local officers, and making it difficult for all but the most skilled to keep intimately in touch with all the instructions of the Commissioners, their numerous modifications, the decisions of the Secretary of the Interior and of the Attorney General and of the various courts concerning the two laws.19 McFarland, perhaps unfortunately, followed the practice of his predecessor, Williamson, in urging first better pay for the chief officers of his bureau and more clerks. But aside from this he strove with considerable eloquence to convince Congress of the need for a drastic overhaul of land legislation. The Timber Culture Act was pictured by him as providing a holding device by which people could control a quarter-section for as much as 8 years without actually setting out and tending the trees, and 13 years without full compliance with the law. During this time the pressure on the land supply was giving it value and making possible the sale of relinquishments at profitable returns. The large increase in entries and the many accounts of abuse of the law convinced McFarland that it should be repealed. He also advocated repeal of a section of the Act of May 14, 1880, that allowed any person to file an entry on a tract which had been relinquished without waiting for the formal cancellation of the entry, as the law had earlier required. It will be remembered that complaints had been brought to the Public Land Commission against this requirement of formal cancellation in Washington and the Act of 1880 had attempted to provide the desired relief. But, as McFarland pointed out, the effect of the new provision was "to invite speculative entries for the purpose of selling relinquishments." He went on: "when a new township is surveyed large portions of the land are at once covered with filings 1B Report, 1883, pp. 5-6. |
