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Show USE AND ABUSE OF SETTLEMENT LAWS, 1880-1904 473 had remained in the hands of the original entrymen, who had sold their timbered tracts to lumbermen. Without the timber, said an agent in northern Minnesota, the land was not worth more than 10 cents an acre. In Kansas and Dakota Territory many people were filing applications and commuting their entries or making preemption entries to gain a tract they could mortgage for $500 or $1,000. They then threw up the land, leaving it to the mortgage company to take over and try to recover its investment. Estimates of the proportion of fraudulent entries ranged from 50 to 95 percent. Sparks could do little more than his predecessors had done in recommending the repeal of the Preemption, Timber Culture, Desert Land, and Timber and Stone Acts. He seemed to believe that the commutation provision of the Homestead Act could not be policed and recommended its abolition.28 Sparks concluded his first report by urging that the public forests on the Mississippi watershed should be preserved and that all such lands should be immediately withdrawn from sale or entry.29 Despairing of early action by Congress to reduce the amount of fraud in the disposal of the public lands, Sparks, on April 3, 1885, after only a month in office, ordered the suspension of all original entries of public lands, except cash and scrip entries in central and western Kansas and Nebraska, northern Minnesota, most of Colorado, and all of Dakota, Idaho, Utah, Washington, New Mexico, Montana, Wyoming, and Nevada. Also, all final entries under the Timber and Stone Act and the Desert Land Act were suspended.30 He justified this sweeping order on the basis of reports of special agents, local land officers, inspectors, district attorneys, and letters from public and private citizens "all detailing one common story of widespread, persistent, public land robbery ...." Sparks took another step which did nothing to win support of a powerful group of land agents and lawyers who practised before his bureau by ending the procedure of allowing them to have claims for patents on the suspended list expedited as "special." Too frequently it had been found that such claims were dubious if not outright frauds. To top all this, Sparks issued an order prohibiting attorneys and claim agents from visiting with clerks and other employees of the Land Office during business hours.31 Sparks also tackled illegal fencing on the public lands. The cattle industry on the Plains was now to a very considerable degree in the hands of English, Scottish, and American companies with great aggregations of capital at their disposal. After obtaining ownership of a ranch of a few hundred acres they had fenced in many times as much land belonging to the government and barred homesteaders from crossing or intruding into their dominion. The New Brighton Cattle Company of Nebraska, for example, was said to have enclosed 84,000 acres of public land and had posted signs along its fence warning "that any person ... who dares to break down this fence had better look out for his scalp."32 Commissioner McFarland had earlier issued a circular which stated that the Department would "interpose no objections to the destruction" of unlawful fences by settlers desiring to take up land within them, and threatened to take action against 28 Ibid., pp. 48-74. 29 Ibid., p. 84. 30 For the order of suspension see Land Office Report, 1886, p. 43. 81 New York Times, Jan. 11, 1886. 32 Cong. Record, 48th Cong., 1st sess., p. 4771. In the report of the surveyor general for Nebraska, from which this quotation was borrowed, the warning appears as "The son of a bitch who opens the fence had better look out for his scalp." H. Doc, 48th Cong., 1st sess., Vol. 26, No. 119 (Serial No. 2206), Part 2, p. 2; House, Reports, 48th Cong., 1st sess., Vol. 5, No. 1325 (Serial No. 2257) , pp. 2-6. |