OCR Text |
Show EARLY EFFORTS TO PROTECT PUBLIC TIMBERLANDS 543 so numerous that steps had to be taken to suppress them. Federal marshals were ordered to proceed against the trespassers; some persons were arrested, including Dorilus Morrison, one of the most prominent Minnesota lumbermen. Quickly the politicians moved in to demand such actions be halted and that the arrested men be permitted to buy the land on which they had made depredations and at the same time to recover their logs. Numerous letters from Senator Henry M. Rice and Representative Cyrus Aldrich of Minnesota and Representative Cadwallader Washburn of Wisconsin in behalf of Morrison and others of the accused who were willing to pay their fines convinced the administrative authorities that other punishment was not necessary "as they have been scared and will probably not steal as before."37 • From 1856 to 1877, with the exception of the one or two agents appointed by Hendricks, responsibility for protecting the public timberlands against pillaging was left either in the hands of the registers and receivers, or alternatively, as part of the responsibility of the surveyors general. These local officers were permitted to deputize agents for short periods to follow up rumors of trespass, get evidence, and even appear as witnesses in court. Since the employment of these special agents depended on the success they achieved and the collections they brought in, they accomplished much more than the regular officers could, but there was no consistent policy followed in their employment. About all that could be said for them was that they more than covered the cost of their employment. They certainly did little to prevent trespass. It has been seen that the timber of absentee owners was regarded as fair game by neighbors who needed fencing and fuel wood. The experiences of Cyrus Woodman, who made a small fortune in buying both prairie and wooded land for speculation in Illinois and Wisconsin and who was constantly troubled by the depredations of local people, are typical. Years of effort through hired agents to prevent the theft of valuable stands of timber were mostly unsuccessful. Finally Woodman was told by one person who wished to buy a tract of land from him that it was known the land belonged to a speculator and that another winter would see every stick of timber on it stolen.38 Indeed by the 1870's it was recognized in Wisconsin that the only effective way absentee owners could preserve the pine on privately owned land was to have a local agent who would cruise the land frequently and warn off all plunderers.39 The largest investment in Wisconsin pine lands was made by Ezra Cornell for the university he founded at Ithaca, New York. He acquired almost a half million acres in the Chippewa Valley with the agricultural college land scrip given to New York State. By the middle seventies extensive depredations were being made on the lands closest to drivable streams by responsible lumbermen who challenged the right of Cornell University to hold such a huge acreage for rising prices. They continued to cut on the land and declared that they would carry the issue through the courts and to the state legislature. They introduced into the legislature a resolution instructing the state '•" Numerous letters about these transactions from Joseph S. Wilson, esp. Wilson to Jacob Thompson, June 29, 1860, in Misc. Vol. 42, GLO. *-James Hinman, Jan. 7, 21, 27, Feb. 1, 23, 1856, to Woodman; C. K. Dean, Feb. 14, June 1, 1856, to Woodman; R. E. Burns, July 8, I860, to Woodman, Woodman MSS., Wisconsin State Historial Society. ™ River Pilot, Feb. 6, 1869, and the same in Wisconsin Lumberman, II (May 1874) , 144; Larry Gara, Westernized Yankee. The Story of Cyrus Woodman (Madison, Wis., 1956) , pp. 31-32, 44, 51, 143. |