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Show 544 HISTORY OF PUBLIC LAND LAW DEVELOPMENT attorney general to bring quo warranto proceedings to determine by what right the university held title to such an estate. Although this action failed, representatives of the university found that Wisconsin law "throws its arms about and around the Loggers in such an effectual and intimate fashion that nothing but 'perjury,' which must be proven in open court, will suffice to penetrate the legal armor of the poor logger."40 Most land grant railroads and states had their difficulties with timber thieves in much the same way the Federal government did. The Illinois Central Railroad was compelled to protect its timbered lands in southern Illinois by appointing agents to cruise the region, find cases of trespass, attach the timber products, bring the accused into court, and try to get juries to convict. It had to confess that the efforts of its agents had not met with much success because of the hostility of local people to the seizure of logs and what was looked upon as the harassing of poor men by a powerful absentee monopoly.41 In his Empire in Pine: The Story of Lumbering in Wisconsin, 1830-1900, Robert F. Fries has told the story of the efforts of Wisconsin to prevent depredations upon state land. A series of laws against trespassers was enacted beginning in 1855 and as many as 20 timber agents were functioning at one time to prevent depredations or punish trespassers but all to little effect. Politics, the appointment of incompetent people as timber agents, and the fact that public opinion 40J. W. Williams, June 19, 1876, to H. C. Putnam, Williams Letter Book No. I, and Smith Robertson, May 18, 1878, to J. W. Williams, Cornell University Archives. I have treated trespassing upon the university lands in my Wisconsin Pine Lands of Cornell University (Ithaca, 1943) , passim. a Gates, The Colonization Work of the Illinois Central Railroad (Cambridge, Mass., 1934), pp. 324ff. was either indifferent to or opposed the enforcement of the laws made the task of protecting the state's timber almost hopeless. A state forester is reported as saying in 1906 that scarcely a 40-acre tract owned by the state had escaped trespass and he added that the same would apply to Federal lands within Wisconsin.42 What made enforcement of timber trespass laws particularly difficult was not only public apathy and the older feeling, slowly passing away, that growing trees were a deterrent to progress and had to be destroyed to make way for farms, towns and cities, but also that government land policy tolerated and indeed encouraged squatting, the making of improvements without ownership. Nor had it been regarded as wrong for a settler to cut a few cords of wood on neighboring public land for sale to passing steamboats, or to build a raft and float products down to New Orleans. Under the preemption laws a settler could squat upon unsurveyed land, file his declaratory statement within 6 months after the survey had been completed, and have another 12 months before he had to prove up, pay his $200 for the quarter-section and take title. In these 18 months he could cut a lot of timber. If caught, he could plead that he intended to prove up as soon as the land office was open or at the conclusion of the 12 months after his original filing. He may have had no intention of making a per- 42 Fries, Story of Lumbering (Madison, Wis., 1951), pp. 195-201. Larson, The White Pine Industry in Minnesota, pp. 336-41, traces the early attempts of Minnesota to prevent trespass on state timberlands with attention to the series of laws which were entirely futile and the weak, inefficient, always complacent if not corrupt administration. She explains the widespread tendency to take advantage of the weakness of state administration as owing to the general belief in "laissez-faire, rugged individualism, and the legend of inexhaustibility." Also useful is Lucile Kane, "Federal Protection of Public Timber in the Upper Great Lake States," Agricultural History, 23 (April 1949), 135-39. |