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Show EARLY EFFORTS TO PROTECT PUBLIC TIMBERLANDS 545 manent settlement but he was conforming to the law. When railroads were granted broad rights-of-way through the public lands they were given the privilege of drawing needed supplies of timber from adjacent land, but contractors were in many instances obliged to go farther afield for ties and fill and few there were to object if they helped themselves from the resources of the public land. When mining developed, first in the lead districts of Wisconsin, Illinois, and Missouri, later in Upper Michigan, Nevada, and California, the loss of timber from the public lands became enormous but again was sanctioned in a backhanded fashion by failure to prosecute and by toleration of the trespassing. It was only when the commercial exploitation of the white pine of the Lake States got under way in the fifties that public resentment against depredations on public lands was aroused. Yet it still was merely an extension of a practice that had long been condoned, though now it was being done on such a large scale that it aroused the nascent anti-monopoly feeling in the West which welcomed efforts to limit if not to end depredations by the larger operators. When trespassers were caught red-handed and could not deny they had cut timber on public lands, it was long the practice for the government to allow the agents to compromise with the offenders by allowing them to pay 50 cents per thousand board feet together with the expenses of the agents in making the seizure. Somewhat later the compromise price was raised to $2.50 a thousand with costs. All such payments went into a judiciary fund from which the expenses of agents deputized by the registers and receivers were paid. Such a policy was regarded as leading to abuses, and beginning in 1872 annual appropriations of $5,000 to $10,000 were made for the payment of costs. Increasing Enforcement Efforts Notwithstanding the low level of public morality in the Gilded Age and the marked movement away from the earlier view that a public office is a public trust, there were some Federal officials who had the public welfare in mind. One of them, Land Commissioner S. S. Burdett, recommended a drastic change of policy toward the United States timberlands. His proposal was taken over and elaborated by his successor, J. A. Williamson, in 1876. Burdett and Williamson critically examined the government's past timberland policy contrasting America's "wicked and wanton waste" of its timberlands with the "restoration and preservation" of forests practiced in the enlightened countries of western Europe. They predicted that a "national calamity" was being rapidly and surely brought upon the country by the useless destruction of the forests. Lumbermen and dealers in timberlands made a mockery of the settlement laws, the principal means of gaining ownership of un-offered land, by hiring people to make entries for them. They thus contributed to disrespect for all land laws in the West. Timbered lands, said Burdett, should not be subject to entry under either the settlement laws or the scrip measures; they should be sold only for cash after they had been appraised. Here he was far ahead of his time. Rarely has the government appraised and sold its timberland though it has appraised and sold timberlands on Indian reservations and cutting rights in national forests and on public domain. Burdett wanted no compounding with trespassers "as is now the custom." Instead he favored confiscating outright all timber cut on public lands and fining and imprisoning offenders. In the mining districts, where generally the land was not surveyed, Burdett proposed that expert agents should estimate the amount |
