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Show 546 HISTORY OF PUBLIC LAND LAW DEVELOPMENT of timber taken, appraise it and exact a reasonable price from the mining companies. He refuted complaints that his proposal would involve the employment of numerous agents at heavy expense by pointing out, somewhat exaggeratedly, that if the government effectively prevented good pine from being obtained by theft from government lands these lands would bring $30 an acre and at this price the timber would be more carefully husbanded. He showed the absurdity of the government's giving away under the Timber Culture Act 160 acres to persons who would raise trees on their quarter-sections while at the same time permitting homesteaders and preemptors to acquire in a shorter time quarter-sections which would be subsequently transferred to lumbermen for cutting. He concluded by urging haste in adopting his recommendations. Enormous losses were being sustained by the government and equally great benefits were being enjoyed by the lumbermen.43 The appointment of Carl Schurz as Secretary of the Interior in 1877 by President Hayes was as heartening to the advocates of good government as had been the appointment of Jacob Cox, also a civil service reformer, by President Grant in 1869. A strong advocate of civil service reform who had no liking for the corruption which flourished so extensively in the Gilded Age, or for the kind of machine politics associated with the Camerons, Conklings, and Chandlers, Schurz tried to make his Department a model of integrity, efficiency, and responsibility. In contrast to his predecessors, Schurz was familiar with forestry practices abroad and with the way Europeans kept great natural scenic spots from being vulgarly 43 Burdett's views were best set forth in his report of 1876 which I have followed here. H. Ex. Doc, 44th Cong., 2d sess., Vol. 4 (Serial No. 1749), No. 1, Part 5, pp. 7-9. exploited for commercial purposes. He appreciated the unique character of the two species of redwood trees in California, "the noblest and oldest in the world," and recommended that at least two townships in the Coast Range, and two in the Sierra Nevada Mountains bearing these trees should be reserved from sale or disposal.44 Before he had been in office a year Schurz was being subjected to "the onslought of the land-jobbers, and Indian Ring" and, as he once said: "It is a constant fight with the sharks that surround the Indian Bureau, the General Land Office, the Pension Office, and the Patent Office, and a ceaseless struggle with perplexing questions and situations. . . ,"45 Schurz retained Williamson in the Land Office and the two seemed to work well in their efforts to give better protection to the forest lands. Even before the change of administration in 1877, Williamson had decided to relieve the local officers of responsibility for preventing depredations which they could not adequately handle and to revive the use of timber agents. He had found that working through the registers and receivers had produced "no practical results in the way of suppression of depredations or collection of values," that there was much looseness in the hiring of deputies by the registers and receivers, that compromises had been made without authority and funds received but not accounted for. Possibly he was a bit harsh in saying that the collections from the depredators had been slight-collections had amounted since 1854 to $199,998, while the costs had been $45,624-but they were more the result of the activities of the Federal marshals and district attorneys 14 C. Raymond Clar, California Government and Forestry (Sacramento, 1959) , p. 69. 45 The Nation, XXV (Nov. 1, 1877) , 261; Frederic Bancroft (ed.) , Speeches, Correspondence and Political Papers of Carl Schurz (6 vols., New York, 1913), 3:82. |