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Show 584 HISTORY OF PUBLIC LAND LAW DEVELOPMENT and on March 4, 1907, the fund was abolished, as has been seen.58 Henceforth, the Forester had to depend entirely upon his ability to convince Congress of the various needs of his agency. One point he continually emphasized was that it was not the bureau's policy to lock up the reserves but that their timber and forage were to be used as the demand arose under controls that curbed damage to the watersheds and provided for regeneration of cutover areas and restoration of overgrazed areas. Lumber Industry Migration As the lumber industry moved into the Far West and the South after 1900, tim-berlands in Oregon, Washington, and California that had gone begging because of their remote situation, began to attract attention. Landlookers, speculators, and the usual wheeler-dealers were making their last great onslaught on the public timber-land outside the reserves, stimulated by the rapid rise in the price of land and stump-age. Because of the 160-acre limitation on sale or entry it was almost impossible to amass any considerable block of timberland from the government without bribing the local land officers or at least including them among the beneficiaries of any fraudulent method of securing titles. "Land rings" had flourished at every pinery land office in the seventies and eighties in the Lake States and now became common in the Far West. Only with Valentine, Sioux Half-breed, Soldier's Additional Homestead, and Forest Lieu Scrip could unsur-veyed public timberland be entered and, except for the latter, the amounts in circulation were small. On surveyed lands homesteaders could file for 160 acres and settlers could buy 160 acres under the Timber and Stone Act. Consequently there was 68 Acts of June 30, 1906 and March 4, 1907, 34 Stat., Part I, pp. 684 and 1269. strong motivation to have the upper elevations on which heavy stands of timber were located surveyed so that homesteaders, or dummy entrymen, could enter these lands. Political pressure brought about surveys for which there was no justification for settlement. The land rings flourished most flagrantly at the Roseburg office in Oregon and at the Eureka office in California.59 Land prices were shooting up rapidly, perhaps most rapidly in these offices where the timber on public lands yielded more than 100,000 board feet to the acre.60 It is small wonder that the C. A. Smith Lumber Company of Minnesota which had found it profitable to cut white pine of the Lake States, where as little as 4,000 board feet of pine to the acre was considered sufficient to justify operations, was participating in the scramble for redwood, Douglas-fir, and 89 In explanation of the degree of corruption that immersed the Roseburg office Jerry O'Callaghan has written: A free and easy attitude toward the public lands had been fostered on all levels by their very extent; and by the feeling that whatever the land disposition laws may have said in letter, in spirit they intended that all the land should be in private ownership. Therefore a little perjury in acquiring public lands was considered within the true intent of the law. "Senator Mitchell and the Oregon Land Frauds, 1905," Pacific Historical Review, XXI (August 1952), 255. 60 By the 1860's in most of the pinery land offices a "ring" existed to prevent competitive bidding at public sales, discourage outside speculators from getting the more heavily timbered land, and to reserve land on the entry books until favored individuals had an opportunity to explore them and later make their entries. I have told the story of the land ring at the Eau Claire, Wis., Land Office in my Wisconsin Pine Lands of Cornell University; also see Richard N. Current, Pine Logs and Politics, A Life of Philetus Sawyer, 1816-1900 and Isaac Stephenson, Recollections of a Long Life. One does not find anything in Hidy, Hill and Nevins, Timber and Men. The Weyerhaeuser Story (New York, 1963), to indicate the existence of rings from which millmen and large dealers in timberlands benefited, but there is some evidence that settlers pilfered from the lands of the big holders of timber-lands. |