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Show ADMINISTRATION OF THE PUBLIC FOREST LANDS 603 After 8 years of complicated litigation between the Southern Pacific Railroad, the purchasers who had bought large tracts, the "settlers" who had purchased quarter-sections at no more than $2.50 an acre, and some 1,300 homesteaders who were claiming (with the aid of S. A. D. Puter, a notorious land dealer and author of a book on land frauds) the right to buy from the railroad quarter-sections of the land at $2.50 an acre, the Supreme Court reversed a lower court decree forfeiting the grant and left the final decision concerning the grant to Congress. Not only was the question of ownership vital to many but so also was the question of the method of sale of the land if it were to be returned to the government. Since some of the most heavily timbered lands in the country were involved, the question was, if they were forfeited should they be turned over to the Forest Service for management? It was scarcely conceivable they would be returned to the public domain and be subject to timber and stone and homestead entries as previously forfeited railroad land had been. Congress on June 9, 1916, adopted a measure that one historian has called more a triumph of expediency than of statesmanship. Because of the questions left unsettled, it was to cause much difficulty for both Congress and the land administrative agencies. The act "revested" in the United States the remaining Oregon and California Railroad lands which had not been sold by July 1, 1913, and ordered their classification by the Secretary of the Interior "in cooperation with the Secretary of Agriculture, or otherwise. . . ." Of the three classes into which the lands were to be divided, the first was to include potential power sites, which were to be subject to withdrawal, the second was timbered lands having not less than 7,500 board feet to the acre, and the third was to include all other lands, presumably cutover areas or pasture lands, and called agricultural. The timber was to be sold separate from the land by the Secretary of the Interior, again in "cooperation with the Secretary of Agriculture, or otherwise. . . ." Fifty percent of the income from timber and land sales was to go to Oregon, of which one half was to be added to the school fund and the other half given the counties in which the land was located for schools, roads, highways, and bridges. Forty percent was to go into the Reclamation Fund established by the Newlands Act of 1902 which was somewhat of a victory of the reclamation states over Oregon, and the balance, 10 percent, was to go into the Federal Treasury.106 Congress had shown disdain for the Department of Agriculture and the Forest Service and favor to the Department of the Interior when it assigned responsibility for the O & C lands to Interior in the Act of 1916. In doing so it had agreed to divide the income from the lands more generously with local governments than the Forest Service was required to do. This two-to-one disparity in the method of division of the income of the two bureaus was further increased by an Act of August 28, 1937, in which Congress provided that 75 percent of the income from timber sales should go to the counties after the Federal government was reimbursed for some advances. Thereafter, nothing would persuade Oregon that Forest Service administration of the O & C lands could be superior to that of the Department of the Interior. Revested O & C Land Management The Act of 1937 was a landmark in the development of forestry in the Department of the Interior. Though Interior was given primary management responsibility for the O & C lands, it was authorized to arrange with Federal, state, or private forest own- 106 30 Stat., Part 1, pp. 221-23. David M. Ellis, "The Oregon and California Railroad Land Grant, 1866-1945," Pacific Northwest Quarterly, XXXIX (October 1948), 253 ff. |
