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Show 604 HISTORY OF PUBLIC LAND LAW DEVELOPMENT ers for coordination of fire protection and other aspects of control. It was also authorized to reclassify "agricultural," that is cut-over land, if it was found such land was more suitable for growing timber than for farming. Most important, the Secretary of the Interior was required to manage the lands on a sustained yield basis, providing for the cutting of no more timber than the lands were reproducing to assure a constant source of supply for dependent industries.107 In 1938, Secretary Ickes reported to the President that the Office of Director of Forests had been set up in the Department of the Interior "to promote a unified policy of forest conservation, forest planning and forestry management. . . ." This must have raised some eyebrows in the Forest Service, where Ickes was partly held responsible for the division of Federal forestry work by his fight to retain sole responsibility for the O & C lands, including 300,000 acres of alternate section lands within national forests, and by his effort to gain administrative control of the indemnity alternate section lands of the Oregon and California Railroad-amounting to 463,000 acres- which had never been patented and from which the Department of Agriculture had managed and sold timber since the administration of Theodore Roosevelt.108 Over the control of these indemnity lands within the national forests there was fought a bitter battle between respective advocates of the Departments of the Interior and of Agriculture. Interior was strongly supported by the people of Oregon who much preferred the 75 percent of the income from timber sales obtainable from that Department, which was inclined to favor early cutting, to the 25 percent share obtainable from the Forest Service, which was slower in authorizing sales and 107 52 Stat. 874. 108 Secretary of the Interior, Annual Report, 1938, p. 124. obtaining income. While he was battling for control over the indemnity lands, Secretary Ickes was also pressing forward his fight to have the national forests transferred to Interior where they might be integrated with the revested O & C lands and the remaining timberlands of the public domain,100 as part of his objective of making Interior the Department of Conservation. In both moves Ickes was defeated; the indemnity lands remained under the jurisdiction of the Forest Service, and the Forest Service remained in Agriculture. On June 22, 1954, Congress extended the formula of the Act of 1937 to the indemnity lands, now definitely retained in Agriculture.110 From the sale of timber on the revested O & C lands in 1966 in Oregon Interior received for distribution to the counties a larger sum than from the mineral, grazing, and timberland receipts in any other state, except for the income from drilling rights on the outer continental shelf.111 Forestry is currently practiced in an extensive way in both the Departments of Agriculture and of the Interior. 109 David M. Ellis has a fairly complete account of the Oregon and California lands from the grant of 1866 which I have followed closely. As Jerry O'Callaghan has shown, the Oregon and California lands were among the most heavily timbered lands the United States owns, there being an estimated 50 billion feet on that portion of the lands administered by the Bureau of Land Management in 1960 and 10 billion on the portion administered by the Forest Service. 110 68 Stat., Part 1, p. 271. An official publication of the Department of the Interior, Bureau of Land Management, for 1966, contains an ownership map of the lands of western Oregon, showing "O & C Lands in Controversy" though in parenthesis appears "Under Dept. of Agr. by Act of 6-24-54, Public Law 426." Public Land Statistics, 1966, p. 123. 111 Public Land Statistics, 1966, pp. 169-70. A useful study of "The O & C Lands," by Christian G. Basler of the Bureau of Land Management was kindly made available by Jerry O'Callaghan. |