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Show 774 HISTORY OF PUBLIC LAND LAW DEVELOPMENT from the United States to the first owner. Some historians have long thought that funds for publication of source material might well be used to reproduce some of the tract book entries. The correspondence of the Commissioner of the General Land Office and of the Secretary of the Treasury (before 1849) was found most helpful. The incoming and copies of the outgoing correspondence in the different series is enormous and I can claim only to have used a small portion. The most intensive use of the early correspondence has been made by Malcolm Rohrbough in The Settlement and Administration of American Public Lands, 1789-1837, which is listed elsewhere in this bibliography. The Bureau of Land Management published in 1959 a small but admirably illustrated brochure entitled The Public Land Records . . . Footnotes to American History in which is described the reproduction work done to preserve and make more manageable the Tract Books and other records which have been used almost to the point of destruction. Harry Yoshpe and Philip Brower in Preliminary Inventory of the Land-Entry Papers of The General Land Office provide a most needed introduction to the land records in the National Archives, Robert W. Harrison has described the scope and extent of the materials in "Public Land Records of the Federal Government," Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 41 (September, 1954), 277-288, and Richard S. Maxwell has shown possibilities for research in the records and what some scholars have already done in "The Public Land Records of the Federal Government, 1800-1950, and their Statistical Significance," prepared for the Conference on the National Archives and Statistical Research, 1968. The Serial Documents of the United States Congress contain the Annual Reports of the Commissioner of the General Land Office and a great variety of other reports called for by resolutions of either House. The early documents are assembled and reprinted in the American State Papers, Public Lands, 8 vols., and in Finance, 5 vols., Gales & Seaton edition in both instances. The Annual Reports of the Commissioner were published with the Annual Report of the Secretary of the Interior after 1849, were summarized by the Secretary, and from 1866 until 1932 were also published separately. Reports subsequent to 1904 are less detailed than those of earlier years. Decisions of the Department of the Interior and General Land Office in Cases Relating to the Public Lands, 1881-1967, 73 vols., contains detail partly included in the Annual Reports of the General Land Office and for the years in which they overlap are analyzed in the various publications of Henry N. Copp, particularly in Copp's Land Owner, 1874-1891, 18 vols. The Hearings of Senate and House Committees having responsibility for bills affecting public land administration become increasingly important in the 20th century. They provide much detailed information concerning the successes and failures of government policies and the political reactions thereto. It has not seemed necessary to list them in the bibliography as they are given full titles in the footnotes. The Reports of the Public Land Commissions of 1879, 1904, and 1930-especially the first two-offer penetrating insights into the functioning of the land system as does the report of the Bureau of Corporations, The Lumber Industry, 4 parts (Washington, 1913-14). In trying to find the objectives, the goals, and the purpose for which Congress enacted the various land laws, it has been necessary to examine the Journal of the Continental Congress, 1784-1789, the Annals of Congress, 1789-1824, the Register of Debates in Congress, 1825-1837, the Con- |