ACTUAL SETTLERS EXCLUDED FROM PUBLIC DOMAIN.
"Wealthy speculators and powerful syndicates," reported Commissioner
Sparks,
covet the public domain, and a survey is the first step in the accomplishment of this desire. The bulk of deposit surveys have been made in timber districts and grazing regions, and the surveyed lands have immediately been entered under the timber land, preŽmption, commuted homestead, timber-culture and desert-land acts. So thoroughly organized has been the entire system of procuring the survey and making illegal entry of lands, that agents and attorneys engaged in this business have been advised of every official proceeding, and enabled to present entry applications for the lands at the very moment of the filing of the plots of survey in the local land offices.
Prospectors employed by lumber firms and corporations seek out and report the most valuable timber tracts in California, Oregon, Washington Territory or elsewhere; settler's applications are manufactured as a basis for survey; contracts are entered into and pushed through the General Land Office in hot haste; a skeleton survey is made… entry papers, made perfect in form by competent attorneys, are filed in bulk, and the manipulators enter into possession of the land. . . . This has been the course of proceeding heretofore. [Footnote: House Documents, etc., 1885-86, ii: 167.]
Commissioner Sparks described a case where it was discovered by his special agents in California that an English firm had obtained 100,000 acres of the choicest red-wood lands in that State. These lands were then estimated to be worth $100 an acre. The cost of procuring surveys and fraudulent entries did not probably exceed $3 an acre. [Footnote: House Ex. Docs., etc., 1885-86, ii: 167.]
"In the same manner," Commissioner Sparks continued, "extensive coal deposits in our Western territory are acquired in mass through expedited surveys, followed by fraudulent pre-emption and commuted homestead entries." [Footnote: Ibid.] He went on to tell that nearly the whole of the Territory (now State) of Wyoming, and large portions of Montana, had been surveyed under the deposit system, and the lands on the streams fraudulently taken up under the desert land act, to the exclusion of actual settlers. Nearly all of Colorado, the very best cattle-raising portions of New Mexico, the rich timber lands of California, the splendid forest lands of Washington Territory and the principal part of the extensive pine lands of Minnesota had been fraudulently seized in the same way. [Footnote: Ibid., 168.] In all of the Western States and Territories these fraudulent surveys had accomplished the seizure of the best and most valuable lands. "To enable the pressing tide of Western immigration to secure homes upon the public domain," Commissioner Sparks urged, "it is necessary… that hundreds of millions of acres of public lands now appropriated should be wrested from illegal control." [Footnote: Ibid.] But nothing was done to recover these stolen lands. At the very time Commissioner Sparks—one of the very few incorruptible Commissioners of Public Lands,—was writing this, the land-grabbing interests were making the greatest exertions to get him removed. During his tenure of office they caused him to be malevolently harassed and assailed. After he left office they resumed complete domination of the Land Commissioner's Bureau. [Footnote: The methods of capitalists in causing the removal of officials who obstructed or exposed their crimes and violent seizure of property were continuous and long enduring. It was a very old practice. When Astor was debauching and swindling Indian tribes, he succeeded, it seems, by exerting his power at Washington, in causing Government agents standing in his way to be dismissed from office. The following is an extract from a communication, in 1821, of the U. S. Indian agent at Green Bay, Wisconsin, to the U. S. Superintendent of Indian Trade:
"The Indians are frequently kept in a state of intoxication, giving their furs, etc., at a great sacrifice for whiskey…. The agents of Mr. Astor hold out the idea that they will, ere long be able to break down the factories [Government agencies]; and they menace the Indian agents and others who may interfere with them, with dismission from office through Mr. Astor. They say that a representation from Messrs. Crooks and Stewart (Mr. Astor's agents) led to the dismission of the Indian agent at Mackinac, and they also say that the Indian agent here is to be dismissed…."—U.S. Senate Documents, First Session, Seventeenth Congress, 1821-22, Vol. i, Doc. No. 60:52-53.]