THE GRANTS FRAUDULENTLY MANIPULATED
Many of the canal companies, so richly endowed by the Government with great land grants, made little attempt to build canals. What some of them did was to turn about and defraud the Government out of incalculably valuable mineral deposits which were never included in the original grants.
In his annual report for 1885, Commisioner Sparks, of the United States General Land Office told (House Executive Documents, 1885-86, Vol. II) how, by 1885, the Portage Lake "canal" was only a worthless ditch and a complete fraud. What had the company done with its large land grant? Instead of accepting the grant as intended by Congress, it had, by means of fraudulent surveys, and doubtless by official corruption, caused at least one hundred thousand acres of its grant to be surveyed in the very richest copper lands of Wisconsin.
The grants originally made by Congress were meant to cover swamp lands—that is, lands not particularly valuable for agricultural uses, but which had a certain value for other purposes. Mineral lands were strictly excluded. Such was the law: the practice was very different. The facility with which capitalists caused the most valuable mineral, grazing, agricultural and timber lands to be fraudulently surveyed as "swamp" lands, is described at length a little later on in this work. Commissioner Sparks wrote that the one hundred thousand acres appropriated in violation of explicit law "were taken outside of legal limits, and that the lands selected both without and within such limits were interdicted lands on the copper range" (p. 189). Those stolen copper deposits were never recovered by the Government nor was any attempt made to forfeit them. They comprise to-day part of the great copper mines of the Copper Trust, owned largely by the Standard Oil Company.
The St. Mary's Falls Canal Company likewise stole large areas of rich copper deposits. This fact was clearly revealed in various official reports, and particularly in the suit, a few years ago, of Chandler vs. Calumet and Hecla Mining Company (U. S. Reports, Vol. 149, pp. 79-95). This suit disclosed the fact that the mines of the Calumet and Hecla Mining Company were located on part of the identical alleged "swamp" lands, granted by Congress in 1852. The plaintiff, Chandler, claimed an interest in the mines. Concluding the court's decision, favoring the Calumet and Hecla Mining Company, this significant note (so illustrative of the capitalist connections of the judiciary), appears: "Mr. Justice Brown, being interested in the result, did not sit in this case and took no part in its decision."
Whatever superficial or partial writers may say of the benevolent origin of railroads, the fact is that railroad construction was ushered in by a widespread corruption of legislators that put to shame the previous debauchery in getting bank charters. In nearly every work on the subject the assertion is dwelt upon that railroad builders were regarded as public benefactors; that people and legislatures were only too glad to present them with public resources. There is just a slight substance of truth in this alleged historical writing, but nothing more. The people, it is true, were eager, for their own convenience, to have the railroads built, but unwilling to part with their hard-wrung taxes, their splendid public domain, and their rights only that a few men, part gamblers and part men of energy and foresight, should divert the entire donation to their own aggrandizement. For this attitude the railroad promoters had an alluring category of arguments ready.