The man having left the land office, I repaired immediately to the telegraph office and wired the descriptions of the lands I wished to enter, to the chief clerk of the land office at Madison, authorizing him to draw on my account with the state treasurer, to pay for the same. The train left Stevens Point that afternoon for Madison, and both interested parties were passengers. Arriving at the land office, I found the lands telegraphed for, to have been duly secured.
This instance is given to show by how slender a thread a matter of great interest sometimes hangs. Had the pigeon not been left on the section line, or had it not been discovered by the competing land hunter, the man with the hobnails in his boots would have been the victor, and his would have been the joy of having won that which he had striven hard to attain.
CHAPTER IX.
Tracing Gentlemen Timber Thieves—Getting Wet—Fawn.
I have said that the country tributary to the waters of the Wisconsin River constituted a good field for the selection of valuable government pine-timbered lands. It is equally true that it was a country where the custom had grown among lumbermen to enter a few forties of government land, sufficient at least to make a show of owning a tract of timber on which to conduct a winter's operation of logging, and then to cut the timber from adjacent or near by forty-acre tracts of land yet belonging to the government.
This method of trespassing upon the timber not owned by the operator, but being the property of the United States, was carried on to a greater extent there than in any other section of the state in which I was familiar with the methods and practices of logging pine timber. Many logging jobbers having formed this habit of helping themselves to government timber, found it difficult, after the government lands had been entered by private purchase of others than themselves, to discontinue their practice of taking timber that was not their own. Reforms of such habits do not come voluntarily nor easily, as a rule, but generally under some sort of pressure.
In the years following my purchase of considerable tracts of timber on these waters, I found it necessary, annually, to make a trip into the country where our timber lands were situated, to ascertain whether or not there had been near-by logging camps during the preceding winter, and if so, to carefully run out the lines around our own timber, to determine whether or not trespass had been committed on any of them. In many instances I found that this was the fact. One spring I found a very considerable number of the best pine trees cut from the interior of forty acres of excellent timber, so that the selling value of the whole tract was injured far more than the full value of the amount of timber that had been unlawfully cut and hauled away. The trespass had been committed by a man prominent in the community and well-known among the lumbermen of the Wisconsin River. The late Gust Wilson of Wisconsin, a fine man, a lawyer of much experience in lumber cases in that state, and whose counsel was considered of a high order, was retained to bring suit to recover the value of the timber trespassed. Not only that, but, annoyed at the boldness of the trespass, I wished also to have him prosecuted criminally for theft. Mr. Wilson said in reply to the request, "Now, don't try that. All of those fellows have had 'some of them hams,' and you can't get a jury in all that country that will bring you in a verdict of guilty, no matter how great and strong your evidence may be." There was nothing left to do under Mr. Wilson's advice but to cool off, keep smiling, and collect the best price for the stumpage taken (not stolen), so as to be polite to the gentlemanly wrongdoer.