VAST THEFTS OF LAND.
But plaudits were too hasty. To the utter surprise of the people the law began to work in a perverse direction. Its provisions had read well enough on a casual scrutiny. Where lay the trouble? It lay in just a few words deftly thrown in, which the crowd did not notice. This law, acclaimed as one of great benefit to every man aspiring for a home and land, was arranged so that the capitalist cattle syndicates could get immense areas. The lever was the omission of any provision requiring actual settlement. The livestock corporations thereupon sent in their swarms of dummies to the "desert" lands (many of which, in reality, were not desert but excellent grazing lands), had their dummies get patents from the Government and then transfer the lands. In this way the cattlemen became possessed of enormous areas; and to-day these tracts thus gotten by fraud are securely held intact, forming what may be called great estates, for on many of them live the owners in expansive baronial style.
In numerous instances, law was entirely dispensed with. Vast tracts of land were boldly appropriated by sheep and cattle rangers who had not even a pretense of title. Enclosing these lands with fences, the rangers claimed them as their own, and hired armed guards to drive off intruders, and kill if necessary. [Footnote: "Within the cattle region," reported Commissioner Sparks, "it is notorious that actual settlements are generally prevented and made practically impossible outside the proximity of towns, through the unlawful control of the country, maintained by cattle companies."—U. S. Senate Docs., 1885- 86, Vol. viii, No. 134:4 and 5.
Acting Commissioner Harrison of the General Land Office, reporting on March 14, 1884, to Secretary of the Interior Teller, showed in detail the vast extent of the unlawful fencing of public lands. In the Arkansas Valley in Colorado at least 1,000,000 acres of public domain were illegally seized. The Prairie Cattle Company, composed of Scotch capitalists, had fenced in more than a million acres in Colorado, and a large number of other cattle companies in Colorado had seized areas ranging from 20,000 to 200,000 acres. "In Kansas," Harrison went on, "entire counties are reported as [illegally] fenced. In Wyoming, one hundred and twenty-five cattle companies are reported having fencing on the public lands. Among the companies and persons reported as having 'immense' or 'very large' areas inclosed . . . are the Dubuque, Cimarron and Renello Cattle [companies] in Colorado; the Marquis de Morales in Colorado; the Wyoming Cattle Company (Scotch) in Wyoming; and the Rankin Live Stock Company in Nebraska.
"There is a large number of cases where inclosures range from 1,000 to 25,000 acres and upwards.
"The reports of special agents show that the fraudulent entries of public land within the enclosures are extensively made by the procurement and in the interest of stockmen, largely for the purpose of controlling the sources of water supply."—"Unauthorized Fencing of Public Lands," U. S. Senate Docs., First Session, Forty-eighth Congress, 1883-84, Vol. vi, Doc. No. 127:2.] Murder after murder was committed. In this usurpation the august Supreme Court of the United States upheld them. And the grounds of the decision were what?
The very extraordinary dictum that a settler could not claim any right of preŽmption on public lands in possession of another who had enclosed, settled upon and improved them. This was the very reverse of every known declaration of common and of statute law. No court, supreme or inferior, had ever held that because the proceeds of theft were improved or were refurbished a bit, the sufferer was thereby estopped from recovery. This decision showed anew how, while the courts were ever ready to enforce the law literally against the underlings and penniless, they were as active in fabricating tortuous constructions coinciding not always, but nearly always, with the demands and interests of the capitalist class.
It has long been the fashion on the part of a certain prevalent school of writers and publicists to excoriate this or that man, this or that corporation, as the ringleader in the orgy of corruption and oppression. This practice, arising partly from passionate or ill- considered judgment, and in part from ignorance of the subject, has been the cause of much misunderstanding, popular and academic.
No one section of the capitalist class can be held solely responsible; nor were the morals and ethics of any one division different from those of the others. The whole capitalist class was coated with the same tar. Shipping merchants, traders in general, landholders, banking and railroad corporations, factory owners, cattle syndicates, public utility companies, mining magnates, lumber corporations—all were participants in various ways in the subverting of the functions of government to their own fraudulent ends at the expense of the whole producing class.
While the railroad corporations were looting the public treasury and the public domain, and vesting in themselves arbitrary powers of taxation and proscription, all of the other segments of the capitalist class were, at the same time, enriching themselves in the same way or similar ways. The railroads were much denounced; but wherein did their methods differ from those of the cattle syndicates, the industrial magnates or the lumber corporations? The lumber barons wanted their predacious share of the public domain; throughout certain parts of the West and in the South were far-stretching, magnificent forests covered with the growth of centuries. To want and to get them were the same thing, with a Government in power representative of capitalism.