Under the Act of 1864, the Central Pacific was entitled to receive its lands upon completion of stretches of 20 consecutive miles in a fashion acceptable to commissioners appointed by the President of the United States. Upon acceptance by the government, the sections of land to which the company was entitled were listed and mapped and sent to the United States Land Office in the land district in which the land was located. The lists were examined there by registrars and receivers, and when declared cleared, the railroad company paid for the surveying, selecting, and conveying. Upon the payment of the fees, the lists were certified by the Surveyor-General of the state, and forwarded to the General Land Office at Washington for further examination. If found correct by the office in Washington, patents were issued. If there was doubt, the questionable cases were held for further examination.
In all this procedure delays were frequent. The initiative in the process of conveyance of land lay with the railroad company and not with the government, so that failure to file lists with the local land office or failure to pay into the United States Treasury the cost of surveys of listed lands prevented progress in the distribution of the grant. On the other hand, the slowness of the government in making surveys hindered the railroad in its selections. Still another reason for delay was the fact that within the mineral belt the Commissioner of the General Land Office required the railroad to file affidavits defining the mineral or non-mineral character of lands by 40-acre tracts. This requirement arrested the selection and patenting of lands, because the government survey did not subdivide tracts of 640 acres, and there was no way of identifying any particular sixteenth section of a tract. There were delays also in determining the title to lands claimed by homesteaders and pre-emptors, and there were delays due to the faulty organization of the Federal Land Office.
Land Office Responsible for Delays
Opponents of the Central Pacific freely charged that the company refrained from patenting its land in order to avoid the payment of taxes. This the company denied, pointing to the fact that the lands listed to June 1, 1887, exceeded the lands patented by 622,612.54 acres, and that the cash deposited with the United States Land Department to cover the cost of surveys exceeds the amount charged against the company up to January 15, 1886, by $28,771.92.[83] Mr. Stanford declared that it was the policy of the company to select its lands and present lists as promptly as possible, in order that lands might be disposed of to settlers, and it does appear that it was to the advantage of the Central Pacific to secure title as quickly as it could in the mineral belts, because the company was protected in its possession of land, which later turned out to contain minerals, if at the time of patenting no minerals had been discovered.
The evidence is clear enough that the delay in the patenting of lands to the Central Pacific Railroad was due mainly to the inadequacy of the staff in the General Land Office at Washington and not to the policies of the railroad itself. This is shown by the wide disparity between listings and patents. The excess of lands selected over lands patented averaged 57,000 acres during the five years ending June 30, 1869. During the next five years the average excess was 64,000 acres, and during the five years ending June 30, 1886, it rose to 248,000. In 1887, as has been pointed out, there was a difference of 622,612.54 acres between the amount of acres which had been listed and those which had been passed to patent. Between 1887 and 1897, there was no year in which the Central Pacific had less than 300,000 acres of land listed and selected and the selections on file in the General Land Office for land in California alone. Yet it is not so important to fix responsibility in this matter, as to observe that the construction of the Central Pacific was not aided to any material degree by the lands offered to it under the legislation of 1862 and 1864. Up to the beginning of 1870, the company had received only four patents, totaling 144,386.63 acres,[84] which if sold at $2.50 per acre would have brought it $360,966.57. As a matter of fact, less than this was disposed of in the early years, and what was sold was on terms, not for cash in hand. In the later period, land-grant bonds with a lien on the land grant were sold to investors. The first issue of such bonds was, however, in 1871.
The bearing of these conditions on the land-grant policy of the United States is very plain. Congress was legislating in order to get a transcontinental railroad built. Every form of assistance which could be immediately transmuted into funds facilitated construction to the full value of those funds. In contrast with this, assistance which could be realized on only after a lapse of years, served not as an aid to construction, but as a reward to promoters for having taken risks. While to some extent the land grant to the Central Pacific may have aided the sale of Central Pacific first mortgage bonds, in the main its effect was to give a grossly excessive and unnecessary profit to a few persons who held most of the stock of the company, without having invested any considerable capital of their own. Such a policy needs only to be understood to be condemned.
Fixing Western Base of Sierras
Both the subsidy and the land-grant clauses of the Acts of 1862 and 1864 were to receive interpretation by the courts. The subsidy provisions will be discussed again in a later chapter, so that the provisions designated to secure repayment of the government loan need not be considered at this time. Mention may be made, however, of President Lincoln’s action in fixing the western base of the Sierras at the point where the line of the Central Pacific crossed Arcade Creek in the Sacramento Valley, a location 7 miles east of Sacramento, in a country which a casual observer would not be likely to call mountainous.
It is not at first sight evident why this point was chosen. The junction of Arcade Creek and the Central Pacific Railroad happens to be at about the edge of the alluvial plain of the Sacramento River, and so is marked by a slight rising of the ground. The rise is not, however, great. The beginning of the Sierra granite is at Rocklin, 22 miles east of Sacramento, and this spot rather than the one selected has the better right to be considered the real beginning of the mountains, so far as any single point can be fixed. As a matter of fact, the advisers of the President, who were in this instance the political authorities of the state of California, made their recommendation on the strength of what they conceived to be the purpose of the federal act rather than on scientific grounds. Mr. Whitney, state geologist, told the government that the intent of Congress was clearly to give a subsidy of $48,000 per mile over the most mountainous section of the road. If, therefore, he said, a distance of 150 miles measured east from the point in the Sacramento Valley where the ascent commenced would clear the most difficult and mountainous portion of the Sierra Nevadas and reach the valley on the eastern slope, then it seemed reasonable that the base of the Sierra Nevadas should be taken as beginning at that point. He recommended the place where the line of the Central Pacific crossed Arcade Creek as such a point.
The same place was selected by the Surveyor-General of the state of California, on the principle that the two extremities of the 150 miles upon which the maximum subsidy was to be given should rest upon corresponding grades, the one to the west, the other to the east of the mountains. These two recommendations seem to have been controlling, although the United States Surveyor-General for California suggested a location further east, where the ascending grade of the Sierras became plainly perceptible to the naked eye.[85] Since this interpretation of the act increased the bond subsidy which the Central Pacific was to receive, the company naturally made no objection.