ways honourable, secured titles to enormous tracts which are now generally in the hands of corporations. In one Oregon county which contains patented lands amounting to 1,127,180 acres, seven cattle companies hold a combined acreage of 512,955 or almost one-half of the whole. One of these companies is believed to own 229,000 acres in that county, and nearly as much more in each of two other Oregon counties. In various Pacific and Rocky Mountain states the company owns an empire aggregating 22,000 sections or 1,408,000 acres.
Much of the territory now held by the cattle companies was originally filched from the National Government by the well-known device of the "dummy " entryman; some of it was once embraced in a wagon road grant unwisely made by Congress, which was purchased from the grantees; some of it was land falsely, or at least doubtfully, described as swamp land and as such sold at the rate of one dollar per acre; and some was state school land the engrossing of which was permitted by the laxness of the state in enforcing the laws intended to restrict the sale to actual settlers.^ Some of it, probably, was secured by the use of land scrip. And there are many cases, it is charged, in which homesteaders were terrorised by hired thugs into selling their rights to others, for the benefit of the cattle companies.
The companies an obstacle to progress in grain 1 For the facts concerning the titles to the big ranches in Harney County, Oregon, the writer is indebted to Mr. H. K. Shirk,
