Hermann was equally ready to believe all this, because Hendricks at one time had been the tutor of his children, and the Commissioner was susceptible to sympathetic influences.
Years went by without any definite results from the numerous complaints of the settlers, many of whom became disheartened and left the country. Not so with Putnam, however. He kept pegging away at the Land Department in Washington until at la.st Special Agent E. D. Stratford (he of Kribs and C. A. Smith fame) was detailed to investigate conditions. It was the same old story about everything being all right, and again the settlers were left in the lurch, and again there was another exodus from the struggling homesteads. Putnam must have sprung from Revolutionary stock, however, as he never gave up hope—or at least, if he did. it had been replaced by a determination to fight it out on that line if it took all summer.
His letters, crude in composition, but wonderfully impressive, kept piling up in the General Land Office until they became traditions. He sent maps drafted with lead pencil on brown wrapping paper from a country store showing the extent to the depredations, but Hermann was too busy to pay any further attention to them, and in his desperation the aid of the United States Attorney for Oregon was invoked in suppressing the evils. Not being well up in the world on such matters. Putnam thought that anything relating to the Department of Justice was all that its name implied, but he failed to take the fact into consideration that John H. Hall was the United States Attorney before whom his grievances were laid.
The evidence produced during the trial of Hall indicated that about the only active interest displayed in the matter by the United States Attorney was to use the situation as a club for forcing Steiwer—who was a candidate for State Senator—to vote for the election of Charles W. Fulton as United States Senator, it being shown that Hall was an aspirant for re-appointment, and that both Fulton and Senator Mitchell could be relied upon to support him for the position. It was brought out by the testimony of Steiwer himself that Hall had made intimations to him of a nature to convey this idea, and Hendricks testified also that Hall and himself had discussed this feature of the situation at a private conference. At all events, after Fulton had been elected to the United States Senate, in which he was aided by Steiwer's vote—as he only received eleven majority at the legislative session in February, 1903—nothing further was done in connection with the charge of maintaining the illegal inclosure until quite a while afterwards.
At this juncture Putnam and his associates became disgusted with conditions, and finally appealed to Secretary of the Interior Hitchcock. The latter lost no time in ordering an investigation, with the result that Edward W. Dixon, at that time a Special Agent of the General Land Office, but now Chief of Field Division No. 3, was directed to make a careful inquiry into the situation. In their letter to Secretary Hitchcock appealing for aid, the settlers had declared that inasmuch as President Roosevelt had been a "rough rider," it was proper that one of the same type should be sent to make the investigations, instead of some person content to lay around comfortable quarters and take the word of those interested that there had been no violations of law. In this respect, Dixon answered every requirement of the settlers, as he was a man of determined character, in addition to being thoroughly honest and incorruptible. It was such a novelty, in fact, for the settlers to come in contact with him, after their experience with special agents of the Loomis and Stratford stripe, that it became difficult for them to realize that their long and earnest prayers for salvation were about to be answered. His coming, in fact, was on a par with the relief of the beleagured garrison at Lucknow by the Highlanders during the Sepoy insurrection, and was certainly equally as welcome.
Dixon did not let the grass grow under his feet when he found out that the settlers had not misrepresented anything in their complaints. In short, he soon ascertained that they had been extremely modest in that regard, and Page 360
