The handling of the Oregon's swamp land grant during the seventies and eighties was wholly discreditable to the state. To say that it exhibits the extreme of credulity and supineness on the part of the Legislatures and Governors of these decades is placing the most charitable interpretation possible upon the policy pursued. It was not an orgy of land looting in which any considerable number of Oregon people participated but rather a neatly executed scheme on the part of foreign capitalists who got a half a million acres of valuable lands for a song. A few private citizens served as tools and Legislatures and state officials were duped into acquiescence.
The Legislature of 1870 was befoozled into passing the act, already referred to, under which a single individual could become purchaser of an unlimited area of such lands as amenable state agents could be induced to designate as swamp lands. A payment of 20 cents an acre secured possession of these lands from the state and if three crops of hay were cut within ten years they were accounted "reclaimed" ; a further payment of 80 cents an acre secured full title to the lands so far as the state could give it.
The sale of the swamp lands was so bound up with the selection of them that it is exceedingly difficult to discuss these transactions separately. In fact, we shall see that the great body of the lands were construed as sold some years before they were selected. But to return to the progress in selection. The first fruits of the perverse handling of the matter of selection appear in the statement of the board of school land commissioners of 1876. By that time the selections by the state agents in the aggregate amounted to some 324,000 acres; yet only 1,336 acres had been approved to the state by the national authorities. Several purchasers who had made first payments to the state, on the basis of its right to these lands under the procedure of the act of 1870, were withdrawing their money as their lands were being taken away from them by preemptors under national law.[1]
- ↑ Report of Commissioners for Sale of School and University Lands, 1876, p. 14.
