lawyer in Portland who was steering the deal through the law. Father Schell gathered facts, records, evidence, which Secretary Hitchcock's prosecutors told me they wished they had had. This tireless priest reported his facts to the local land offices, to the United States district attorney, to the Interior Department at Washington, and to the newspapers. He knocked at every door of the system, excepting only those which opened to knock him. Nothing was done. On the contrary, his life was threatened; the lawyer attempted first to bribe, then to blackmail him; and his church rebuked and finally twice transferred him. Well, Father Schell wrote to Mr. Hitchcock and he received an acknowledgment from him, but nothing was done. And the priest went to Washington to see the Secretary. He saw the "ring." The Secretary was "busy." To break through the "ring," Father Schell appealed to Senator Mitchell, of Oregon, and he thought he had the Oregon "pull." But no, the "ring" said the Secretary was "out." They referred him to the Assistant Secretary of the Interior, who referred him to the Assistant Attorney-General's office, which referred him on, and on, and on. Father Schell ran round and round the icy circle of official Washington until he became known as the "crazy priest." That "crazy priest" had the truth and he cried it aloud in the wilderness; when he needed help from on high, he was disciplined, and when, at last, Rome fell, and there was no man to deny his testimony, then his superiors, the church in Oregon, boasted that "it was a priest, the Rev. Joseph Schell, who first called attention to the land frauds!"
Why is it that the churches are so often caught on the side of wrong? Why is it that the forces of evil, oftener than those of good, defeat evil? The land frauds, like the life insurance graft, and the corruption of so many cities and states were first exposed, not by good men, but by the quarrels of the grafters over the graft. Secretary Hitchcock, having had Father Schell's explicit complaints investigated, by the "ring," concluded, with the "ring," that the priest was unreliable and his charges false. That settled Father Schell and, coming as he did, at the end of two or three years' experience with cranks, his settlement settled outside informers generally with Mr. Hitchcock. The Secretary's ear was for the men about him, and, stiff-necked and obstinate, those who know him have long wondered how it happened that he, of all the secretaries of the Interior, came to be the discoverer of the ancient graft of the General Land Office.
Inferior Department Cliques
The explanation is simple. In the Land Office there were two cliques. Binger Hermann, the commissioner, was the head of one, the so-called "Oregon bunch." W. A. Richards, the assistant commissioner, was the head of the other, the "Wyoming push." Richards wanted Hermann's place, and his side was the stronger. He had with him his clerk, James T. Macey; the assistant attorney-general assigned to the Interior Department, Willis Van Devanter; and, best of all, the secretary's private secretary, W. Scott Smith. Back of the Wyoming clique were Senators Warren and Clark; back of "Oregon" were Senators Mitchell and Fulton. Not all the men on a side were after the same thing, but all were united against Binger Hermann, the sly.
Richards and Macey watched the commissioner. They knew what he was doing. They didn't expose him publicly. They meant only to expose Hermann to the Secretary. So they worked upon Mr. Hitchcock quietly. They poisoned his mind with doubts concerning his unctuous land commissioner till, in 1902, when the opportunity offered for a bold play, Mr. Hitchcock was ripe with suspicion.
Beginning of the Exposure
The opportunity came in the form of a letter from one Joost R. Schneider. It was a remarkable complaint. Schneider charged that F. A. Hyde and John A. Benson, two enterprising land operators on the Pacific Coast, practiced fraud on a grand scale. The Federal Government, in Lincoln's day, had set aside certain sections of the public land to be disposed of to raise funds for the public schools. When years later some of these lands had to be taken back for forest reserves (and other Federal purposes), an Act was passed to permit the states (and others) to make up for their losses by choosing "in lieu thereof" an equal amount of unclaimed land somewhere else. Schneider, Benson and Hyde operated under these laws. They would settle
