amending the act of September 27, 1850, commonly called the donation law, so as to protect settlers who had failed to file the required notice, and allowing them to make up their deficiencies in former grants. A large amount of land was taken up under this act.[1] In the same manner the state was indemnified for the school lands settled upon previous to the passage of the act donating the sixteenth and thirty-sixth sections for the support of schools. In 1876 congress passed an act for the relief of those persons whose donation claims had been taken without compensation for military reservations, which reservations were afterward abandoned as useless. The settlers who had continued to reside on such lands were granted patents the same as if no interruption to their title had occurred.
According to the act of admission, five per cent of the net proceeds of sales of all public lands lying within the state which should be sold after the admission of the state, after deducting the expenses incident to the sales, was granted to the state for the construction of public roads and improvements. The first and only public improvement made with this fund was the construction of a canal and locks at the falls of the Willamette River opposite Oregon City, begun in 1870 and completed in 1872. After this use of a portion of the public-improvement fund, the five-per-cent fund was diverted from the uses indicated by law, and by consent of congress converted to the common-school fund, to prevent its being appropriated to local schemes of less importance to the state.[2]
- ↑ Zabriskie's Land Laws, 636-7; Portland Or. Herald, Feb. 28, 1871; Sec. Int. Rept, 77-86, 44th cong. 1st sess.
- ↑ Or. Laws, 1870, 14; Governor's Message, app., 1872, 73-4; Deady's Hist. Or., MS., 52; Portland Standard, Jan. 7, 1881. The first embezzlement of public money in Oregon was from the five-per-cent fund, amounting to $5,424.25. The drafts were stolen by Sam. E. May, secretary of state, and applied to his own use. Or. Governor's Message, app., 79-113; Woods' Recollections, MS., 7-9. It was this crime that brought ruin on Jesse Applegate, one of the bondsmen, whose home was sold at forced sale in 1883, after long litigation. S. E. May was a young man of good talents and fine personal appearance, though with a skin as dark as his character, and which might easily have belonged to a mulatto or mestizo.
