Sunset (magazine)/Volume 36/The Land-Grant Lobby

The Land-Grant Lobby

ONCE upon a time S. A. D. Puter wrote a book in which he placed a royal crown upon his head. The crown was made of infamy and the kingdom was that of the Oregon land-fraud ring, the exposure of which sent a United States senator, a millionaire and a number of professional land-sharks to the penitentiary. Today S. A. D. Puter, self-styled land-fraud king, is lobbying with a brazen face in the halls of Congress on behalf of schemers who would divert the unearned timber increment on two million acres into their own pockets.

Congressman W. W. Wilson—of Chicago—has introduced a bill giving those who have filed claims on the Oregon railroad grant lands—See "Skinning the Land Grant Bear" in the February Sunset—a preferential right to select and buy 160 acres of the land at $2.50 an acre, the claimants to have one year in which to exercise their option. About 16,000 claims have been filed, ninety-nine per cent of them by speculators and professional public-land jugglers who hoped to obtain for $400 a quarter section of land covered with timber worth from $1000 to $10,000. For years designing, shrewd swindlers have used this difference between cost and value as a bait with which to fleece the innocent and unwary out of "location fees" from fifty dollars upward, even though they knew that the title to the land was in dispute. Several swindlers have been convicted and more have been indicted for this fraud. Now Puter, his record notwithstanding, has the unspeakable gall to appear openly before Congressional committees and smoothly, expensively expound the claim of persons who have no more right to a gift from the nation than they have to the iron cross.

Fortunately the Oregon Journal is waging a relentless fight against Puter and his ilk. The Portland newspaper is endeavoring valiantly to keep the vast timber domain out of the multitude of itching palms reaching for it, and its efforts will be successful unless an overdose of preparedness gives Puter and his cohorts a chance to get away with the loot. But there is a string to this loot. The railroad has been confirmed in all its possessory rights subject to the conditions of the grant by the Supreme court, and the railroad need not sell a single acre to the 16,000 claimants unless it chooses to do so.

In the meantime it is pertinent to ask why a Representative from Chicago should father a bill apparently drawn to put money in the pockets of a Puter.