902 



ANNUAL REPORTS OF DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 



departments jointly. An important item of the work of the district 

 assistants is the comment which they submit to the Solicitor upon 

 formal o])inions rendered by each other. In many cases these com- 

 ments are exhaustive discussions of the questions involved in the 

 opinions under consideration, and they are always useful and valua- 

 ble to the Solicitor in his final review of the opinions. 



The opinions and comments submitted by district assistants 

 during the year are tabulated as follows: 



CONTRACTS. 



During the year the Solicitor and his assistants prepared and exam- 

 ined for legal sufficiency upwards of 1,250 contracts for the Forest 

 Service. These contracts included leases, cooperative agreements, 

 bonds, right-of-way stipulations, timber-sale agreements, and agree- 

 ments for construction of works necessary for the proper administra- 

 tion of the forests. Practically all of the cooperative agreements 

 were with conservation or agricultural departments of the States. 

 Agreements for cooperation in fighting fire on the watersheds of 

 navigable streams, under the act of March 1, 1911, were perfected 

 during the year with the States of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, 

 Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Wis- 

 consin, Minnesota, Oregon, and Washington. 



Contracts were prepared in the districts as follows: 



DiBtrictl 292 



DiBtrict2 262 



DiBtrict3 154 



Disfxict 4 164 



District 5 158 



District 6 136 



CLAIMS. 



This office has handled during the year 1,568 cases involving claims 

 to lands within the National Forests under the homestead, timber and 

 stone, mineral, lieu selection, and other special and general land laws 

 of the United States. An explanatory table of these cases is given 

 in a subsequent part of this report, beginning at page 1013. The cases 

 are there divided according to the districts in which they were dis- 

 tributed. This table shows the claimant, character of claim, National 

 Forest in which the land lies, quantity of land involved, and status 

 of the claim on June 30, 1912, the close of the fiscal year. These 

 cases embraced upwards of 400,000 acres of land, supporting many 

 million feet of valuable merchantable timber. Not all of these cases 

 came on for hearing during the year, but each one required some 

 attention, varying in degree with the progress of the case in the In- 

 terior Department. In previous annual reports of this office full 

 details of the method and procedure in handling the claims cases 



