1900. 



AMERICAN FORESTRY ASSOCIATION. 



'57 



regard of the Federal provisions became 

 the common practice, and have, indeed, 

 continued almost undiminished down to 

 the present dav. In the next place, when 

 iron and steel began largely to replace 

 wood in the construction of ships, there 

 was no further pressing need of the reser- 

 vation of Live Oak. Again, such meas- 

 ures could never have been pushed except 

 for the prevailing ignorance as to the real 

 extent and character of the country's 

 forest resources. But perhaps the effect 

 of this early legislation would have been 

 more beneficial, it" it had not been for the 

 passage of laws whose provisions are 

 either ambiguous or inconsistent with the 

 above, or both. Sections |_'"^ and |~^i 

 of the Revised Statutes contain regula- 

 tions covering the same heads, but fur- 

 nishing other definitions of tin- offense- and 

 also different penalties for the offender. 

 Redundacv and confliction have, indeed. 

 always been a drag upon the operation of 

 the Federal timber la\\s. The want of a 

 satisfactory definition of the offence and 

 of the penalty attached to it robbed these 

 la\\s even of effective expression. Again, 

 among the pioneers of the West there had 

 grown the feeling, sprung from frontier 

 independence, that government property 

 was common property; and to this \\as 

 added the natural inference that a govern- 

 ment which was unable to frame adequate 

 or intelligible laws for the protection of 

 its property roundly deserved to be robbed. 

 Between the years of i.XjXund 1831 the 

 government experimented with two plan- 

 tations of Live Oak, one near the Pensacola 

 Navy Yard, and one at Deer Point, Fla. 

 According to existing accounts the Pen- 

 sacola plantation proved unsuccessful. 

 The Deer Point plantation appears to have 

 been more ambitious and perhaps better 

 managed. Judge Breckinridge had the 

 supervision of it. and from his letters to 

 the Secretary of the Navy and the reports 

 of Clark, his overseer, it would seem that 

 the work done consisted of the grubbing 

 out of over-crowded patches of Live Oak, 

 the planting of seedlings over sparse 

 areas, the cutting of fire-roads and the 

 planting of acorns. Apparently the plan- 

 tation throve under this treatment ; but 



the political interests changed with the 

 appointment of a new Secretary of the 

 Navy, difficulties about appropriations 

 arose, and when a special agent was ap- 

 pointed to inquire into the progress of the 

 work, his report, which is in part com- 

 mendatory and in part equivocal, deter- 

 mined the Secretary to discontinue the 

 \\ork, and it was never afterwards re- 

 sumed. 



From the date of the first Live Oak 

 laws down to 1831, the Secretary of the 

 Navy had charge of the naval timber res- 

 ervations. In that year this authority 

 passed into the hands of the Solicitor of 

 the Treasury, where it remained till 1855, 

 the year in which it was transferred to the 

 Department of the Interior. That De- 

 partment, through the General Land Of- 

 fice, has since had the care of the public 

 timber lands, both reserved and unreserved. 

 Special appropriations for the protection 

 of the public timber lands from theft be- 

 i in iN~j. Fi\e thousand dollars were 

 annually appropriated till 1878, when, 

 the depredations having goneon unchecked 

 Congress increased the appropriations to 

 $25,000. After that year the yearly sum 

 given for this purpose rose to as much as 

 $120,000 and declined, till in 1898, the in- 

 creased appropriation of $175,000 was 

 made, which this year has been increased 

 again under the new Federal Forest Ser- 

 vice, to the sum of $300,000. 



IV. THE FEDERAL LAND POLICY. 



Intimately connected with the Federal 



J 



forest policy, and in large measure ex- 

 planatory of it, is the general Federal 

 policy with regard to the disposal of its 

 public lands. The government was in- 

 terested in encouraging the squatter, the 

 homesteader and the miner, to take and de- 

 velop these lands. The Preemption law 

 was passed in 1841. In 1862 came the 

 Homestead law, which permitted a settler 

 to acquire 160 acres of public land after a 

 residence of five years, its aim being, of 

 course, to further agricultural settlement. 

 Fraudulent settlement for purposes other 

 than agricultural, however, soon began to 

 be common. The settler had only to pay 

 the moderate entry charges, and where the 



