INTRODUCTION xxxi 



ber on the land and later to dispose of it to some 

 large timber holder. Every citizen is allowed to 

 exercise his homestead right. Big timber operators 

 would secure the services of many dummy locators, 

 pay the expenses of locating, improving, and per- 

 fecting the patent, and then buy the claim from 

 these dummies for small sums. A large timber 

 holder in California secured his hundreds of thou- 

 sands of acres of timber land in this way. By in- 

 structing these men where to locate their claims he 

 was able to secure more or less solid blocks of timber 

 made up originally of 160 acre patches. These 

 patches, which originally were bought by the lum- 

 ber barons for from $500 to $800 a claim, now have 

 a value of from $8,000 to as high as $20,000. The 

 people of the United States have lost the difference. 

 It is difficult to say where or how this wholesale 

 misuse of the public land laws would have ended 

 if it had not been for the inauguration of the Na- 

 tional Forest policy. Since the Government has 

 taken full charge of its forest domain, this misuse 

 has stopped. In fact many of the fraudulent 

 claims located years ago are being investigated, and 

 if they are found to have been initiated with intent 

 to defraud the Government, the land and the timber 



