American Forest Congress 345 



mittee and protested against any change. Mr. Her- 

 mann was before the committee. At that exact moment 

 the Oregon grand jury was in session in the city of 

 Portland, composed of men drawn by lot from all 

 over the State, and that grand jury urged the repeal 

 of all those laws — the Timber and Stone Act, the 

 Desert Land Act, and the Commutation Clause, and 

 sent a memorial to the Public Lands Commission to 

 that effect. Now the grand jury has had some busi- 

 ness with Mr. Hermann since that time. 



I understand that Mr. Williamson is not here, and 

 I do not know where he is. I did see an article in an 

 Oregon paper charging that he put up the money 

 himself for some fellow to buy a lot of worthless school 

 land, and then they tried to get it into a forest reserve 

 and failed and Williamson lost his money. 



I am lifting the sheet ofif the corpse a little, but I 

 don't think it will do any harm. If you don't have these 

 cold, hard facts impressed upon you by somebody you 

 are not going to accomplish anything. 



If you want to do something, go ahead and talk to 

 your member of Congress and get him to help to get 

 the House of Representatives to carry the public lands 

 legislation right straight over the heads of the com- 

 mittee. 



They passed one land bill at the last session of 

 Congress, a bill throwing away thousands and hun- 

 dreds of thousands of acres of lands, in tracts of 640 

 acres, in western Nebraska, which should have been 

 retained and trees planted on it to be used in the 

 mines of South Dakota, and of the whole Rocky 

 Mountain region. Nebraska sold its birthright for 

 a mess of pottage when it allowed the Kinkaid bill 

 to become a law. The whole scheme for 640-acre 

 homesteads is a rank deception and offers a premium 

 for fraud. 



