THE PERIOD OF BEGINNINGS 49 



lands and the destruction of public timber, was the Desert Land Act 

 of 1877, yet it must be mentioned here because it was sometimes used 

 by timbermcn. The process under this act was to make entry, with no 

 intention of acquiring title, strip the land of its timber, and move on 

 to other fields.^* . 



Another factor of considerable influence upon the public timber 

 land was the system of land bounties for military service. Under vari- 

 ous acts, warrants were issued for a total of over 61,000,000 acres of 

 land. By the provisions of the earlier acts the warrants were unassign- 

 able; but in 1852 Congress passed an act making them assignable, 

 and warrants for nearly 35,000,000 acres were issued after this. 

 These warrants were bought up in large quantities by speculators, 

 and in this way large tracts of land, some of it timber land, were taken 

 up by private holders.*^ 



PUBLIC SALE 



Public sale was from the earliest times a common method of land 

 disposal, and in the period of nearly a century during which sale was 

 permitted, considerable areas were taken up, particularly in the 

 South. Since there was no limit to the amount of land which could be 

 acquired under the laws for public sale and private entry, those laws 

 were used a great deal by timbermen wherever timber land was obtain- 

 able under their provisions. ^^ 



In some of the southern states, timber lands were for a time very 



effectually locked up from sale, if not from theft. At the close of the 



Civil War, in order to preserve homesteads for the negro freedmen, 



Congress had passed a law providing that in Alabama, Mississippi, 



Louisiana, Arkansas and Florida, lands should be disposed of only 



^under the provisions of the Homestead Act.®^ This law affected much 



)f the finest timber in the countr}'^, since much of the southern land 



ras wholly unfit for cultivation, and therefore could not be taken up 



mder the Homestead Act. Of course, such a provision could not long 



withstand the demands of the timbermen. 



84 Report, Land Office, 1881, 377. 



85 "Lumber Industry," I, 258. 

 80 Ibid., I, 185, 256-258; II, 147-149; III, 197, 213, 214: Report, Land Office, 



1868, 93; 1872, 26; 1873, 12. 

 87 Stat. 14, 66, 67. 



