56 UNITED STATES FORl!ST POLICY 



government in several different ways ; by public sale, by private sale, 

 under the Homestead Act, under the Preemption Law, and by the use 

 of military bounty warrants or other forms of land scrip. Public sale, 

 as above pointed out, had been one of the earliest methods of land 

 disposal, but after the adoption of the Homestead Act, in 1862, pub- 

 lic sale was not favored, and at this time very little land had been 

 offered for sale except in the South — in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, 

 Louisiana, and Mississippi, where all of the surveyed public lands 

 were offered under the act of 1876. No land could be entered at 

 private sale unless it had first been offered at public sale, so that 

 about the only lands available at private sale, were in the southern 

 states.®^ The Homestead and Preemption laws had been devised for 

 agricultural lands, not for timber lands, and the acquisition of 

 timber lands under their provisions was often fraudulent — indeed 

 the acquisition of much of the timber land of the West was neces- 

 sarily fraudulent, since it was not fit for agriculture when cleared. 



There was always a considerable amount of land scrip of various 

 kinds, which could be used in acquiring title to public lands, but much 

 of this was, of course, in the hands of speculators, and so was obtain- 

 able generally only upon the payment of a speculative price. In secur- 

 ing land in this way it was necessary also to hunt out the holders of 

 the scrip ; and finally, some of the scrip, as for instance the military 

 bounty warrants, was available for location only upon public land 

 which was subject to private cash entry, and for this reason was of no 

 value in many sections of the countr}'.^* 



Thus, there was in 1878 no general legal and honest way of acquir- 

 ing public timber lands, or the timber itself, in many parts of the 

 United States ; and when appropriations for the suppression of tim- 

 ber depredations became available, and under Carl Schurz, the admin- 

 istration began a policy of law enforcement sufficiently vigorous to 



93 Somewhat later than this, considerable land seems to have been offered at 

 public sale in various parts of the country, and in some sections, as, for instance, 

 Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, large tracts were taken up at 

 public and private sale. {Report, Public I^ands Commission, 1905, 199 et seq.: 

 "Lumber Industry," I, 185, 256-258; II, 147-149; III, 197, 213, 214: Donaldson, 

 "Public Domain," 206, 207, 415, 1159.) 



94 Donaldson, "Public Domain," 223, 232-237, 289, 290, 950, 958, 959, 1276: 

 "Lumber Industry," I, 258. 



