186 UNITED STATES FOREST POLICY 



For a great many years certain districts of the coast states were 

 infested with speculators, agents of timber companies and of the rail- 

 roads, hunting for scrip, land warrants, or for hirelings to enter lands 

 in their interest. Government officials of all kinds, and apparently of 

 all degrees of dignity were corrupted — land officers, attorneys, sur- 

 veyors, inspectors, and men higher up.^* Hitchcock learned something 

 of this state of affairs soon after his initiation as Secretary of the 

 Interior, and, after looking carefully into the matter, began "house- 

 cleaning" late in the year 1902. One of his first moves was the removal 

 of Commissioner Binger Hermann from the Land Office. At about the 

 same time he secured indictments against F. A. Hyde, John A. Benson, 

 and several others for conspiracy to defraud the government of large 

 areas of its public lands. ^^ Some of these men had been in the business 

 of stealing from the government for over thirty years, and one had 

 been implicated eighteen years before in land survey frauds involving 

 over $1,000,000.'" 



The scheme of Hyde, Benson, and their gang in these later years 

 involved an attempt to steal several hundred thousand acres of land 

 under the Forest Lieu Act, by first securing title to state school lands 

 within the forest reserves in California and Oregon, and then making 

 lieu selections on the basis of these school lands. It appears that they 

 had some kind of a "subterranean connection" with officials of the 

 government, so that they got advance information as to the creation 

 of new forest reserves, and on receipt of such information, they got 

 possession of state lands, largely worthless lands, and used it as a 

 base for selecting valuable lands elsewhere. When Mr. Kingsbury 

 took the office of surveyor-general of California in January, 1907, he 

 discovered that indemnity or lieu lands were almost entirely controlled 

 by Hyde ; and nearly 40,000 acres had been patented before the fraud 

 was discovered. Secretary Hitchcock immediately stopped the issue of 

 patents upon all selections and entries involved, and ordered the arrest 

 of the men implicated.'^ 



54 For an interesting account of conditions here, see Puter and Stevens, "Looters 

 of the Public Domain." 



55 Report, Sec. of Int., 1904, 21. 



56 Report, Sec. of Int., 1887, 332. 



67 Report, Sec. of Int., 1904, 22 et seq. 



