226 UNITED STATES FOREST POLICY 



In thirty-five years of its operation, from 1878 to 1913, this act 

 resulted in the sale of over 12,000,000 acres of timber lands, the gov- 

 ernment receiving the sum of $30,000,000 for lands worth much 

 more than that, while most of the profit was divided among dishonest 

 timber speculators and perjured entrymen. Not over a fractional part 

 of 1 per cent of the timber purchased under the act is now held by 

 the men and women who made the entries.® 



The evil effects of the law were repeatedly pointed out. In 1897, 

 the committee appointed by the National Academy of Sciences re- 

 ported : "The act has been used by corporations and wealthy individ- 

 uals to secure fraudulently . . . most of the valuable redwood lands 

 of the California coast region, and great bodies of the Sequoia and 

 sugar pine forests of the Sierra Nevadas, and much of the best timber 

 lands on Puget Sound.'" In the same year, the Secretary of the Inte- 

 rior, C, N. Bliss, stated : "The calamitous results predicted and antici- 

 pated by the Land Department . . . have been fully verified and 

 realized."^ Four years later. Secretary Hitchcock announced that this 

 act, together with the Free Timber Act, would "result ultimately in 

 the complete destruction of the timber on unappropriated and un- 



ning with 1893 is doubtless explained by the depression following the crisis of 1893. 

 (S. Doc. 130; 57 Cong. 2 sess.) The very great increase beginning in the year 1900 

 was probably due mainly to the speculative boom in the purchase of timber lands 

 during these years. The value of timber lands was rising rapidly, and speculators 

 were picking up tracts in every way possible; and the Timber and Stone Act was 

 one of the cheapest means of acquiring timber lands in the West. Furthermore, it 

 seems at least possible, although at first blush very strange, that the energetic 

 administration during these years had something to do with the increase in Timber 

 and Stone entries. Timber lands had been fraudulently acquired, not only under 

 the Timber and Stone Act, but under the Commutation Homestead Law, the Forest 

 Lieu Act, and in various other ways. Secretary Hitchcock had the will and the 

 funds to suppress frauds wherever possible, and it was possible to suppress, in 

 some measure, the abuses arising under most of these acts. For instance, an exami- 

 nation of the homestead entry would indicate its fitness or unfitness for agriculture, 

 and so reveal any attempt to get timber lands through a dishonest use of the 

 Homestead Act. Frauds under the Timber and Stone Act were, however, very 

 difficult to prove, as has been shown in the case of United States vs. Budd (144 

 U. S., 154), and perhaps when the administration became so vigilant that the 

 Homestead and other laws were no longer available for the acquisition of timber 

 lands, speculators were driven to use the Timber and Stone Act even more than 

 before. 



6 "Lumber Industry," I, XVIII. 



7 S. Doc. 105 ; 55 Cong. 1 sess. 



8 Report, Sec. of Int., 1897, XV. 



