238 UNITED STATES FOREST POLICY 



repeal, merely extended its evil provisions. It will now be necessary to 

 return to the consideration of the free timber acts, and follow out 

 their history after 1891. 



THE FREE TIMBER ACTS AGAIN 



It will be recalled that, in the General Revision Act of 1891, Con- 

 gress had left the Free Timber Act of 1878 untouched, and had passed 

 another more generous free timber act, known as the Permit Act, 

 which provided free timber on the entire public domain, in Colorado, 

 Montana, Idaho, North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming, Alaska, 

 and the gold and silver regions of Nevada and Utah, not only for min- 

 ing, agricultural, and domestic purposes, but also for manufactur- 

 ing.^* Thus after 1891, there were two acts providing free timber on 

 the public domain. 



In the years after 1891, just as before, the Free Timber Act of 

 1878 continued to serve as the means whereby large corporations, 

 lumber dealers, and railroad contractors cut timber for all sorts of 

 purposes. The evils arising under the law would not have been very 

 serious had it been possible to confine the cutting to mineral lands ; 

 but lumbermen, and even courts and juries, naturally showed a ten- 

 dency to construe the law very liberally. The true interpretation, as 

 already pointed out, limited the application of the act to land con- 

 taining mineral in sufficient quantity to "justify expenditure for its 

 extraction, and known to he so."^° The bias of some of the western 

 courts is well illustrated by the instructions given a jury in an Idaho 

 case ten years after the Supreme Court of the United States an- 

 nounced the true interpretation. The Idaho court construed the act 

 to allow the cutting of "all timber in the neighborhood of mines, or 

 within such distances from them as to make it convenient for their use, 

 whether mineral is actually found in the ground or not." These 

 instructions also included as mineral "all ground or country of such 

 character, and so situated with reference to other lands known to 

 contain mines, that miners would prospect it xsnth the expectation of 

 finding mines."^^ Such a construction as this was a license to cut 

 practically all of the unreserved timber in the vicinity. 



64 Stat. 26, 1093, 1099. Cross Reference, pp. 68-70. 



65 Davis vs. Weibold; 139 U. S., 507, 519. 



66 Quoted in Report, Land Office, 1901, 97. 



