162 



would make them settle at seventy-five cents a standard, and where 

 they had been cutting the timber themselves, we would make the 

 price one dollar and twenty-five cents the standard, a rule that we 

 have adhered to wherever settlements have been made, with only the 

 two exceptions. 



Q. State what there is of that exception; has there been an excep- 

 tion to that rule, and if so, how many; and state what the attending . 

 circumstances were in regard to that particular settlement? 



A. I have but one settlement in mind, and that was one for twenty- 

 five cents a standard; our agents reported that a certain man had 

 been cutting on State lands and stopped him cutting, and thereupon 

 the owner of those lands came and made a statement before the com- 

 mission that he had sold these logs to this man in good faith, think- 

 ing that he had owned the land, but by some error in the tax arrange- 

 ments the land had been sold for taxes, and that he had sold these 

 logs to this man for twenty-five cents a standard; that, rather than 

 see this man have to pay an exorbitant price, or seventy-five cents or one 

 dollar and twenty-five cents, he would redeem the land from the State 

 and would settle with the men for that figure; upon investigation we 

 found that was a fact, that the chances for redemption were very 

 strong and that we would, by pressing the matter for seventy-cents or 

 one dollar and twenty-five cents, lose the land and lose the settlement, 

 and we accepted, on these representations, a settlement of twenty-five 

 cents a standard. ■ • 



Q. That is the only case you have any recollection of now ? 



A. That is the only case I remember, of being settled for any less 

 than our stated price of seventy-five cents and one dollar and twenty- 

 five cents; the report of our men was such, as I said before, as to 

 surprise us as to the large extent of cutting that was going 

 on, and as the Legislature had only set aside $5,000 for the 

 prosecution of suits, and as I had a pretty fair knowledge of the 

 difficulty of prosecuting such suits against anybody else where they 

 were tried in counties where the jurors themselves were either friends 

 or neighbors, it was quite a dilemma as to how to proceed to stop 

 this cutting; we finally made up our minds that the best thing we 

 could do in regard to that was to send out some noted cases of 

 cutting, and we took one to the north, one at the east and one at the 

 south and prosecuted them; when we commenced the prosecution 

 we were informed that it would be almost impossible for us to carry 

 that out, adding to the general opinion then prevailing, that any 

 bright lawyer could beat ihe State title, which was a tax title, and was 

 somewhat risky; when we came in the Comptroller had just been 



