571 



of foresters — continued and Lynch discovered it and reported it and 

 testified to it here. It was undertaken on the part of the commission 

 and their counsel to dispute that there had been any recent trespass. 

 That could not be at all and the affidavits of the men who cut the 

 trees this very year were brought here and read, one of them the 

 workman and the other the man who bought the timber of Ed Talbott 

 on the State lands. He told him to cut any timber he wanted and it 

 would "be all right. What sort of an administration of the laws is 

 that on the part of Garmon and these men ? 



At Long Lake, in the same district, it appears that a large trespass 

 was there committed this fall and this commission and the warden 

 seemed to be utterly ignorant that any such thing had happened until 

 they learned of it in the testimony here, when they professed to have 

 learned it for the first time. Garmon said that two years ago he had 

 seized a quantity of logs over there in the woods near Minerva and 

 had allowed them to remain there, and they had depreciated fifty 

 per cent, so in hot haste he made out some notices and gave them to 

 his forester Powers to go right over there and sell. So they sold at 

 the tavern in Minerva logs six or eight miles off in the woods. I do 

 not know who got them, who the lucky man was, and then he went 

 right over to Long Lake and sold these logs that were cut this winter 

 by Mr. Butler, brother-in-law of Powers, and great stress was made 

 that they had established a price as unalterable as the laws of the 

 Medes and Persians, and that a man who had cut purposely had, to pay 

 one dollar and twenty- five cents a stand ard, and where he cut innocently, 

 they would let him off for seventy-five cents a Standard, and yet this 

 Butler willfully cut on the State lands these logs. Garmon's notice 

 was sent over in hot haste and Powers, the brother-in-law of Butler, 

 sells them to Bstler for sixty-one cents a standard, and the whole thing 

 is done and condoned. A neat little trick to take care of the brethern 

 within the ring. So far as Garmon was concerned in that transaction, 

 it was not only negligence, but I submit corrupt. / 



Now, we come to another subject. There was an act passed in 

 1887, allowing exchanges of land, called the Hadley act, and 

 Commissioner Knevals, when he is on the stand testified that 

 that act was a job and it was instigated by one John Hurd, to enable 

 him to plunder the State, and that as soon as the act had passed, Hurd 

 put in an application for an exchange. Can't be a mistake about that. 

 All recollect it, that as soon as Kurd's application came in on the 10th 

 of June, 1887, the forest commission passed a resolution that they , 

 would make no exchanges under this Hadley act, and that resolution, 

 together with the application, was sent down to the Comptroller's 



