Page:A History of the Pacific Northwest.djvu/314



cheaply in order to insure profits and minimize risks, the temptation was sometimes overpowering to hire "dummy" entrymen to take up the lands from the government and turn them over to the operator on receiving the government's patent therefor. There was a time when the contracting of one's "timber right " was considered a perfectly legitimate process of "bargaining and selling." It involved no disgrace to either party. But during the Roosevelt administration a number of timber land frauds were prosecuted to conviction and the public finally awoke to the immorality of such proceedings, which involved on the one hand perjury and on the other subornation of perjury, with purpose to defraud the government of its lands. Operators are now content to buy such tracts as they want from legitimate owners, paying on the basis of stumpage. They are sometimes able to secure abundant supplies of timber by contracting for stumpage growing in the Forest Reserves. In such cases they buy no land, of course, and they harvest the timber when ripe, under the direction of government foresters.

Competition with the South. The land fraud prosecutions may have had some effect in delaying the progress of the lumber business in the Northwest, by tending to impede the usual process of acquiring timber supplies to feed the proposed manufacturing plants. Yet, doubtless, the main reasons why manufacturing proceeded more slowly here than in the South were that timber was not readily accessible