Page:Looters of the Public Domain.djvu/380

 ""The Senate amendment provides for the repeal of the Acts of June 4, 1897. June 6, 1900, and March 3, 1901, in so far as they provide for the relinquishment, selection and patenting of lands in lieu of tracts covered by an unperfected bona fide claim or patent within a forest reserve It also provides for the protection of all contracts heretofore entered into by the Secretary of the Interior on this subject. The amendment to the Senate amendment, insisted upon by the House conferees, protects selections heretofore made in lieu of lands already relinquished to the United States.""

This statement was signed by Congressmen John F. Lacey of Iowa, F. W. Mondell of Wyoming, and John Lind of Minnesota, as managers on the part of the House.

Of course there was a long debate on the floor involving the repeal of the obnoxious "Scripper" Act of June 4, 1897. All the big corporations in the country could afford to kill the law. because it had outlived its usefulness, and the next move was to make a grandstand play before the country and pretend to bow to the people's will, and incidentally shut the stable door after the horse was gone. All these proceedings were part of the game to help along the good cause for the Northern Pacific. It was a lot of horseplay calculated to fool the people. By pretending virtuous indignation against the poor, old, wornout Scripper Act — which really never did possess any sincere friends—the schemers in Congress were enabled to throw a protecting arm around all the base belonging to the great railway corporation in the Mt. Rainier Forest Reserve, as well as the Mt. Rainier National Park, and practically give it a free license to do as it pleased with the public domain in those States penetrated by its lines. The Jim Hill road takes its different courses through the State of Washington like the uncertain wanderings of a tangled skein, and yet it has made selection of but 100,000 acres herein; it also traverses Idaho for a considerable distance, and here the records show that 120,000 acres have been selected for the benefit of the corporation; while in Oregon, its few miles of line in that State, extending from Kalama, on the Columbia river, to the City of Portland, gave them a franchise, under the clever wording of the Act quoted above, to select more than 320,000 acres of its best timber! Nor is this intended as any commentary upon the good taste of the Northern Pacific in preferring to make selections in Oregon to other States. It simply goes to show that it was worth while to build that much road in the State, even if it had to let it go to rot, for the divine privilege of acquiring such a vast amount of valuable property, because, had the Northern Pacific lines not penetrated Oregon to some extent, it could not have selected an acre of its magnificent forests in lieu of the worthless, burned-over and logged-oft' tracts in the Mt. Rainier Reserve and National Park. That is as plain as day, as a careful perusal of the Act will show.

Then comes the question: How could the Northern Pacific make forest reserve selection of lands in any of these States—and particularly unsurveyed lands—when the Act of June 4, 1897, was supposed to be repealed? That is where the fine Italian hand of the Northern Pacific comes in—because Congress, in its passage of the measure repealing the Act of June 4, 1897 (no doubt, inadvertently!) very kindly clothed the Jim Hill corporation with an exclusive right when it provided "for the protection of all contracts heretofore entered into by the Secretary of the Interior on this subject." Which means, that the Northern Pacific, having already filed with the Secretary of the Interior proper deeds "releasing and conveying to the United States the lands in the reservation hereby created, also the lands of the Pacific (Rainier Mountain) Forest Reserve which have been heretofore granted by the United States to said company, whether surveyed or unsurveyed," was entitled to select "an equal quantity of non-mineral public lands, so classified as non-mineral at the time of actual Government survey, which has been or shall be made, of the United States not reserved and to which no adverse right or claim shall have attached or have been initiated at the time of the making of such selection lying within any State into or through which the railroad of said Northern Pacific Railroad Company runs, to the extent of the lands so relinquished and released to the United States." Page 374