Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 11.djvu/133

Rh the state, its claim to these parcels of land was made subject to certain prior rights. These preferred claims included those (1) of the United States, if the lands were more valuable for mineral than for agricultural purposes; (2) of settlers who had begun the improvement of them prior to the time of the survey; (3) of the United States if disposed to use them for parts of Indian or forest reservations.

These preferred rights to sections 16 and 36 and to legal subdivisions of them, to which the claims of the state were subject, mi.de great holes in that continuous checkerboard of school land plats tentatively promised the state in the terms of the original grant. Under the working of these several limitations of the rights of the state larger patches were taken out of this endowment for its schools, as originally defined, than was suffered in any other state excepting its sister commonwealths in the Pacific Northwest.

Loss to the state of sections 16 and 36 because of settlement prior to the government survey was greater by far in Oregon than in any other state of the Union as the settlement of the valleys of western Oregon was in progress some ten years before government survey in Oregon began. Furthermore, conditions that caused Uncle Sam to take occasion to retain his hold on the areas covered by these sections 16 and 36 have prevailed to a peculiar degree in Oregon. Indications of mineral wealth are widely scattered throughout the state, numerous Indian tribes have had to be provided for and the many and widely expanded mountainous regions of the state invited extensive reservations for forest and water conservation.

The gaps in the state-wide platting of school lands thus occasioned necessarily took from the state some of the choicest portions of the grant as originally constituted. On the other hand, however, it was open to the state to secure restitution for these losses from its school land grant by selecting the very best of the federal lands available as indemnity or lieu lands.