Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 11.djvu/151

Rh be freely assigned and the assignee on payment of the amounts due on the purchase price of the lands represented by each certificate would receive a deed and there was no limit whatever to the number of acres the state would thus deed to him.

The securing of all the lands coming to the state under the different congressional grants had been the zealous aim of the administrations in the early seventies. All the lands acquired were put in charge of the state board. Its task became in- creasingly heavier. The volume of land sales expanded rapidly at the close of this decade. The opening for the speculator in the arrangement for the assignment of the certificates of sales no doubt was a prime factor in securing this result. The minimum price had been raised and the state census gives but a slight increase in population for the first half of the eighties, yet the steady and rapid increase in the sales of its lands was unprecedented for Oregon.

The legislature in the act of 1878 seemed to take cognizance of this undue burden upon the members of the state land board and transferred the actual work to the "clerk of the board," putting him in charge of the records, and giving authority to his acts. What would be more natural than that the routine of this department of the state's affairs should then be neglected by the members of the board ? Its dry and tangled statistics repelled. Under these circumstances if the state had any values in its lands to tempt cupidity, the reign of a high carnival of graft in connection with the sales of these lands may be anticipated.

During the nine years following 1878 the land law was retained unchanged, though the economic conditions affecting land values were being revolutionized. The long-continued isolation from the main part of the country now disappeared through the completion of two transcontinental railway lines reaching Oregon. During these nine years, too, the railway mileage of the state was extended from 300 to nearly 1200 miles. The approaching exhaustion of the lumber supply from the states of the Middle West was anticipated and