Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 11.djvu/157

Rh because of irregularities in computation — sold. Again, the national government retained all school sections mineral in character. There was a procedure for proving the mineral character of them even when not so reported by the surveyors. With this, too, the trafficker in base was busy. It so happened that this procedure for determining the mineral character of school lands was especially susceptible to admitting the freest play in lieu land dickering of the kind for which the Oregon land office was prepared. The national government required only evidence of a prima facie character before authorizing the state to proceed to make selections in lieu of these lands it was likely to lose because of their mineral character. But remember, it was the essence of the Oregon system that all such tasks as securing evidence of the mineral character of school sections should be delegated to private enterprise. Add to this Oregon's precipitancy to sell and the impelling motive for selling that the trafficker in base had, and the commonwealth must necessarily soon find itself in a bedraggled condition for having sold land its original claims upon which having proved baseless. In the first place, the eagerness to prove the mineral character of the lands by an irresponsible go-between in an unworthy relation led to a stretching of the evidence of mineral character. Then the slip- shod organization of the state's agencies for handling its land affairs, — its dual officials, the state land agent and the clerk of the state land board, working without concert, — had under the strong pressure for land and the tempted and tempting influence of the mineral base manipulator resulted in the state's selling nearly two-thirds of such lands twice over and some of it thrice over. In the period from 1887 to 1895 of more than sixty thousand acres of mineral basis upon which lieu lands were sold, only about twenty-six thousand were confirmed to the state; the remaining thousands were cancelled by the general government. The state came to the rescue of these luckless purchasers by furnishing them valid base from the then newly created Cascade forest reservation. Thirty-eight thousand acres were so used.