Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 11.djvu/159

Rh ing of all sorts of frauds and conspiracies. It offered prizes that attracted the arch-land speculators from all parts of the country. National law and national administration governing the disposition of public lands in Oregon were but a shade better at this time than the state's. Frauds of gigantic proportions were possible only because national and state laws were equally ill-adapted to conserve the common weal and because officials of both governments were equally pliable. Conspiracies were formed to induce the national authorities to create forest reservations, the conspirators having in view only the inclusion of school sections which they had bought solely for the purpose of being thus included and later exchanged for carefully selected timber lands. Such a scheme could be consummated only through the use of the state and the national laws, so to speak, dovetailed together. The ridiculously easy terms on which the lands could be gotten from the state made feasible the first step and the equally absurd provision of the national law under which land utterly worthless could be exchanged for the best of the public domain, in virtually unlimited quantities, was the means of completing the steal. Nothing that Oregon ever did, however, was quite so rank or the means of so large inroads upon the public domain for private advantage as the railway lieu land act of Congress in 1897.

But returning to Oregon's delinquencies. The supineness of its land office officials encouraged the most bare-faced forms of fraud. In 1898 an armful of applications, covering 40,000

pay 25 cents an acre on the lands. had been interested with me more than once on that sort of thing. I had made deals with and  also.

"The way I did it was to hunt up fellows who were well acquainted. They would bring in a lot of men and I would ask them if they had ever bought school lands. If they had not bought lands, I would ask them if they wanted to earn a dollar by signing their names to an application and an assignment. They always did. Usually I would not have applications to go around. At one time I got about 50 applications in this way for and at another time furnished a batch for his use. It cost them $1 for each application, besides expenses of drinks". A former under-clerk of the state land office when asked whether he had entertained suspicion that fraud was connected with the filing of such bunches of applications, admitted that he had; but as he was only a clerk in the office he thought it not his business to confide his fears to the land board. He was instructed by the clerk at the head of the board, he said "to receive and file all applications presented so long as they were filled out properly and acknowledged" When pressed to say whether or not the land board knew of the frauds practiced in the state and whether it winked at the evasions of the law, he could answer only, "I can't say".