Page:The American Magazine volume LXIV.djvu/603



''Heney's connection with the Government as a prosecuting attorney began in a political pull. In Arizona he had ably defended some land grants belonging to the Camerons of Pennsylvania. So in 1903 when Heney went to Washington as the legal representative of Judge Noyes of Alaska, whose unwarrantable actions had been taken to the courts, he carried a letter to Attorney-General Knox from Don Cameron. His client was properly removed, but Knox was impressed by Heney and offered to make him an Assistant Attorney-General. Heney was beginning to build a practice in San Francisco and refused. But when a little later Knox telegraphed for himself and Secretary Hitchcock urging Heney to go to Portland and try the land cases, he felt he could not refuse the request.''—

RANCIS J. HENEY laid bare in Oregon the government of that state and the system of corruption which reached thence to Washington and back again. He also raked some muck and put some low-down rascals and high-up citizens into jail, and we all saw that done. But this story aims to follow the outlines of government, the actual government of Oregon and the United States as the facts sketched them in Heney's own mind. We begin where he began, knowing nothing and nobody, and perhaps we shall get what he got: a typical picture of our American 585