Page:The History of Oregon Bancroft 1888.djvu/674

 described, and offered for sale at not less than one dollar per acre; twenty per cent of the purchase money to be paid within ninety days after the publication of a notice of sale, and the remainder when the land had been reclaimed. Reclamation was defined to consist in cultivating on the land in question for three consecutive years either grass, cereals, or vegetables, on proof of which the remainder of the purchase money could be paid, and a patent to the land obtained, provided the reclamation should be made within ten years. No actual survey was required, but only that the tract so purchased should be described by metes and bounds; therefore, the twenty per cent which constituted the first payment was a conjectural amount. The law had other defects, which operated against the disposal of the lands to non-speculative purchasers who desired to obtain patents and have their titles settled at once. It was discovered, also, in the course of a few years, that draining the land, which the law required, destroyed its value. The law simply gave the opportunity to a certain class and number of men to possess themselves of large cattle-ranges without anything like adequate payment.

The intention of the original swamp-land act of congress, passed September 28, 1850, was to enable a state subject to overflow from the Mississippi River to construct levees and drain swamp-lands. The benefits of this grant were afterwards extended to other states, including Oregon. But Oregon had no rivers requiring levees, and, strictly speaking, no swamp-lands. It had, indeed, some small tracts of beaver-dam land, and some more extensive tracts subject to annual overflow, on which the best of wild grasses grew spontaneously. To secure these over flowed lands, together with others that were not subject to inundation, but could be embraced in metes and bounds, was the purpose of the framers and friends of the swamp-land act of 1870 in the Oregon legisla-