Journal of Political Economy/Volume 17/Review: Looters of the Public Domain
The subtitle of this work boasts that it "embraces a complete exposure of the fraudulent system of acquiring titles to the public lands of the United States." This statement is a trifle too ambitious but it may well be claimed that it is an authoritative "inside history" of the system, for Mr. Puter was prominently engaged in the fraudulent practices, finally acquiring the doubtful privilege of an eighteen-month confinement in the Multonomah County jail, from which he was released by President Roosevelt's pardon, January 6, 1908. Mr. Puter's collaborator, Horace Stevens, was formerly of the government land service. The combination of these points of view has certainly resulted in some interesting reading.
The major part of the work centers about the plans, frauds, and adventures of Mr. Puter, although many other matters are introduced and the latter third of the book deals almost exclusively with these other fields. Throughout, the story is much the same, varying only in the entertainingly disgusting details. The reader has a wide choice: he may revel in a detective story where shooting-irons are much in evidence, or in a western romance; in tragedy, melodrama, or comedy; in a story of private cupidity of predatory corporations; in a recital of political corruption or of faithful observance of a public trust, and the story loses none of its interest because the real hero is Francis J. Heney. The wealth of illustrations has the same cosmopolitan range. There are prosaic diagrams of timber regions, portraits of convicted U. S. senators, copies of documents and letters, reproductions of absurd newspaper etchings, and the "typical mountaineer," carefully posed so that his "trusty weapon" shall be much in evidence.
And with it all, Looters of the Public Domain possesses scientific value. Puter's motive in making these revelations is not of the highest, but he has made a real contribution to our knowledge of the subject of the land frauds and of the methods of caring for our public domain. There is a concreteness and a definiteness about the whole story that convinces one of its essential truthfulness and serious students of the problem will find good material for their use.
The University of Chicago