Page:Looters of the Public Domain.djvu/374

Chapter XXIV

Under the guise of creating a National Park from the bleak territory surrounding Mt. Rainier, Congress enacts a measure giving the Northern Pacific Railroad Company autocratic powers in the selection of Government lands, and enables the Hill corporation to exchange its worthless holdings for valuable tracts in every State penetrated by its lines—How the Land Department, under the Bollinger regime has aided the Northern Pacific with its lien selections—With less than thirty miles of constructed road in Oregon, the railway company is empowered by Congress to make selection of more than 300,000 acres of valuable timber lands in that State—The bulldozing manner in which settlers are prevented from taking homestead claims.

THE entire idea of making a National Park out of the unprepossessing country surrounding Mt. Rainier, was clever in the extreme. It was the work of a master mind, because there was no more necessity for endowing this region with such exclusiveness than would exist in the contemplation to create National Parks out of every high mountain peak in the country. In short, Mt. Rainier owes its distinction in this respect to the fact that the Northern Pacific Railroad Company owns a lot of land in the neighborhood. Had the Jim Hill corporation possessed the odd-numbered sections adjacent to Mt. Shasta, in California, Mt. Hood, in Oregon, or Mt. Anything, in Anywhere, there is no question but what Congress would have wisely recognized the utmost importance of making National Parks out of them also. Hence, good fortune must have smiled upon Mt. Rainier with peculiar blessings when old Nature itself took a hand in the game ages before anything human was ever dreamed of, and reared the snow-capped summit of the mountain 'mid territory that millions of years later, perhaps, fell within the granted limits of the Northern Pacific.

In no essential particular, however, was the ingenuity of the plan to make Mt. Rainier a National Park more clearly defined than was contained in the cunning arrangement to permit the Northern Pacific to have the right of selection of unsurveyed lands of the United States in exchange for the worthless portions of its holdings in the entire Mt. Rainier Forest Reserve as well as the 5sational Park. This National Park idea was a subterfuge from the start to cloak the real intentions of the corporation, and was calculated to lull the public into the belief that Congress was moved by consideration of deep public interest when it enacted the measure that made the National Park possible.

It should be borne in mind that the Mt. Rainier Forest Reserve was established February 22, 1897—two years before the National Park of that name—and embraced a much greater scope of country. It included all of Mt. Rainier, besides a vast area adjacent thereto, aggregating 2,565,760 acres, of which the railway company owned practically one-half, and while it enjoyed the same rights as others under the Act of June 4, 1897, applicable to forest reserves, and could exchange its lands in the reserve for any unappropriated lands of the United States, it had no exclusive privileges, such as would accrue under a special Act, and it is the purpose to show herein how this seeming obstacle was overcome. In order to circumvent any possible future ho.stile legislation, and at the same time clothe the great railway corporation with a complete monopoly along certain lines—after the fashion of starting a back fire—the company on March 2, 1899, caused the passage of an Act setting aside a comparatively smallPage 368