"In case the tract so selected shall, at the time of selection, be unsurveyed, the list filed by the company at the local land office shall describe such tract in such manner as to designate the same with a resonable degree of certainty; and within the period of three months after the lands including such tract shall have been surveyed and the plats thereof filed by said local land office, a new selection list shall be filed by said Company, describing such tract according to such survey; and in case such tract, as originally selected and described in the list filed in the local land oflace, shall not precisely conform with the lines of the official survey, the said Company shall be permitted to describe such tract anew, so as to secure such conformity."
In other words, it is not only given the perpetual right of doing something that none others are allowed to do—file on unsurveyed lands—but is further granted the privilege of cruising everything in the township, and then, if it finds that any mistake has been made in the matter of securing the cream of the timber, it is privileged to float its base around like a bogus Mexican grant and light upon anything in sight worth having! In fact, the whole bill, from beginning to end, is a mass of subterfuge, and to say that the Congressmen who voted for the measure did not know what they were doing or could not see any of its glaring features, is to write them down a lot of asses.
It would have been bad enough, under the most extenuating circumstances, for Congress to have confined the operations of the Act of March 2, 1899, to the Mt. Rainier National Park alone, as the Northern Pacific owned fully 100,000 acres within its confines, and the greedy corporation ought to have been satisfied with that amount of plunder; but that was not the point; the idea was to bring in all the lands owned by the company in the larger area contained in the Rainier Mountain Forest Reserve—aggregating about 1,000,000 acres — and this Congress has succeeded in doing with a vengeance, as may be seen by reference to the third section of the Act creating the Mt. Rainier National Park which provides that "also the lands in the Pacific (Rainier Mountain) Forest Reserve which have been heretofore granted by the United States to said Company, whether surveyed or unsurveyed," shall come under the operations of the law. Those voting for the bill may seek pardon for their offense upon the theory that the law gives actual settlers in the Park the same privileges as those enjoyed by the great railway company, but when it is considered that there never were any settlers in the region, and that, by reason of the rough character of the country, no self-respecting billy goat would even be tempted to try and exist there, the humor of the allusion to "actual settlers" may be fully appreciated. It was merely a sop to pull the wool over the eyes of those members of Congress who voted for the measure in the half-hearted belief that they were aiding a lot of poor homesteaders, when as a matter of fact, they were entirely unacquainted with conditions, and accepted that view of the situation as a drug to their consciences in having become accessory to a highway robbery.
The whole bill is a tissue of deceit from beginning to end, because it is paved with the same kind of good intentions that another place is supposed to be noted for. There is a whole lot of buncombe in it about "preservation from injury or spoliation of all timber, mineral deposits, natural curiosities, or wonders within said park, and their retention in their natural condition." Any ten-year-old child knows that the only "natural curiosity" or "wonders" in any way connected with the alleged "park" exists solely in the phraseology of the law that created it. Even with this tremendous pull in the weights the Northern Pacific was not satisfied, so what was its next course? Why, its henchmen in the halls of National legislation adopted a protective measure so as to clinch its bargain beyond any question of doubt, and here in the proceedings of the Fifty-Eighth Congress (see pages 4239, 4240 and 4241, Congressional Record, March 4, 1905), we find Congressman Lacey, of Iowa, calling for unanimous consent for the substitution of the statement for the conference report upon the repeal of the forest reserve lieu land Act of June 4, 1897, and its amendments of June 6, 1900, and March 3, 1901. There being no objection, the Clerk read the statement of the Committee instead of the full report, as follows:
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