selections had been made in the interest of Thomas B. Walker, a multi-millionaire lumberman of Minneapolis, Minnesota, who was reputed to be an intimate associate of James J. Hill, the great Northern Pacific railroad magnate. Swezy admitted to me that he had also filed forest reserve selections in the Susanville Land Office covering 70,000 acres, and 14,000 acres in the Redding district, or more than 110,000 acres altogether within a few months in behalf of Walker, who was likewise employing the services of other land agents in his efforts to grab all he could of the public domain, besides purchasing private holdings wherever obtainable within the scope of his operations. I traced fully 500,000 acres into Walker's hands, and my researches were only stopped by the Oregon Boundary. How much he got hold if in that and other heavily timbered states is a matter that would probably stagger the imagination, but it stands to the everlasting shame of the nation that grafting members of both branches of Congress have manipulated the public land laws in such a way as to equip the organized wealth of a single person with the power to acquire a territory so vast in extent that the feudal barons of old would appear like petty larcenists in comparison.
After gathering a sufficient amount of data at the Marysville Land Office tor all necessary purposes, I proceeded to Oroville, where I hired a livery rig, and for nearly a month occupied my time in traveling through the region mostly affected by the operations of the land-grabbers, in the course of my investigations, visiting the following places: Mooretown, Merrimac, Magalia, Inskip and Chico, Butte county; La Porte, Quincy, Crescent Mills, Taylorsville, Greenville, Prattville, Humbug Valley and Longville, Plumas county; Gibsonville, Table Mountain and Poker Flat, Sierra county; Yuba Dam, Yuba county; Red Bluff, Tehama county; Redding, Shasta county, besides other points of minor importance.
At nearly all of these places I remained long enough to listen to the grievances of the miners, and to make personal inquiry therein, as I had no desire to base m}' conclusions on hearsay evidence. I found that in practically every instance the State Mining Bureau had been correctly informed as to the character of the alleged interference with the rights of the miners, although it was soon apparent that the complaints of the latter in no material sense measured the extent of the depredations, much of which was uncovered by my subsequent examinations of the Land Office records of the Marysville, Susanville and Redding land districts. For example, I would note carefully the exact location in each section of the different unpatented mining claims, and after going over the land office records would compare the various forest reserve lieu selections under the Act of June 4, 1897. the timber and stone Act of June 3, 1878, and the State lieu selections, with the descriptions embraced in the unpatented mineral entries that I had obtained from the county records, and the result was appalling.
Aged and discrepit miners, who had earned a livelihood from their holdings for years, and who had, in many cases, reared large families thereon, found themselves in the merciless grasp of these inhuman plunderers, and liable in the sundown of their lives to be deprived of property that had been their only source of income for a score or more of years. General indignation prevailed when the real situation of affairs became apparent, and at several places, notably Gibsonville, Sierra county, and towns throughout Indian Valley, Plumas county, there existed a strong inclination in the direction of reviving the old lynch law spirit.
At Marysville, immediately upon realizing what the probable outcome of my investigations would be, based upon what I had already discovered, I wired State Mineralogist Anbury to request Governor Gage to join himself and the Sacramento Valley Development Association in urging the Secretary of the Interior to suspend all land entries in the Marysville, Susanville and Redding districts until I was in a position to report my findings. I had already unearthed sufficient to warrant these precautionary measures, and in my opinion it was the most expeditious way to call an emphatic halt upon the headlong rush of the timber looters.Page 420
