To this branch of the service is assigned the duty of seeing that all such conflicts are properly determined, so far as executive action is concerned. This volume of judicial questions required many hours of labor every day on the part of the Secretary of the Treasury. In two and one-half years time he had decided more than five thousand claims. It was observed that this work was not necessarily the work of a public financier. Daniel Webster and other Senators thought that the Land Office was enough work for one man, and that it would be proper to separate it from the Department of the Treasury.

Many suspended cases between the United States and claimants had accumulated. To adjudicate these, there was created a Board of Equitable Jurisdiction in 1846 (9 Stat. L., 51), which consisted of the Secretary of the Treasury, the Attorney-General, and the Commissioner of the General Land Office. Although this tribunal existed only three years, its creation being for an emergency, it was permanently revived in 1853; but the office of solicitor was abolished in 1844, leaving much judicial work for the other officers of the Land Office.

There were other like handicaps. Much of the survey work was done by contractors who were employed as deputy surveyors. They were directly under the superintendence of a U. S. Surveyor-General of the state in which they worked. The annual cost of this service was approximately $450,000. Other duties developed the office. In 1847 Dr. Robert Mayo declared that "the intrinsic attributes of the General Land Office fairly claimed to constitute it a distinct department, and entitle it to be styled the Department of Public Domain.35 It was performing more classes of functions, he maintained, than were performed in several of the great departments.

Yet with all of these functions to perform, Congress in35 Mayo, The Treasury Department and its various fiscal bureaus, p. 207.

stituted no new divisions. The exigencies of the situation forced the development of new subordinate agencies. The office grew by administration rather than legislation. Consequently by the time the General Land Office was transferred from the Department of the Treasury to the Department of the Interior by the act of March 3, 1849 (9 Stat. L., 395) it contained ten thoroughly organized divisions, or according to Dr. Mayo, they were really bureaus:

1. Bureau of Principal Clerk of Public Lands, the head of which acted as Commissioner ad interim, worked in close touch with the congressional committees on public lands, and superintended the opening of new land offices.

2. Bureau of Principal Clerk of Surveys, which supervised the mapping of new districts.

3. Bureau of Principal Clerk of Private Land Claims, much of whose work was to study claims in the French and Spanish languages.

4. Bureau of Military Bounty Lands.

5. Bureau of Land Sales, otherwise known as the Bureau of Accounting and Bookkeeping.

6. Bureau of Preemption claims.

7. Bureau of Miscellaneous Duties.

8. Bureau of the Recorder of Patents.

9. Bureau of Distribution of Lands for internal improvements among new states and territories.

10. Bureau of Salaries and contingent expenses.

The Secretary of the Treasury was thus relieved of judicial duty with the General Land Office by its transfer to the newly created Department of the Interior. Under this department the Land Office has continued until the present. Its functions were not affected by the transfer, but they continued to grow.

The surveys continued to be an important activity. In 1855 the Clerk of Surveys, John W. Moore, prepared “A manual of instructions to surveyors-general." This was made "a part of every contract for surveying the public lands of the United States” by the act of May 30, 1862 (12 Stat. L., 409).

During the decade preceding 1874, seven new surveying districts were made, and thirty-seven land offices established. The annual survey of lands was increased from 4,000,000 to 30,000,000 acres, the annual cost of which increased from $170,000 to $1,217,000. The annual disposal of lands was increased from 3,000,000 to 13,000,000 acres. 36

In 1855 the office was charged with the management of timber on public lands. The registers and receivers of the local offices were required to protect forests from depredations, but due to insufficient personnel they were not very successful. Special agents were therefore provided in 1876 to perform this

service.

Another impetus to land sales resulted from the Graduation Act of August 4, 1854 (10 Stat. L., 574), which permitted lands that had been on the market for a long time to be sold at low rates, graduated from twelve and one-half cents to one dollar an acre. Before the repeal of this act in 1862, the sales had amounted to more than twenty-five million acres.

The Preemption Act of September 4, 1841 (5 Stat. L., 453) and the Homestead Act of May 20, 1862 (12 Stat. L., 392), as approved by President Lincoln, greatly burdened the General Land Office. 37 These laws crystallized a new policy in public land administration—that of national development rather than national revenue. 38 38 The later law required no money payments for public lands, but did require the entryman to reside upon his grant and to cultivate and improve it. Consequently most of the subsequent entries were preëmption or homestead entries, and as Commissioner Willis Drummond declared "the work of examining one preëmption or homestead case is equal to that of examining eight private entries." 39

The donation laws, which were founded very much on the

36 43 Cong. I sess., H. rep. 251.

37 The period between these two acts is covered in detail in Stephenson, The political history of the public lands from 1840 to 1862. 38 Cf. Orfield, Federal land grants to the states, University of Minnesota, Studies, No. 2 (1915).

39 43 Cong. I sess., H. rep. 251.

same principle as were the preëmption acts, made for rapid disposals. Under the Oregon Donation Act of September 27, 1850, there were conveyed in the Oregon Territory alone between two and three millions of acres.

The mineral laws of May 10, 1872 (17 Stat. L., 91) were met by the organization of the Mineral Lands Division. The many railroad grants between 1851 and 1872 offered wider fields of activity, and a new division was created having jurisdiction over about 155,000,000 acres of land. Precedent for these grants had been established in 1830 when Ohio was authorized to use for railroad purposes an 1828 grant to a canal. Again in 1833, the state of Illinois was granted permission to appropriate moneys for the construction of a railroad, which moneys were the proceeds of a grant of land that four years previously had been granted in aid of the Illinois and Michigan Canal. These grants had mounted to approximately 172,119,430 acres by 1874. This involved many adjustment claims especially between the settlers and the railroads.40 The railroad grants were odd numbered sections of the townships which bordered on the line of the road. Sometimes all of such sections on either side of the road-bed within six to twenty miles of the line of track would be granted to the corporation. Considerable areas of land were also granted to encourage wagon roads and canal and river improvements. Under the agricultural and mechanical college grants 1,479,316 acres had at this time been granted, and script had been issued for 7,830,000 acres more.41

The Desert Land Law of March 3, 1877 (19 Stat. L.,

40 Specific details of these grants are presented in Sanborn, Congressional grants of land in aid of railways, University of Wisconsin, Studies, No. 30. In Ibid. No. 342, is the treatise of L. H. Haney on the Congressional history of railroads in the United States, 18501887.

A bibliography is included in Cleveland and Powell, Railroad promotion and capitalization in the United States (1909).

41 See James, The origin of the land grant Act of 1862, University of Illinois, Studies, vol. IV, No. 1 (1910) and Powell, B. E., Semicentennial history of the University of Illinois, pp. 14-155 (1918). Blackmar, The history of federal and state aid to higher education,

377) allowed persons to make entries without residence for 640 acres of arid land, provided it be reclaimed by water within three years. Under this law the Land Office has conveyed eight millions of acres. 42

The Timber and Stone Act of June 3, 1878 (20 Stat. L., 89) allowed any person to purchase 160 acres of public land that is non-mineral and non-agricultural but valuable for timber and stone. This law was applied to all public lands in 1892, and under it title has been passed to more than 13,500,000 acres of timber lands.

The task of the Land Office during the reconstruction period after the Civil War was further augmented by the extension of the land administration to the Mexican cessions and the Oregon country. The unfinished business was overwhelming, and some of it related to claims that had been adjudicated as remotely as 1807.

Public Land Commission of 1879. A Public Land Commission was appointed by Congress in 1879. It was composed of the Commissioner of the General Land Office, the Director of the Geological Survey, and three other members, including Thomas Donaldson, who was the compiler of the detailed and comprehensive report."

This commission investigated at first hand the lands and the supervision of them, codified about three thousand acts of Congress, and recommended an increase in the number of the higher grade employees and a reduction in the number of the lower grade employees.

Bureau of Education, Circular No. 1, (1890). Legislation pertaining to land grants for educational purposes and judicial and departmental decisions relating thereto is reviewed in 64 Cong. I sess., H.

rep. 779, pp. 1-73.

42 In 1878 J. W. Powell described the arid regions of the United States and indicated the need of a land system for them. See 45 Cong. 2 sess., H. ex. doc. 73.

43 This report is Donaldson, The public domain, which contains 1343 pages of data, published by the Government Printing Office. Officially it constitutes 47 Cong. 2 sess., H. misc. doc. 45, Pt. 4. Serial 2158.