Democratic Sentinel, Volume 11, Number 52, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 20 January 1888 — THE LAND STEALERS. [ARTICLE]

THE LAND STEALERS.

(Concluded.) He asserts that I have charged the Supreme ourt of the United States with joining hands with the blunderers of the public domain. There is not a sentence or word in my article which can be tortured into any such meanr g, and Mr. Dorsey, who carefu ly read it for reply, knows this to be true. He says that my article implies t at all the Secretaries of the Interior from 1861 to 1885, all the Commissioners of the General Land Office, and all my predecessors in office, were dishones' and corrupt men. This statement is a gross exaggeration, and it is, moreover, a mere begging of the question. Quite a number of the officials referred to are involved in my exposure, and the records of the Government will identity them. Are my sects aut entic ? Mr. Dorsey makes no attempt to controvert them, which he certainly wo’d have done if he had been able, but with uplifted hands and the whine of a convict, begs that the officials whom I have arraigned as his accomplices shall be shielded 1 row the right of search!

Mr Dorsey says the Committee on Public Lands of the House of Repr ’sentatives, during the time I was its chairman, reported favorably bills granting lands to railroad corporations covering more than half of all the land granted to railroads in the United States, which bills passed Congress as a result of such report. In these statements he does not refer to the vast areas granted to our great ’’rans-Continental railways, respecting which he makes no charges against me. He speaks only of the fertile lands granted in Illinois, lowa and other Western States, which were not granted to railroad corporations at all, but to the States themselves. The entire ; *»g re gate of these lands was a small fraction only of the many millions granted to our Pacific railways by bills reported from the Committee on Pacific railroad -, and not by the Committee on Public Lands. Mr. Dorsey should also have remembered that, even as to these moderate grants for which he holds me responsible, I had only one vote as a member of the com mittee, a majority of which made the report, and that I could not, of course be made responsible for the action of the two houses of Con 7 gress on the passage of the bills reported. Moreover, Mr. Dorse/, h.mseif, says the land grants in hese cases “wete for the best interests of the whole country,” and thus defends my aciior. But mt me admit for the sake of the argument, that soiim of my votes are indefensible. Does thatjprove that he is not a land-stealer?

Mr. Dorsey further holds me responsible for the provision in all our railroad grants, c impelling the settlers on the reserved sections to pay $2.50 per acre for their lands, instead of the ordinary price, $1.25 per acre. He says “I thus added more than two hundred millions of dollars te the burden of the settlers who sought homes along the proposed lines of the railway,” while I put an additional “two hundred millions of dollars into the pockets of the railroad lobby.” I think I am safe in saying that this example of parliamentary al mightiness has no parallel in the annals of the

civilized world. Both houses of Congress and the Presid nt of the United States were my playthings, and my diabolism had full sweep from 1850, when the first land grant was made, till I left Congress in 1871! Such flashes of imbecility are really somewhat dazzling and spectacular, but life is too short to be wasted in a fight with dissolving views.

I must not conclude these illustrations of the ethical side of Mr Porsey’s character without noticing the display he makes of him.self in connection with the Una de Gato grant, m which he is personally involved. This is what I said on that subject in my article:

“1 he area of this grant, according to Mr. D isey, its claima was nearly 600,000 acres. It as reserved from settlement, and is so reserved to-day by the act of 18?4; hut when the forgery of the grant was demonstrated iu 1870, and he thought it unsafe to rely upon that tide, he determined to avail himsels o’ the homestead and pre-emption laws. This he could not legally do, because the land was reservad; but the Commissioner of the General Land Office w«s touched by his misfortune, and iu defiance of the Lw ordered the land to be surveyed and opened to settlement. Mr. Dorsey, who was already in possession of thousands of ac:es of the choicest lands in the tract, at once sent out his squads of henchmen, who availed themselves of the forms of the pre-emption and homestead laws in acquiring pretended titles,which were conveyed to him acccruing to arrangements previously agreed upon. No record of this unauthorized action of the Commissioner is to be found in the Land Office. What was done was done verbally, and in the dark, and nothing is now known of th transition fact of its oe; i rrence, and the inH.’ii te relations then existing between Mr. Dorsey and the Commissioner and his chief of surveyors. Of course, he and his associates in this business have no title t:> the lands thus acquired, and their entries should be cancelled, rot only because t. e land was reserved from sale by act of Congress, but . tcausethe entries were iraudu ently made, as will be shown by investigations now in progress.”

These are exactly the facts as , shown by official documents. Now, j how d es Mr. Dorsey answer me? , Upon investigating the title of I this >jrant he says he became satisfied it was fraudulent When did he make this investigation and reach this conclusion? The records of my office and of t'.e InteI rior Department give no answ rto the question. They do not sho v that he ever made ai. investigation, but the contrary. He says that he wrote to the Hon. Carl Schu'Z, then Secretary of the Interior, stating substantially all the facts in his possession granting the grant, and asked him to send a spe cial agent to make a careful investigation, and turned over to the Secretary all the papers in his possession. Unfortunately for Mr. Dors y, these statements are unsupported by the records of the Land Department, and contradicted by them. They show that he persisted in his claim for years following the first agitation of the validity of his title, and up to January, 1879, when the forgery of the grant was demonstrated. He did nothing whatever in instigating the inquiry which led to this demonstration, whic . inquiry w T as set on foot by Lewis Kingman and Henry W. Ai ms in the year 1877. The papers show that he was displeased with their intermeddling with his title, and that it was solelely at the instance of these men s hat the Land Office directed an investigation to be made. In the 1 ght of the ie facts the reader can judge for himself as to Mr. Dorsey’s reverence for *he truth when he says: “I exposed the fraudulent nature of the grant with which Mr. Julian atteo. pted to link my name unfavorably!” The audacity of this statement is fascinating.— It is Satanic, and it settles the fact that Mr. Dorsey, in bis way, is a genius. But he says that he applied to the Secretary of the Interior to have the land within the bounds of this fraudulent grant thrown open for .ettlement, and that it was done accordingly. This is what I said in mv article; but I stated, further, that the Land Department had no power to do this. One Surveyor-General had pronounced the grant valid, and another had dec ar.d it to be a forgery. Congress alone could determine the question, and the land was absolutely reserved by law law in the meantime. Secretary Schurz and Williamson knew this perfectly, and for this reason, doubtless, no written order for the survey and sale of these lands was made, and the business was done “in the dark.” Nor is there any mystery about this action. Mr. Dorsey was then a power in politics. He had neared the summit of his remarkable ascendancy. It was in the following year (1880) that his genius lighted the way to national victory for the Republicans, for which he was banqueted and lionized as “the Napoleon who carried Indiana.”— When such a man wanted the. Republican officials of the Land Department to violate the law to enable him to appropriate a large body of public l?nds in furtherance of his rapacity, they did not dare say no, and the robbery “was done.”— Mr. Dorsey knows all this, but makes no defense. He admits the action of the Land Department in response to his request, but stands mute as to its illegality. He knows, and so do Carl Schurz and J. A. Williamson, that that acti n was totally unauthorize ’ andsneakingly performed, and that the lands acquired by him an i his allies under an illegal ord r now rightfully belong to the United States. In these statements lam supported by the records of the Government, and no 1 wyer will attempt to controvert them. In snch a dilemma as this, Mr. Dorshould have remained silent, both on bis own account and in the interest of parties claiming title under him. Mr. Dorsey concludes his paper with a digression upon the water sup ly of New Mexico, and its “physical phenonpna of climate and topography;” and he insists that with very slight exceptions | the land is fit only for grazing and mining. This is not the conclu- i sion of a disinterested explorer ; and devotee of science, after pa-' tient inAestigati.m, but the plea of I a land stealer, seeking to make the | phvsicial ’' ■' ■"dl-rities of the conn- (.;■■■■ VL.. cCu . -1.. L U- -11.' CIUJ.

The way-faring man, though a fool, can see this. If he could make I the public believe that New Mexico is worthless for agr culture, it wo’d go far to exonerate him from th? charge of robbing the Government aad plundering poor settlers thro’ the machinery of the homestead and pre-emption lavs. It would also tend to smooth his way to still more formidable schemes of robbery as a great cattle king, through which he and his confederates co’d trample down and crush out both the stock-grower of small means and the homesteader, and thus bring the people of the Territory more completely under the yoke of a grand Brotherhood of Thieves. The trcuble with Mr. Dorsey :s that he believes the p ople too stupid to see through the game he is playing. It does not occur to him that owing to his unfortunate survival of his own conscience nobody will accept either his theories or his facts. Although his reputation for sue essful and brilliant rascalitv is continental, he impudently takes the witness stand, as if he expected the public would believe him. He is, perhaps, the most picturesque political reprobate now on public exhibition; but he seems wholly unconscious of the fact that "he interest felt in him is purely historic and post mortem, and that the pe pie onlv desire to get some idea of hi. moral physiognomy, and what may be called the scenery of his career. I trust 1 have done them some service in this direction; but it has been the chief ’'urposeof this paper to penetrate the dry rot of hi self-com-placency, and by a little wholesome vivisection to help him catch at least a glimpse of his real lineaments as others see them, and as indelib’y pai ted by himself in the somber pigments of his evil deeds. If I have failed in these friendly offices it will be Mr. Dorsey’s misfortune, and not my fault Gegrge AV. Julian.

The latest thing in the line of a swindle, says an exchange, for the ta/mers LTsteer clear of, is a v ry innocent /looking individual who wants to paint the roof of your barn for *a night’s lodging, nd in the morning wants you to sign a rerommendation as to his qualifications. The recoin mentation turns up at a neighboring bank in the shape of the usual promissory note. > -A— The Indianapolis News, a prominent republfcan paper, has this to say in response to John Sb man's recent anti-tariff reform effort: “Judging thus far, we should say that Republican leaders would do wisely in letting the P'-esident’s message alone. It can not be distorted into anything but an honest appeal for a reduction of the tariff, and it has probably already made the biggest “vest pocket” vote of any document that nas been put fo r th in years.”