The Boise citizen. (Boise, Idaho) 1906-1910, 1906-12-28
BIG GRAFT
In TIMBER
W6u6rhd6uS6r Richest
Man in World
PEOPLE DESPOILED
OF NATIONAL WEALTH
Methods Bu Which Vast Forests
Passed to Railroads bu
Stroke of Pen

Charles P. Norcross presents an arti-
Gle in the January Cosmopolitan which
asserts that Frederick Weyerhauser, the
timber king, is a richer man than John
D. Rockefeller, and is, therefore, the
richest man in the world. After tracing
Weyerhauser's advent in America as a
poor German emigrant and his modest
rise as a lumberman, Norcross goes
on to describe what he terms a stu
pendous legal steal, by which the public
domain was looted:
with the recent revelations as to
graft and the illegal methods used by
various captains of industry" to achieve
their eminence in the world of com
merce, one naturally wants to know
whether Weyerhaeuser and his associ-
ates have created this giant industry, or
ganized this great trust, and builded this
monumental fortune with clean hands
Unfortunately not Weyerhauser and
his associates have done their part, just
as Mitchell and many other men1 in the
Northwest did their part, in securing
lands fraudulently. The game of home
steading and getting government land
by fraud was just as familiar to the
Weyerheauser interests as to others.
Possibly Weyerhaeuser never personally
conducted any of these illegal opera
tions, but hundreds of thousands of
acres taken in by his companies for tim
Der purposes were stolen under the old
and well-known formula 1t is hardly
worth while discussing this, since the
same practices for which Francis ].
Heney is securing convictions in Ore
gon were practiced by the Weyerheauser
clique 1t is necessary to record, how
ever, one of the most stupendous steals
ever engineered in this country. It was
done legally; there is no redress. 1t was
the looting of the United States gov
ernment of lands worth fully S1OO, 900, 900.
The scheme was engineered for the ben
eft of the Weyerhaeuser companies, and
while others made millions the Weyer-
haeuser interests probably benefited more
than any one else"
Here is given in detail in the article
facts showing the near exhaustion of
the timber of the middle west and the
covetous eyes turned to the great fields
of Oregon, Washington and Idaho, and
the passage by congress in 1897 of bill
creating forest reserves, which contained
the following joker:
That in cases in which a tract covered
by an unprotected bona fide claim or
by patent is included within the limits
of public forest reserve, the settler or
owner thereof may, if he desires to do
so, relinquish the tract to the govern
ment and in lieu thereof select a tract
of vacant land open to settlement, not
exceeding in area the tract covered by
the claim or patent, and no charge shall
be made in these cases for the making
of the entry of record or issuing the
patent to cover the tract selected
Under this innocent looking provis-
ion to favor some honest homesteaders,
the land grant railroads came to the
front as their grants carried with ther;:;
millions of acres, taking in as they did
every alternate section of $40 acres on
both sides of the tracks for distance
of twenty miles. When this was passed
in 1897, the land which had been used
to finance the railroads had largely
passed out of their hands and there
were, however (and here the whole
scheme stands revealed, J, somewhat less
than 100000 acres of these worthless