The daily morning journal and courier., 1907-02-16
AN ILLUMINATING LAND GRAB.

AN ILLUMINATING LAND GRAB.
 If Senator Carter of Montana, who
 has been wiel5ing his own little Big Stick over the head of the Secretary of
 the interior in behalf of injured settlers
 on public lands, has heard of the bril- liant operations charged against gen.
 tlennan of the name of Yard in Galifor-
 mia. he has not given utterance in his
 views of the matter on the florr of the
 upper house This latest land graft
 scandal affords an illustration that is
 worth the study of that large majority
 of the public that has been aroused to interest in Secretary Hitchc5ck's 's actiy- ity without, perhaps, being quite clear
 what it is all about The Yard case is
 a particularly aagrant type of a kind
 of transaction that is possible under the public land laws. assuming the lack of a disturbing conscience on the part of the perpetrators and the easy com I pladsance of the government officials. What Yard ana his associates want ed and got out of the public preserves, | according to the allegations, was
 quite different thing from what they { pretended to want and what the gov
 ernment, at the beginning, took it for i granted had been allotted to them.
 These land railers gave the govern I nlent to unders tand that they were af- 1 ter minerals. They were really all for 1 timber They industrdously acquired, l in the course of three or four years, i nearly three hundred thousand acres of I what was supposed to be mineral l claims. The law provides that such an i association may file on the familiar ] quarter sectin of one hundred and six 2 ty acres of land having mineral de- 1 posits, and then may file on as many { adjacent tracts as it chooses. Ordina- i Iily, the Yard syndicate might have kept on filing claims without hindrance, i the length and breadth of the state of ] California, till the enl of time. But i Secretary Hitchcock has acquired the { suspicious habit in recent years, and an 1 inspecting party was recently sent to l the scene to find what kind of mineral ! it was that should stimulate so anlaz- 1 ing a demand for the ground. The X government explorers have not yet { covered all the hundreds of thousands 5 of acres pre-empte1, but they have ex-
 amined enough territory to convince
 them that there is no mineral to speak
 of in it, There are, however, vast for l ests, and at a low estimate, the valua-
 tion of the timber that the Yard claims t covered, under the mask of mineral,
 amounts to some three millions 1f dol-
 lars. MT. Yard has already consented
 to surrender some thousands of acres l of his claims, and the government is { going after him for more, unless he can show pay dirt of some kind to suibstar-
 tiate his original entries.
 [ Senator Carter in a burst of oratory, made strong objection to the an
 nounced purpose of the Secretary of the Interior to issue no land patents
 until one of his inspectors has person. | ally viewed claims to sec if they were
 in agreement with the specifications submitted. The Montana senator af-
 feeted to regard such inspection as an
 insult to innocent settlers and an af-
 front to honest entryanen. The Yard
 case is a sample of the sort of thing
 that has been going on for years, sim-
 ply because the government did not go to the trouble to protect the interests of the original owners of the public | lanids, the people of the United States, | by some such expedieft as will now be
 vigorously enforced. d.-Provide1lce Jour-
 nal.