him on the stream or streams his homesteads are on or near, obtains his advances in money and provisions, engages to cut and float so many logs, as the case may be, returns to his cabin, cuts and hauls his logs, and when the winter rains swell the streams sufficiently, he starts them afloat, each one with his brand upon it, and at the booms, many miles below, he gathers up all that come through, usually about 90 per cent., forms raits of them, and then delivers them at the mills from which he received his advances. Since the recent seizures, most of this has been suspended-I fear not discontinued. And it has been brought to my notice by some of my deputies that the class of men who have been checked at it by the presence of your agent and the measures he has taken, are now preparing for future operations by making fraudulent or fictitious homestead entries upon the best timbered lands, hoping thereby to tie them up and keep them out of market till a time shall have arrived more favorable for their purposes. My deputies who have been engaged in that quarter report that few of the tracts covered by homestead entries have settlements upon them or bear any evidences of improvement at all, most of them near the larger streams having been more or less denuded of the pine timber. I have read with pleasure your excellent recommendations in the report of the bureau for 1876, page 8, for the enactment of a law by Congress to enable you to protect the pine-bearing lands of the United States. Such a system as you recommend is so obviously necessary in Louisiana that one would suppose it only needed to be called to the attention of the national legislature to secure its prompt adoption. But experience shows that needed reforms are often slow of adoption, and hence I would suggest that before the anticipated public sales take place in this State, some other means be resorted to to enable the government to sell the pine lands. At present the lands which would be purchased for their timber, either at public sale or subsequent private entry, are those within one and two miles of streams or lakes which afford water sufficient for floating purposes; but it is just these lands that the false homestead entries have heretofore been made upon, and will probably continue to be made upon, for the motives I have mentioned. And should the public offerings take place before examinations are effected such lands cannot be offered, of course, and those who honestly seek to purchase and who naturally desire the best lands, will be denied the right in favor of what all men know to be a shallow fraud. I would recommend that as you decide to employ the sum alloted for surveys in Louisana in further resurveys in the pine region of the Calcasieu country, the land office here be required to furnish my deputies with abstracts of all homestead entries in their respective townships to be placed under contract, and that each deputy be required to examine each tract sufficiently to enable him to make a sworn report as to the actual condition in which he finds the land. If such report showed nonsettlement or abandonment, the entries could be canceled, or, if you saw proper, the supposed settler could be notified by notice in some newspaper to show cause, by a certain time, why his entry should not be canceled. As to entries in townships not necessary to be resurveyed, or which cannot be put under contract this year, I should be authorized to appoint and send out a deputy in whom I have confidence, furnishing him with the proper abstracts from the local land office, and requiring him to make similar examinations and reports. Such reports would be valuable evidence in the legal proceedings to be had here next winter for the confiscation of the timber seized by your agent in Calcasieu Parish, and which I suppose are likely to turn upon the fact whether or not the depredations were committed on public or private lands. UNCONFIRMED PRIVATE LAND CLAIMS IN LOUISIANA. This subject still attracts attention, and I think it my duty again to briefly allude to it, in order that through you Congress may be informed correctly upon the subject. In this connection I cannot do better than recall your attention to what I had the honor to lay before you in my report for 1874, published in the bureau report for that year, pages 76, 77, 78, and 79. Nothing has occurred to induce me to modify or abandon any of the reasons then advanced in favor of a general act of Congress which, proprio vigore, would forever quiet this class of claims and relieve the Land Department and Congress of a fruitful source of annoyance and labor. Practically, the United States can make no disposition of the lands covered by these claims. And they would not if they could. They embrace but about 80,000 acres in all, excluding of course the Houmas and a few other large grants. In nearly every case are embraced in the limits of valuable plantations or farms, have been long since surveyed and represented upon the usual township maps, and hence are susceptible of being readily described in any bill which might be passed for their confirmation, by their proper designation as to section, town ship, range, and area. Should policy, prudence, or other consideration oppose such wholesale divestiture of right by Congressional action, whereby it might be feared a dangerous precedent might be established, then I would recommend an act similar to the Missouri act of June 12th, 1866. The objects of that act were confined to lots or other lands within the city of Saint Louis, of which prior confirmations, relinquish ments, or recognitions of title by the United States were predicable. The evil to be remedied was the difficulty proprietors met in showing documentary and other evi dence of title or boundaries against the United States, and the act liberally allowed the United States district court at Saint Louis, with right of appeal to the circuit court, to adjudicate the question of prior confirmation, recognition, or relinquishment, with boundaries, and to afford appropriate evidence of the facts found in a proper decree. The parallelism between the case of the Saint Louis lot owners and the occupants of the unconfirmed claims in Louisiana is closer than at first glauce it might appear; for although antecedent title against the sovereign was pleadable in favor of the former, and founded the right to a decree declaratory of its existence and limits, and the theory of the latter is that no proof of title can be shown against that sovereign, yet in point of practice we know that examination and research develop such title in many cases, and that in all the sovereign impliedly admits its existence by non-claim and indiffer ence. Indeed, if the strict principies of law applicable to royal lands in England, immemorially enjoyed and occupied in opposition to the Crown, should by our courts be applied to the class of lands under consideration, it may safely be assumed that the ancient and continued occupation and enjoyment of these lands in a public and unequivocal manner, with the full knowledge and sufferance of the sovereign, would afford judicial proof of the existence of grants good against the United States but lost through lapse of time. Hence it would not be stretching the Missouri precedent very far to apply it to the lands in Louisiana immemorially possessed by her citizens, who are unable to exhibit their grants and boundaries. Although I favor, for reasons stated in my report for 1874, an act of relinquishment which will require no expensive legal or other proceedings on the part of its beneficiaries, yet if such an act would be unwise, one similar to the Missouri act would be the next best thing, and against it certainly no objections could be urged. Congress should pass one or the other of these acts at once, because the present anomalous condition of these lands exposes their possessors to vexatious annoyances and suspicions, and in some cases to depreciation in value of plantations consisting in whole or part of such claims. I again desire to invite your attention to the necessity of an appropriation to enable me to bring up, while yet it is practicable, the long suspended work of this office, and to which I and my predecessors have so often called attention that it is becoming an oft told tale, and I fear wearisome. There are about 784 townships in the State, the surveys of which are complete, and the original notes of which are on file in this office. Those are among the early surveys. Contrary to law, the copies of these notes have never been made and sent to the bureau for safe custody. Should an accident happen to the records here, by which they should be stolen or destroyed, every vestige of a record showing the surveys in those townships would be swept away, and no power on earth could restore them or duplicate them. During the war these records were taken possession of by the authorities of the Confederate States, removed from place to place, and many of them lost, stolen, or destroyed. Since the war, the custom house, where they now seem to be secure, was often in the midst of riot and danger, and once was in the theater of battle, where shot and shell and bullets did their bloody work. In 1865 the entire records of the United States land office for the old southeastern district of Louisiana, located in this city, were destroyed by fire, and irreparable loss inflicted on many of the property holders in this section of the State, whose claims and evidences of title were recorded among them. In course of time the custom and the policy of the law will require that this office be closed and its records transferred to the State. Perhaps the liability of the records to destruction will then be greater than now. In view of all this, should now be copying these notes and sending the copies to the seat of National Government, as the law directs, and as wisdom and prudence dic tate. Then, too, before patents can issue according to law, this office must prepare and furnish to the local land offices patent plats in about 6,170 private land claims heretofore duly surveyed, and now represented upon the township plats. It is the duty of the government to issue these patents, and the law requires the piat to be annexed to the patent as a part of it. All this work, so long neglected, should now be brought up. Special attention has been called to the subject in the reports from this office for 1871 and 1873, and to which I respectfully refer you. There are a few of the leading heads of work in arrear in this office, none of which is of modern origin. It is all left to this office as a legacy of the early surveyors gen eral and their clerks. Much more work could be stated of a miscellaneous nature now sadly in arrear, which should be brought up, but I cannot enter upon any of it. I have for this current year but $2,000 for clerk hire, and I shall endeavor to retain the two efficient gentlemen I have had so long, but it will only be at beggarly salaries no just government would expect its servants to work for, and which, indeed, competent men would not work for but as an escape from the hard fate which the poverty of the times has visited upon this part of our country. My own salary has been cut down from $2,000, allowed since the office was created in 1831, to $1,800, and I submit as gracefully as I may, no alternative being left me. I have the honor to be, very respectfully, your obedient servant, Hon. J. A. WILLIAMSON, Commissioner of the General Land Office. O. H. BREWSTER, Surveyor General Louisiana. A.-Statement of surveying contracts entered into by the surveyor general of Louisiana on account of the appropriation of $18,000 for fiscal year ending June 30, 1874. New Orleans, August 28, 1877. 3 OFFICE OF SURVEYOR GENERAL, DISTRICT OF LOUISIANA, O. H. BREWSTER, B.—Statement of surveying contracts entered into by the surveyor general of Louisiana on account of the appropriation of $15,000 for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1875, approved by act of Congress of June 23, 1874. New Orleans, August 28, 1877. OFFICE OF SURVEYOR GENERAL, DISTRICT OF LOUISIANA, O. H. BREWSTER, Surveyor General, Louisiana. |