Land Office Cuts Northern Pacific Claims by One-Third
A government intervention restores a third of Northern Pacific's land claims in Washington to the public domain, sparking a bitter feud between settlers and the railroad.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
The Northern Pacific Railroad has been deprived of over one-third of all the lands it claimed in Washington Territory by a recent order from the Land Office. The order has caused a tremendous chattering among the railroad organs of the Territory, and they all disapprove of it. The issue is simply this: the Northern Pacific Railroad was granted its odd sections in a strip of land forty miles in width on both sides of its road. To indemnify the company for such of that land as had been taken from the possession of the Government before the railroad could comply with the provisions of the act, it was given power to take other lands outside the limits of the grant but within ten miles of either side of it. This latter limit was afterwards extended to twenty miles. By the decisions and practice of the General Land Office, however, the company was allowed to withdraw from settlement any lands within the lien limits without making known what lands within the grant they were intended to replace. Large quantities of lien lands were accordingly withdrawn from settlement without any statement being made of the lands which had been lost within the grant. The lands so withdrawn were treated by the company as if its title to them was unquestioned. A man who settled within the lien limits did so at the risk of having his claim taken from him as soon as his labor had made it desirable. In one list filed at the Walla Walla land office on September 4, 1884, 3,794 acres of land which had previously been settled upon were claimed by the railroad. Under the rules of Commissioner Sparks, total robbery is impossible, and the company will be allowed to hold within the lien limits only enough land to indemnify it for the lands lost to it within the grant. There are to be no more wholesale withdrawals to indemnify the company for land; no more sales of lands which in reality belong to the settlers who cultivated them. It is ordered that they be freed from all the lands within the lien limits, and they are in reality now thrown open to settlement.
“A man who settled within the lien limits did so at the risk of having his claim taken from him as soon as his labor had made it desirable.”
This 1885 conflict over the Northern Pacific's aggressive 'land grabbing' and the displacement of settlers mirrors current debates in Washington regarding corporate land ownership, housing scarcity, and the balance of power between large developers and local residents.
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