The Settler's Plight: Caught in the Crosshairs of Territorial Law

Thousands of school land settlers throughout the territory are in trouble over their threatened prosecution under the law of 1885. Many of them have built homes upon these lands, while others have fenced, plowed, and planted. They were not damaging the property whatever, and the various counties were receiving a good many thousand dollars each year for the leases. It is a wonder that men are agitated all over the country when they see Congress busying itself with such small jobs as this, and at the same time blanketing the big jobs connected with the railroad land grants. Members are very much horrified at the abuses under the pre-emption law, whereby a poor man occasionally gets 160 acres to which he is not entitled according to the strict letter of the law, but the same members look not at the law but at the 'equities' of the situation when they are considering land steals by corporations of over 100,000,000 acres. Members of Congress strongly favor paying our national debt in silver, yet not one has a word to say about paying salaries of members of Congress in silver. Both Houses of Congress can take time to confer upon Mrs. U.S. Grant the petty privilege of franking to ten dollars to her all told, but they cannot pass bills conferring fairly earned but inestimable privileges upon the 800,000 people of Washington and Dakota in admitting these Territories to statehood. Better do nothing than do so little and do that little wrong. The people are not to be blamed for crying out against such injustice, and the only astonishment is that their forbearance lasts as long as it does.