Hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of splendid acres were wrested from their innocent purchasers and holders.There began a vast hegira of evicted settlers in tattered wagons; going nowhere, cursing injustice, stunned, purposeless, homeless, hopeless.Their children began to look up to them for bread, and cry.
It was in consequence of these conditions that Hamil-ton and Avery had filed upon a strip of land about a mile wide and three miles long, comprising about two thou-sand acres, it being the excess over complement of the Elias Denny three-league survey on Chiquito River, in one of the middle-western counties.This two-thousand-acre body of land was asserted by them to be vacant land, and improperly considered a part of the Denny survey.
They based this assertion and their claim upon the land upon the demonstrated facts that the beginning corner of the Denny survey was plainly identified; that its field notes called to run west 5,760 varas, and then called for Chiquito River; thence it ran south, with the meanders -- and so on -- and that the Chiquito River was, on the ground, fully a mile farther west from the point reached by course and distance.To sum up: there were two thousand acres of vacant land between the Denny survey proper and Chiquito River.
One sweltering day in July the Commissioner called for the papers in connection with this new location.
They were brought, and heaped, a foot deep, upon his desk -- field notes, statements, sketches, affidavits, connecting lines-documents of every description that shrewdness and money could call to the aid of Hamlin and Avery.
The firm was pressing the Commissioner to issue a patent upon their location.They possesed inside infor-mation concerning a new railroad that would probably pass somewhere near this land.
The General Land Office was very still while the Com-missioner was delving into the heart of the mass of evi-dence.The pigeons could be heard on the roof of the old, castle-like building, cooing and fretting.The clerks were droning everywhere, scarcely pretending to earn their salaries.Each little sound echoed hollow and loud from the bare, stone-flagged floors, the plastered walls, and the iron-joisted ceiling.The impalpable, perpetual lime-stone dust that never settled, whitened a long streamer of sunlight that pierced the tattered window-awning.
It seemed that Hamlin and Avery had builded well.
The Denny survey was carelessly made, even for a care-less period.Its beginning corner was identical with that of a well-defined old Spanish grant, but its other calls were sinfully vague.The field notes contained no other object that survived -- no tree, no natural object save Chiquito River, and it was a mile wrong there.
According to precedent, the Office would be justified in giving it its complement by course and distance, and considering the remainder vacant instead of a mere excess.
The Actual Settler was besieging the office with wild protests in re.Having the nose of a pointer and the eye of a hawk for the land-shark, he had observed his myrmi-dons running the lines upon his ground.Making inquiries, he learned that the spoiler had attacked his home, and he left the plough in the furrow and took his pen in hand.
One of the protests the Commissioner read twice.It was from a woman, a widow, the granddaughter of Elias Denny himself.She told how her grandfather had sold most of the survey years before at a trivial price -- land that was now a principality in extent and value.Her mother had also sold a part, and she herself had suc-ceeded to this western portion, along Chiquito River.
Much of it she had been forced to part with in order to live, and now she owned only about three hundred acres, on which she had her home.Her letter wound up rather pathetically:
"I've got eight children, the oldest fifteen years.Iwork all day and half the night to till what little land I can and keep us in clothes and books.I teach my children too.My neighbours is all poor and has big families.
The drought kills the crops every two or three years and then we has hard times to get enough to eat.There is ten families on this land what the land-sharks is trying to rob us of, and all of them got titles from me.I sold to them cheap, and they aint paid out yet, but part of them is, and if their land should be took from them I would die.My grandfather was an honest man, and he helped to build up this state, and he taught his children to be honest, and how could I make it up to them who bought me? Mr.Commissioner, if you let them land-sharks take the roof from over my children and the little from them as they has to live on, whoever again calls this state great or its government just will have a lie in their mouths"The Commissioner laid this letter aside with a sigh.
Many, many such letters he had received.He had never been hurt by them, nor had he ever felt that they appealed to him personally.He was but the state's servant, and must follow its laws.And yet, somehow, this reflection did not always eliminate a certain responsible feeling that hung upon him.Of all the state's officers he was supremest in his department, not even excepting the Governor.Broad, general land laws he followed, it was true, but he had a wide latitude in particular ramifica-tions.Rather than law, what he followed was Rulings:
Office Rulings and precedents.In the complicated and new questions that were being engendered by the state's development the Commissioner's ruling was rarely appealed from.Even the courts sustained it when its equity was apparent.
The Commissioner stepped to the door and spoke to a clerk in the other room -- spoke as he always did, as if he were addressing a prince of the blood:
"Mr.Weldon, will you be kind enough to ask Mr.
Ashe, the state school-land appraiser, to please come to my office as soon as convenient?"Ashe came quickly from the big table where he was arranging his reports.
