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Charts of Public Land Sales and Entries

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 February 2011

Paul W. Gates
Paul W. Gates
Affiliation:
Cornell University
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Extract

Critical readers of The Public Lands. Studies in the History of the Public Domain, edited by Vernon Carstensen, whatever the merits of its other features, cannot but be struck by the fact that separate charts showing interest in the public lands—as evidenced first by income from sales and second by the total of land entries in acreage—differ so widely. One explanation for some of the difference is that Arthur H. Cole, in compiling the data for the charts showing income from sales, seems to have used the calendar year, whereas the chart showing original land entries is based on the data for the government fiscal year. Another difficulty is that the Cole chart is prepared from manuscript schedules in the old General Land Office and they do not coincide with the published data in the Annual Reports of that office.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 24 , Issue 1 , March 1964 , pp. 22 - 28
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1964

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References

1 Carstensen, , The Public Lands (Madison: The Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1963).Google Scholar

2 Cole, Arthur H., “Cyclical and Sectional Variations in the Sale of Public Lands, 1816–1860,” The Review of Economic Statistics, IX (Jan. 1926), 41–53,Google Scholar reprinted in Carstensen, The Public Lands. I refer particularly to the table on p. 233 and the chart on p. 241. The chart showing original land entries is on p. 481.

3 Data concerning land entries are compiled from the Annual Reports of the Commissioner of the General Land Office, which were included with the Annual Reports of the Secretary of the Treasury prior to 1849 and thereafter with the Annual Reports of the Secretary of the Interior, and are in the serial documents. It has not seemed necessary to give references to data therefrom.

4 Act of Feb. 11, 1847, U. S. Statutes at Large, p. 125.

5 Donaldson, Thomas, The Public Domain (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1884), p. 237.Google Scholar

6 The 40-acre warrants always brought the best price, the 120-acre warrants brought the lowest price. Differences in the buy and sell quotations of the warrants may be seen in the following table:

The quotations are from the Hudson North Star (Hudson, Wisconsin), April 9, 1856,Google Scholar quoting a circular of Taylor & Bros, of New York, and from the American Railroad Journal, XXXIII (Feb. 18, 1860), 145.Google Scholar

7 Act of September 28, 1850, 9 U. S. Stat, p. 521; Act of March 22, 1852, 10 U. S. Stat, p. 3; Act of March 3, 1855, 10 U. S. Stat., p. 702.

8 Cole's charts and tables (cited in n.2) also fail to consider the warrants for 4,930,000 acres of land given to soldiers of the War of 1812, which were largely located in 1817–19 in Illinois, Arkansas, and Missouri. Usually, the ex-soldiers sold their warrants to speculators who acquired them at much less than the $2.00 an acre which the government then maintained as its minimum price. Valued at their face, they would substantially change the tables and charts. For the story of speculation in these lands, see Carlson, Theodore L., The Illinois Military Tract: A Study of Land Occupation, Utilization and Tenure (Urbana, Illinois: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1951).Google Scholar

9 Donaldson, Public Domain, p. 236.

10 Ibid., 290–91.