24. Upon these sagebrush areas they erected their notices. and immediately hunted for a buyer. One Jameson was willing to acquire what rights the locators might have in the land. He offered two dollars an acre. On condition that he also take Section 24 at fifty cents an acre, the locators accepted his offer for the other square mile. They pocketed the reward of honest labor. Great service had they rendered the public by being the first to decorate the land with a location notice. For this service they received sixteen hundred dollars.

Not enough oil to fill a pint-bottle was visible on the land. The "prospectors" simply guessed that petroleum might be somewhere beneath the surface. They did nothing to find or lift the oil. They were paid to get off. For the labor of removing themselves the pay was not bad, but the land was dirt cheap at the price. Neither did the second claimant do more than encumber the land with his

He, too,

got off, for fifteen dollars an acre. His pay for removing himself was better.

The third set of claimants organized the Mount Diablo Oil Company. They leased a portion of the land to someone willing to do real work, willing to spend his money in an effort to find oil and bring it to the surface. The lessee struck oil, whereupon others rushed in to lease and drill the balance of the section. For its services in negotiating the leases, for its assistance in proving

the presence of oil, the third set of claimants two years after the drilling of the first well received a monthly royalty of eight thousand barrels worth four thousand dollars at the prices then prevailing. One of the operating companies, from a partially developed quarter section, was paying dividends on a capitalization of half a million, notwithstanding the royalty it had to pay. The entire section, so it is reported, was sold to a British syndicate for a million and a half. Ultimately the Britishers hoped to receive

thirty per cent. dividends from the royalties.

You and I and all the other parts of the prodigal public sold that land for just enough to pay the transfer expenses. Section 24, sold by us on the same terms, is today controlled by Standard Oil and the Santa Fe.

Two miles north of these sections lies a tract of eighty acres which, after passing through various hands, always at a profit, was acquired by one Dyer on a thirty-day option. The price was to be twenty-eight thousand dollars. Twentyfour hours later the Santa Fe bought the land for forty thousand dollars. Dyer made twelve thousand dollars on the deal in a day.

You and I and all the other part owners were satisfied with two hundred dollars.

Part of the land which now is the Kern River field, the oldest oil district in the San Joaquin Valley, belonged to the government. The largest portion of the remainder was patented to the Southern Pacific. When oil was discovered on this land in 1899, the railway, like the government, played the part of the fool without foresight. Because it had small faith in the future of the oil industry, because it did not recognize the economic value of the new fuel source, the Southern Pacific joyously made use of the oil boom to dispose of many sections for two dollars and a half an acre. In 1900 J. J. Mack and J. M. Keith bought from the railroad some eight hundred acres for two thousand dollars. The two .com

375

panies organized to drill on the land have paid three million dollars in dividends since then, and the land is still producing two million barrels of oil a year, the Southern Pacific buying the output for use on its engines, just as the government is purchasing more than a million barrels a year, paying market price for oil that is pumped out of land given away with a free and liberal hand.

Here the analogy ceases. Though the Southern Pacific acted the part of a fool without foresight for a year or two, it soon ended the practice of giving away land worth five thousand dollars an acre. The government, on the contrary, continued to hand out its oil land to all comers. In Oklahoma the Interior De

partment erected a hog-tight fence around the oil land belonging to its wards, the Indians; in California the same Department allowed the speculators to help themselves for ten years. At the end of the decade, after incessant conservation preachments, after the scramble for the land had degenerated into a freefor-all fight in which the strongest and wealthiest, by brute force, were taking away the claims of the weak, the Interior Department at last awoke. But it did not put up a hog-tight fence. It only waved its arms menacingly and shouted: "Shoo! Shoo! Get out of there!"

Did the grabbers mind the shooing? Did they pull up their location stakes and depart?

They did not. Acting upon the advice of eminent attorneys, they placed the end of the thumb to the tip of the nose and wriggled the fingers derisively.

Once again the Interior Department pronounced its threatening "Shoo!" with the same result. That was nine months after the first warning. Having thus performed its duty, it centered its attention upon Alaska's coal, guarding with holy zeal that which no one was taking. Down in the San Joaquin Valley oil was being pumped illegally out of public land day and night. To this day it is being pumped out of land withdrawn from entry, but no steps have been taken to end the theft of public property.

Since settlement began the San Joaquin Valley has been the scene of grabbing operations on an impressive scale. It was here that Henry Miller, the German butcher-it was his boast that he could drive cattle from the Canadian to the Mexican line and water them on his own land every night-acquired a kingdom of 330,000 acres by various methods. It was here that a boat on wheels was dragged over many sections that the claimant might not perjure himself when

he swore, in his application for patent, that he had traveled all over the "swamp" in a canoe before "reclaiming" the land. In this broad valley Haggin and Tevis acquired holdings of nearly half a million acres in one county. In this valley, through the efforts of the land barons, the insidious doctrine of riparian rights was foisted upon California, a doctrine which enables the great land owners to monopolize the flow of the streams without making a really beneficial use of the water. Here again, in the Sierra Nevada bounding the valley on the east, power corporations have pre-empted power sites and water rights capable of producing two million horsepower, holding the rights and sites against the time when the growth of the valley below will make the development of current highly profitable.

water

In this sanctuary of the grabber the most important supply of fuel in the Far West was discovered. Before that discovery coal, imported from distant fields, retailed at fourteen dollars a ton in California. Coal fuel cost the railroads an average of seven dollars a ton. Every industry was handicapped by excessive

laboriously filing on twenty-acre claims. Thus, with no more expense, he could hold eight claims while doing work on but one. By means of this joint placer claim private parties, in quarter-section bites, devoured practically every acre of potential oil land in California. They would be peacefully digesting the meal by this time, not a foot of oil land would be left in the hands of the public if it were not for the ancient, unshakable fact that the bear refuses to part with his hide before he is found and killed.

Possession of any mineral claim rests

upon the discovery of mineral. No rights of any kind are acquired prior to a discovery. No one is entitled to the proffered reward by pointing out a haystack as the locus of the lost diamond. The California oil "prospectors" squatted upon the haystack, did nothing and asked tribute of those willing to search for the jewel. They pre-empted square mile after square mile of public land presumably containing oil, but they furnished no proof of its presence. Most of them were willing to let the other fellow sink his money into a well. Drilling in Cali