In the years since European settlement, America developed its own relationship
with the commons, which in our case included the vast unfenced lands we took
from native people and Mexico. Some Americans saw our commons as the soil
from which to build a nation of educated small proprietors. They passed laws
such as the Land Ordinance of 1785, the Homestead Act, the Morrill Land Grant
College Act, and the Reclamation Act, which allocated family-size plots to
settlers and financed schools to educate them. Many also cherished these
lands for their wildness and beauty; they created national parks and wilderness
areas.
At the same time, others in America lured Congress into endless giveaways,
acquired huge chunks of the commons for themselves, and made fortunes. Two
vignettes, occurring more than a century apart, illustrate this continuing
process.
In 1877, Congress passed the Desert Land Act, which removed several hundred
square miles from settlement under the Homestead Act. The lands were said
to be worthless, and were to be sold for 25 cents an acre to anyone promising
to irrigate them. In fact, much of the land was far from worthless. A chunk
of it eyed by James Haggin and Lloyd Tevis — two cronies of California
Senator Aaron Sargent — was located near the Kern River, and was partially
settled already. By hiring vagabonds to enter phony claims, and then transferring
those claims to themselves, Haggin and Tevis acquired 150 square miles before
anybody else in California had even heard of the Desert Land Act. Oil was
later found beneath the land, conferring a huge windfall on the heirs of
the two land-grabbers. ... read
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