to much of the Smith lands are in evidence as Government exhibits at Portland, Oregon, in the case of the United States against John H. Mitchell, and have been there since June, 1905, and if no action is taken by the authorities in Washington to utilize this proof and save to the public this vast domain, then it is high time that those responsible should be impeached in disgrace for their perfidy.
In the case of the Walker lands in Northern California and Southern Oregon, embracing several hundred thousand acres of valuable timber, much was located by process of "dummy" entrymen in 1902, but patents were not issued for fully a year thereafter; so there is no excuse for allowing the period to go by in which to proceed, as there is still fully a year left.
That the Land Department in Washington has winked at these frauds all along is a matter of history. On November 9, 1902. the writer made a complete report to Lewis E. Anbury, State Mineralogist of California, covering extensive investigations of Walker's fraudulent timber land operations in the Susanville and Redding Land Districts of California, and a synopsis of this report was not only published in the San Francisco newspapers on November 12, 1902, and sent broadcast throughout the country by the Associated Press, but complete copies of the report itself were transmitted to the Interior Department and General Land Office, and are still on file in those offices.
In that report, fully fifty specific charges of fraud were alleged, and yet. in the face of this evidence. Commissioner of the General Land Office R. A. Ballinger, during his visit to the Pacific Coast in the Summer of 1907, in the course of an interview in the San Francisco Examiner, is quoted as declaring that his Department would make no effort to investigate the Walker entries unless the California State Mining Bureau, or others equally interested, should furnish the General Land Office with "specific charges" of fraud! Just as if it is at all necessary for any State officer to call the attention of a high Government official to matters affecting the public domain of the United States!
It is an episode of history that Nero fiddled while Rome was burning, and it is self-evident that Commissioner Ballinger is a firm disciple of the doctrine that there ought to be a repetition of history, whether the people want it or not.
At the door of avarice can be laid all the sins of the land frauds, and this trait is responsible for the ultimate undoing of the perpetrators. Had Mays, Jones or Kribs been liberal enough not to have allowed avarice to blind them, and had come to Puter's rescue with bonds after his conviction in the 11-7 case. he would have been the last man on earth to have exposed them, and it stands as an indelible record that Puter's co-operation with the Government was the key that unlocked the vaults of corruption, and furnished the means by which United States Senator Mitchell, and others in high official power, were made to suffer for their offenses.
It was the narrow, selfish natures of this trio that made them afraid of their souls, and caused them to tighten their purse-strings when their old associate in crime pleaded with them for the small boon of freedom. Ready to put up thousands or any unlimited amount when it came to a question of bribery or the corruption of public officials, they were too deeply impregnated with the germs of covetousness, too much the slaves of greed, to chance the loss of a picayune, even though well aware that by reason of their complicity in his fraudulent operations they were completely at his mercy, and that their indifference to his fate was planting in his breast those seeds of hate and revenge whose harvest must be their own dishonor and downfall.
Had Senator Mitchell refrained from making his unfortunate speech in the United States Senate immediately after his first indictment, the probabilities are that the full measure of his infamy would never have been known, because what he said upon that memorable occasion amounted to a challenge for Puter to do his worst, and I have no desire to rake up the dead past to show what that all meant.
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