gations at Marysville. That report practically whitewashed the whole business, and since it was made the Interior Department had found there have been extensive frauds throughout the district, and that Burke failed signally to discover them.
Nor was the enforced retirement of Register Johnson and Inspector Burke the only fruits of the exposure of affairs at the Marysville Land Office. It was practically the beginning of the friction between Secretary of the Interior Hitchcock and Commissioner of the General Land Office Hermann, which culminated in the latter's expulsion from the position, and the appointment of W. A. Richards to till the place.
After Hermann's peremptory removal as head of the Land Department, he retired to private life, but at the next election sought vindication at the hands of the people of his Congressional district, which was accorded him in a manner that must have been extremely gratifying to his personal vanity, as he was elected by a large majority. The campaign was productive of some dark hints of Hermann's unworthiness, but these rumors had little effect upon the opinions of voters.
What added to the popularity of the ex-Land Commissioner was the fact that while making his canvass during the summer of 1903, President Roosevelt visited Oregon in the course of a tour of the Pacific Coast, and upon this occasion Mr. Hermann practised the clever deception that is referred to heretofore, wherein the disgraced former Land Commissioner succeeded in having himself photographed with the President on the rear platform of the Presidential train.
In the course of a recent interview with a St. Paul newspaper, Thomas B. Walker rushes to the aid of down-trodden millionaires in this fashion:
"Hill is entitled to 10,000 times more credit for his work in the Northwest than is William Van Horne and other men who have played similar parts in Canada. Yet Van Horne and some of his associates have been knighted and honored by the British government and Hill is attacked and condemned by the farmers of the Northwest. As a matter of fact the Hill merger of the Northern Pacific, Great Northern and Burlington was the only thing which prevented St. Paul and other Minnesota cities from becoming mere way stations on transcontinental lines owned and controlled by Harriman.
"One of the best citizens in the United States is John D. Rockefeller. He is honorable, just and fair. He is a good Christian. There is no better thumbed Bible in the country than that of the oil king. He knows and loves the Scriptures. And yet how he is reviled by the unthinking!"
It was during my trip through the northern counties of California for the State Mining Bureau that I became cognizant of one of the most brazen attempts to grab a large body of public and private land that ever came under my observation. My attention was first called to the situation while at Oroville, which seemed to have been the head center of the scheme, as the idea originated there, and it was at this place where most of its leading promoters resided. In brief, the proposition was for eight men to file on twenty acres of land each under the United States placer mining laws, pooling their issues in a single claim of 160 acres, and continuing in this manner until they had secured all the land they required for their purposes. By this method they could apparently locate the entire universe, or at least that portion of it within the jurisdiction of Uncle Sam, as the statutes governing mineral entries seemingly place no limit upon the number of claims eight persons could thus locate.
At all events, I ascertained that H. H. Yard, J. P. Cleary, W. Haines, F. E. Emlay, N. J. Conover, R. T. Hall, W. E. Allen and W. S. Jackson had already filed upon more than 100,000 acres in Butte and Plumas counties by this process, with several counties yet to hear from; and it developed afterward that they increased their holdings to upward of 265,000 acres before their lust for land had been fully satisfied.
Cleary, Haines, Emlay, Conover, Allen and Jackson were all residents of New Jersey, Pennsylvania and New York, while Yard and Hall claimed Oroville as their legal place of abode.
