No sooner was a township surveyed than it was quietly gobbled up by alleged settlers under the special homestead Act created by Congress for their so-called benefit. The whole proceedings looking- to the disposition of these lands was a mistake from the beginning-. In the first place, the country is of such general character that no person could ever make his living there by cultivation of the soil, as it would take a lifetime to develop any kind of respectable clearing. As a matter of fact, the region is a vast jungle, impenetrable to a greater degree than any portion of the heart of Africa, and it has been estimated that it would cost fully $300 an acre to clear the land.
It is essentially a magnificent forest, and as such should have been preserved by the Government, allowing the few surviving Indians therein to retain possession of their own. They could do no harm by their occupancy, but on the contrary, were capable of accomplishing a great deal of good, as they would naturally take a pride in preserving it from devastating fires, thus affording a continuous protection to the watershed, and thus operating to the material benefit of the climate of the Western coast of the State. Provision should have been made for the sale of the ripened timber to the highest bidder in an open market, and in this way the Government could have secured a revenue sufficient to have maintained the reserve for all time. Wild game could thrive there almost unmolested throughout the closed season, and eventually the region would have become one of the world's greatest hunting grounds.
But there was design on the magnificent timber from the very start, and the proposition to throw the reservation open for settlement under the farcical Homestead Act quoted, was merely a ruse to cloak the real motives of those interested, who figured wisely that few honest claimants would attempt to comply with the prohibitive conditions of the law, and go there with the idea of making a home in every sense of the word. With only one method of acquiring a legal foothold, hundreds of men, and not a few women, were found base enough to lend themselves to the scheme of the looters, and even old soldiers, who had shed their blood on the battlefields of their country, were lured into committing perjury by the fascination of the plunderers' gold. Most of them established a quasi right in a manner that it were a vain pity to call residence, and was seemingly done more for the purpose of maintaining a franchise on the right of possession, than through any honest effort^to make a permanent settlement.
Here it was that Willard N. Jones, himself the son of a distinguished officer of the Rebellion, and honored in his own name by the gift of political favor, discarded all his claims to good citizenship by employing such methods to acquire these titles that has made him a candidate for prison bars. His scheme contemplated the location of a large area by process of "dummy" entrymen, and to the shame of all concerned, these were drawn mostly from the ranks of old soldiers,
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