In the early decades of the United States Congress viewed the Public Domain as a munificent bounty to be given away, or to be sold to raise revenue for the nation's cash-starved treasury and to reward soldiers who had served in the Continental Army. The Land Ordinance Act of 1785 put the public domain on the auction block and ordered a rectangular survey system of public lands, the beginning of the modern cadastral survey method.
Although there was a general agreement that public lands should be sold, how they were sold was a matter of intense debate. The opposing views polarized around Alexander Hamilton on one side and Thomas Jefferson on the other. Hamilton wanted to sell public lands in large blocks to capitalists and land companies, while Jefferson wanted to retail small tracts at cut rate prices. Hamilton's view prevailed in the Public Land Law of 1796, but four years later small farmers won a victory. The Land Law of 1800 authorized local land offices, reduced the minimum size for purchase and extended credit. In 1820 credit was abolished but the minimum price was lowered. The Jeffersonians' final triumph came with the Homestead Act of 1862, by which small farmers could acquire 160 acres at no cost other than their time and labor.
Selling off the Public Domain, first to raise money, and later to encourage settlement of the western territories, was the predominant public and Congressional attitude until the late 19th century. Territories were carved out of public lands; upon admission to the union, the new states waived all claim to the Public Domain within their boundaries. To placate the states, however, Section 16 in each township was reserved to finance public education. After 1848 new states received two sections in each township, which was increased to four sections with the admission of Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico.
Congress also provided public lands to states to finance prisons, schools for the deaf and blind, and for internal improvements such as roads and canals. In 1841 each public land state received 500,000 acres for such purposes. On occasion, Congress offered free land in regions it wanted settled or for fighting Indian insurgencies. In 1862 every state in the Union received 30,000 acres for each senator and representative to finance mechanical arts and agricultural colleges. Scrip was issued in 160-acre increments to states with no public land; these scrips could then be sold to private parties to locate and pay for public lands open to sale or private entry.
Nothing, however, could match Congress' generosity toward railroads: between 1862 and 1871, a total of 128 million acres were granted to corporations for the construction of railways, creating multi million-acre "checkerboard empires." Public criticism and demand that lands be reserved for actual settlers finally halted this congressional largesse in 1871.
With so much land on the auction block, it is small wonder that speculation and fraud were problems right from the creation of the Public Domain. Land speculators included the nation's first president George Washington, as well as both Merriwether Lewis and William Clark, and many other, less notable persons. As the years went by the illegal appropriation of public lands and resources became so rampant that in 1885 the Commissioner of the General Land Office, William Sparks, reported:
At the onset of my administration I was confronted with overwhelming evidences that the public domain was being made the prey of unscrupulous speculation and the worst form of land monopoly through systematic frauds carried on and consummated under the public land laws.
In many sections of the country, notably throughout regions dominated by cattle raising interests . . . entries were chiefly fictitious and fraudulent and made in bulk through concerted methods adopted by organizations that had parceled out the country among themselves and inclosures defended by armed riders and protected against immigration and settlement by systems of espionage and intimidation.
Again, in timbered regions, the forests were being appropriated by domestic and foreign corporations through suborned entries made in fraud and evasion of law. Newly discovered coalfields were being seized and possessed in like manner.
(Annual Report of the Commissioners of the General Land Office, 1885)
By the time of Commissioner Sparks' report the Public Domain was rapidly diminishing. But now other views began to assert themselves: a recognition that some of the public lands were national treasures worth preserving for aesthetic or scientific values while other lands should be preserved for the common good. In 1864 President Lincoln deeded Yosemite Valley to the state of California for a “A public park” thus planting the seed for the wilderness park idea. Beginning with the establishment of Yellowstone National Park in 1872, other parks, monuments, and wildlife refuges were withdrawn from
As the nation celebrated the two hundredth anniversary of its birth in 1976, Congress recognized the value of the remaining Public Domain by declaring as policy, that these lands would remain in public ownership. It also set the goal that these lands be managed in ways that best meet the present and future needs of the American people. Never before did the words This land is your land ring truer.
. . . and in winter, we turn the cattle out on the Domain."
“What do you mean 'Domain’?”
"Public Domain. That's where you go hunting, or camping, or picking wildflowers, and ain’t nobody can tell you what to do. Because that’s land that belongs to me, and to you, and to everyone else.
--Jim Gilleece, cowboy, Baker Ranch, Utah, 1996
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