This is a continuation of my posts about the Willamette Valley & Cascade Mountain Wagon Road.

Taking a page from his father’s example of the Minnesota mineral lands, Louis Hill turned his timber lands in Oregon into a trust. Louis, however, wasn’t as generous as his father. Instead of making Great Northern Railway stockholders the beneficiaries of the trust, he created the trust to provide a continuous income for his family. Actually, he made six trusts: one for each of his children, one for his wife, and one for himself. Each had a one-sixth undivided ownership of the timber lands. While the trusts were created in 1917, the lands earned no income for another two decades.

Congress’ policy of granting only every other square mile of land creates a distinctive checkerboard pattern. The dark green on this Google map is the Willamette National Forest while most of the light green squares are Hill trust forest lands. Highway 20 closely follows the route of the Santiam wagon road. Click here to see the same map in satellite view showing clearcuts on the Hill forest lands.

Shortly after Louis Hill acquired those timber lands, a forestry professor at UC Berkeley quit his job to start a forestry consulting firm in Portland. Dave Mason was a prophet of sustained yield forestry, which he described as “limiting the average annual cut to the production capacity” of a forest. This was in contrast to most timber land owners of the time, who generally bought land, cut the timber, and then let the land go for taxes. Continue reading →

Long before their title to the Willamette Valley and Cascade Mountain Wagon Road land grant was secure, the farmers and livestock owners who founded the company put the road and land up for sale. In 1871, they agreed to sell the company to someone named H.K.W. Clarke for just over $160,000 (about $4 million in today’s money), of which Clarke paid $20,000 and the rest was paid by someone named Alexander Weill.

This 36-page booklet was used to try to sell lands from the WV&CM land grant. Click image to download a 26.5-MB PDF of the booklet, which is from the Harvard Library.

At the time, the company had received title to just 107,893 acres, or about one-eighth of the final grant, but since the governor had certified the entire road by 1871, both sides were confident that the company would get the rest. While $160,000 for 860,000 acres of land is only 18-1/2¢ an acre, it is a pretty good return for the company owners who probably spent less than $30,000 building and maintaining the road and got most or all of it back in tolls. Continue reading →

This is a continuation of my posts about the Willamette Valley & Cascade Mountain Wagon Road.

Before the Willamette Valley and Cascade Mountain wagon road was built, or not built as the case may be, a number of families had started farms near the route of the road in the Prineville area. They planned to claim their lands as homestead as soon as the federal government did a land survey. But once the survey was done, about three dozen of them found themselves on odd-numbered sections that were automatically given to the road company.

This 41-page document published by the House Committee on Military Affairs contains W.F. Prosser’s report on his examination of the wagon road. Click image to download an 11.7-MB PDF of this report.

The wagon road company offered to sell them the land for $1.25 an acre. This, said the company, was the same price the government sold its land for, but homesteaders only had to pay a filing fee that worked out to less than 20 cents an acre. Angered, the settlers sent an 1880 letter to the Department of the Interior arguing that “has never built or con­structed any road as the laws of this State requires roads of that character” and that in the 300 miles from Smith’s Rock to the Snake River “there has been no attempt to open or construct any road by the above named com­pany or anyone else.” Continue reading →

Most central Oregon residents are familiar with the Santiam Wagon Road, which parallels U.S. highway 20 up the Cascade Mountains from Sweet Home to Santiam Pass and then down the other side to Sisters. Parts of it are still open as a gravel road that is frequently used by recreationists and the occasional log truck. Other parts have been downgraded to a trail that is less frequently hiked. I’ve both hiked and driven much of the route.

Much of today’s post is based on this book by Cleon Clark, who wrote it after retiring from a career with the Deschutes, Ochoco, and Malheur national forests, all of which were crossed by the wagon road. This book was published by the Deschutes County Historical Society in 1987 and is not copyrighted, so I am making it available for download here. Click image to download the 22.5-MB PDF of this 122-page book with two large maps.

What most residents don’t know is that the Santiam Wagon Road is only part of what was supposed to be a road from Albany, in the Willamette Valley, to the Snake River on the eastern boundary of the state. Even fewer realize that this road was part of one of the biggest land scams in the state, even bigger than the Oregon & California Railroad scandal in the sense that the owners of the Willamette Valley and Cascade Mountain Wagon Road company got away with their scam, while the O&C Railroad did not. Continue reading →

I wrote several posts for my other blog, Streamliner Memories, that are relevant here as well. Recent news stories have asked why projects like the California high-speed rail and Honolulu rail line are so expensive. The answer is that the politicians who support these projects don’t care about the cost because someone else will have to pay it. Or rather they do care but for them the cost is the benefit — the more they spend, the more might be turned into contributions to their future political campaigns from grateful contractors.

This 1939 report from the Department of the Interior lists 105 railroad, wagon road, canal, and river improvement land grants made by Congress in the 19th century and how many acres various transportation companies ended up receiving for those grants. A few of the grants, including the massive Northern Pacific grant, were still open with the grantees hoping to get several million more acres. Click image to download a 4.7-MB PDF of the report.

We saw an early example of this in the First Transcontinental Railroad and later railroads supported by large federal land grants. Railroads weren’t the only transportation projects supported by federal land grants: there were also canals, wagon roads, and river improvements. As it happens, I live near one of the wagon road projects that turned out to be a giant scam in which a few people got more than 860,000 acres of federal land for doing little more than driving a wagon across the state of Oregon. Continue reading →