Great Fortunes from Railroads | Page 6

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Very significantly, from about the very time when the Erie Canal was finished, the era of the private canal company, financed by the Government, began. One after another, canal companies came forward to solicit public funds and land grants. These companies neither had any capital of their own, nor was capital necessary. The machinery of Government, both National and State, was used to supply them with capital.
The Chesapeake and Ohio Canal Company received, up to 1839, the sum of $2,500,000 in funds appropriated by the United States Government, and $7,197,000 from the State of Maryland.
In 1824 the United States Government began giving land grants for canal projects. The customary method was the granting by Congress of certain areas of land to various States, to be expressly given to designated canal companies. The States in donating them, sometimes sold them to the canal companies at the nominal rate of $1.25 an acre. The commuting of these payments was often obtained later by corrupt legislation.
From 1924 to 1834, the Wabash and Erie Canal Company obtained land grants from the Government amounting to 826,300 acres. The Miami and Dayton Canal Company secured from the Government, in 1828 and 1833, a total grant of 333,826 acres. The St. Mary's Falls Ship Canal Company received 750,000 acres in 1852; the Portage Lake and Lake Superior Ship Canal Company, 400,000 acres in 1865-66; and the Lac La Belle Ship Canal Company, 100,000 acres in 1866. Including a grant by Congress in 1828 of 500,000 acres of public land for general canal purposes, the land grants given by the National Government to aid canal companies, totalled 4,224,073.06 acres, mostly in Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, Wisconsin and Michigan.
Whatever political corruption accompanied the building of such State- owned canals as the Erie Canal, the primary and fundamental object was to construct. In the case of the private canal companies, the primary and fundamental object was to plunder. The capitalists controlling these companies were bent upon getting rich quickly; it was to their interest to delay the work as long as possible, for by this process they could periodically go to Legislatures with this argument: That the projects were more expensive and involved more difficulties than had been anticipated; that the original appropriations were exhausted, and that if the projects were to be completed, fresh appropriations were imperative. A large part of these successive appropriations, whether in money, or land which could be sold for money, were stolen in sundry indirect ways by the various sets of capitalist directors. The many documents of the Maryland Legislature, and the messages of the successive Governors of Maryland, do not tell the full story of how the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal project was looted, but they give abundantly enough information.
THE GRANTS FRAUDULENTLY MANIPULATED
Many of the canal companies, so richly endowed by the Government with great land grants, made little attempt to build canals. What some of them did was to turn about and defraud the Government out of incalculably valuable mineral deposits which were never included in the original grants.
In his annual report for 1885, Commisioner Sparks, of the United States General Land Office told (House Executive Documents, 1885-86, Vol. II) how, by 1885, the Portage Lake "canal" was only a worthless ditch and a complete fraud. What had the company done with its large land grant? Instead of accepting the grant as intended by Congress, it had, by means of fraudulent surveys, and doubtless by official corruption, caused at least one hundred thousand acres of its grant to be surveyed in the very richest copper lands of Wisconsin.
The grants originally made by Congress were meant to cover swamp lands--that is, lands not particularly valuable for agricultural uses, but which had a certain value for other purposes. Mineral lands were strictly excluded. Such was the law: the practice was very different. The facility with which capitalists caused the most valuable mineral, grazing, agricultural and timber lands to be fraudulently surveyed as "swamp" lands, is described at length a little later on in this work. Commissioner Sparks wrote that the one hundred thousand acres appropriated in violation of explicit law "were taken outside of legal limits, and that the lands selected both without and within such limits were interdicted lands on the copper range" (p. 189). Those stolen copper deposits were never recovered by the Government nor was any attempt made to forfeit them. They comprise to-day part of the great copper mines of the Copper Trust, owned largely by the Standard Oil Company.
The St. Mary's Falls Canal Company likewise stole large areas of rich copper deposits. This fact was clearly revealed in various official reports, and particularly in the suit, a few years ago, of Chandler vs. Calumet and Hecla Mining Company (U. S. Reports, Vol. 149, pp. 79-95). This suit disclosed the fact