Donation Land Law and the Federal Survey:
Claiming the Prairie Plains

The federal Donation Land Law, more popularly known as the Donation Land Claim Act (DLCA) provided land for males who (1) were white or half white and half Native American, (2) were at least eighteen years of age by 1 December 1850, (3) were either residents of the territory or to become such by 1 December 1851, (4) had cultivated their claims and lived on them for four years, and (5) were either United States citizens or to become such by 1 December 1851. If a settler met these qualifications, he could claim 320 ares (a half section) if single, and 640 acres (a full section) if married. The additional 320 acres were to be held in the wife's name, which made the DLCA the first federal land law granting title to women, albeit only through their relationship to men. The DLCA also allowed widows to take out claims if their husbands would have met the requirements for a claim if they had lived. For example, Elizabeth Ritchey, who settled on the Calapooia on 11 October 1853, benefited from this allowance. Her husband died in Iowa just as he was preparing to move to Oregon. He had even "obtained several waggons and teams for the purpose of going to Oregon that Season." After his death, Elizabeth determined to journey to Oregon anyway. On arrival, she received a land claim in her own name near the Calapooia River. Furthermore, the DLCA granted to male settlers who arrived after 1 December 1850 but before 1 December 1853, 160 acres if single and 320 if married. The act also required these later arrivals to live on the land and cultivate it for four years before receiving official title. In 1853 and 1854 Congress passed amendments to the DLCA. These amendments (1) commuted residency requirements on the land to two years if the claimants paid $1.25 per acre for their land, (2) allowed claimants to sell their rights to the land before receiving patents, and (3) extended the DLCA to 1 December 1855.^[6]

This federal land act also provided for a surveyor general's office. The surveyor general's tasks included administering the DLCA, settling land disputes, and, most important for our discussion, establishing the township-range, thirty-six-section cadastral system in the Willamette Valley and making sure that new claims adhered to it. Section 6 of the

act delineated how land claims would be taken in reference to the cadastral survey:

In all cases it shall be a compact form; and where it is practicable so to do, the land so claimed shall be taken as nearly as practicable by legal subdivisions; but where that cannot be done, it shall be the duty of the said surveyor general to survey and mark each claim with the boundaries as claimed. . . . Provided , that after the first of December next [1850], all claims shall be bounded by lines running east and west, and north and south: And provided further , That after the survey is made, all claims shall be made in conformity to the same, and in compact form.^[7]

The United States government adopted the DLCA and the federal survey at the very time that land claiming along the southern Willamette Valley foothills had pretty much ended and settlement of the plains was just beginning. Subtle but important differences existed, then, between claiming the plains and claiming the foothills. As previously discussed, earlier Oregon provisional and territorial laws governing the claiming of land allowed a certain flexibility when it came to accommodating the configuration of the landscape. The earlier method of survey—the use of natural markers—encouraged an intimacy between the settler and the landscape. Although settlers had to take claims, after June 1844, in square or oblong form, provisional government laws did not bind them to the cardinal points of the compass when positioning their claims on the idiosyncratic landscape. This older process, as explained in chapter 3, governed the claiming of the Calapooia foothills.

Based on the rational survey system initiated in the Northwest Ordinances of the 1780s, the Oregon Donation Land Law laid the groundwork not only for the way land claims would be taken out in the Oregon Territory after 1 December 1850 (and thus largely on the plains of the southern Willamette) but also prescribed abstract principles for claiming a landscape that quite naturally had little semblance to rational order. The taking of land in square form and in legal subdivisions, bounded by lines perpendicular and parallel to the (far distant) magnetic north, effectively terminated the older land-claiming process in which humans worked directly with topography. Settlers thereafter no longer had the choice of how and where to lay out a claim with reference to the idiosyncracies of the local landscape. The imposition of the Donation Land Law and survey culminated a process, initiated by provisional government laws requiring claims to be in rectangular form, that assisted in estranging post-1850 Calapooia settlers and other Willam-

ette Valley inhabitants from the land—particularly the land on the plains.

The government no longer accepted ash trees entwined at the roots, swales, creeks, and blazes on oaks as sufficient markers for land-claim boundaries. Rather, abstract numbers that had no relation to the landscape defined a claim's dimensions. Thomas Wilcox, who took a claim on the plains bordering the Calapooia on 10 November 1853, now knew his land as the southeast quarter of section 15, township 13 south, range 3 west; the south half of the northeast quarter of section 15, township 13 south, range 3 west; and the south half of the northwest quarter of section 15, township 13 south, range 3 west. And Wilcox and others like him had no leeway to arrange their claims on the land in the way they wanted.^[8]

The new land law also affected older residents of the Calapooia. The government did allow the earlier claims to remain in their original configuration, though they had to be resurveyed and defined accordingly. Thus, the boundaries of Agnes Courtney's claim, which she originally knew as a "creek," several "white oaks," a "white fir," and "a fir on the mountain," now became a jumble of numbers that had little to do with the nature of the land that she and her husband originally settled: "Beginning 18.25 chains west of the southeast corner of the southwest quarter of section sixteen in township fourteen south range two west. Thence south 8 degrees, 15 feet west, 18.06 chains; south 81 degrees, 45 feet east, 41.27 chains; north 8 degrees, 15' east, 8.26 chains, south 81 degrees, 45 feet east, 39.03 chains."^[9]

Imposing a geometric survey on an earlier system that had both complied with the local landscape and used natural features as markers ultimately led to innumerable disputes among the settlers. Henry H. Spalding's Donation Land Claim file reveals that after the surveyor completed his task in the Calapooia Valley, Spalding contested boundaries with James Blakely, John Findley, William R. Kirk, and William Glass—all but one of whom had taken land before the completion of the survey. The problem was resolved only when Spalding relinquished all disputed land to the men who claimed it.^[10]

The survey left land in dispute throughout the Willamette Valley. James Andrews in Polk County, for instance, disputed with several neighbors, especially a Mr. Goff. Andrews alerted the surveyor general to Goff's claim and warned that if Goff tried to prove up on it, he was going to "have a mery time of it." Confusion engendered by the survey

in the Willamette went beyond neighborhood quarrels. In some cases the entire land-claiming process simply broke down. In the French Prairie region of the northern Willamette Valley, for instance, where the early French-Canadians claimed land in odd patterns reminiscent of the manorial system, settler S. D. snowden in 1853 had difficulty applying straight lines to the claim he wanted to take in the same vicinity. He complained that the French-Canadians seldom used "a straight line between the corners" of their claims and thus he was "at a loss how to comply with the instructions by running a line straight from the corner stake to corner stake." But Calapooian Joseph L. Evans best summed up the problem with the survey when he wrote to Surveyor General John B. Preston, "There is something going on in our County that I Doe not understand."^[11]

Even as late as 1895, the survey caused problems. When Fannie Adams Cooper's parents took up a homestead on some unclaimed land in the upper Calapooia next to Frank Malone's presurvey Donation Land Claim, they made the usual improvements to their homestead, building a home and barn and planting a garden. After Malone died and his estate was settled, officials discovered that all boundary lines in the vicinity were incorrect. Not only did the Adams family find that their garden and barn were now on a neighbor's property, but they eventually lost their entire claim.^[12]

In the transition from an intimate system of land claiming to an abstract system of laws to guide human activities on the landscape, both individual families, like the Coopers, and clusters of neighbors, like Spalding, Kirk, Blakely, and Glass, all encountered difficulties. At the same time, Calapooia residents began to lose their initially close relationship with the landscape. People like Calapooia settler Agnes Courtney, for example, no longer dealt with their parcels of the landscape purely in terms of its features. Rather, they now spoke of the landscape in terms of numbers, chains, links, degrees, townships, ranges, and sections. More important, rather than the exigencies of the landscape, township, range, and section lines on a governmental surveyor's map determined new claim boundaries. Changing attitudes toward the land that the DLCA and cadastral survey encouraged are exemplified in the experience of Jared Fox in the northern Willamette Valley in 1853. Fox had recently immigrated from Wisconsin, a state whose settlement the cadastral survey directed and which had thus conditioned his interpretation of the landscape. On 14 March he viewed the Tualatin plains,

settled long before the cadastral survey, and asserted that they appeared "in some respects the most like live of any I have seen, good faced, well fenced & a few tolerable buildings but too many sloughs, too much clay, & they have taken their claims in any possible shape so as to take a nook of timber or prairie, which spoiled the looks of the whole."^[13]

Although the DLCA and the cadastral survey helped sunder an older, more intimate relationship between humans and the land in the Willamette Valley, the former also, in a few key ways, inhibited change in the Calapooia and Willamette Valleys. Because the parcels of land the DLCA granted were so large—up to a square mile to a husband and wife—claimants found it difficult to "improve" and cultivate their entire property. At the same time, the DLCA prohibited a claimant from selling off smaller parcels to other potential cultivators for several years until the claim had been "proved-up."^[14] Thus, the DLCA preserved vast expanses of the valley in a nearly natural state. Table 5 shows the amount of farmland in an unimproved state in the Calapooia, Linn County, and the Willamette Valley between 1860 and 1890.

According to historians Dorothy O. Johansen and Charles M. Gates, the huge size of the land grants, in addition to leaving a large percentage of the valley in an unimproved state, impeded the growth of towns and the diversification of occupation, industry, and crops. Nineteenth-century critics roundly denounced the DLCA for its generosity with land and thus the negative effects it had on the valley economy. As late as 1874, L. B. Judson outlined in a letter to the editor of Willamette Farmer the multifaceted problem that large land holdings created. He first blamed the large land holdings for the lack of population growth and economic development in the Willamette Valley. He especially chided large landholders who lived "in towns and cities enjoying the advantages of city schools and city privileges . . . while they leave the country in which their land lies, in a state of wilderness." Because of the limited economic diversity in the Willamette Valley, Judson noted that farmers who did live on their land and were forced to "make mixed husbandry a means of support, cannot . . . afford to divide their land and sell off a part and confine themselves to small places; in fact under the present state of affairs . . . [this] farmer feels the need of room."^[15]

Proposed theories explaining slow development of the economy and its relationship to large land claims in the Willamette Valley varied. E. Ingersoll, writing in 1882 for Harper's New Monthly Magazine , suggested that the problem lay with the character of the DLCA claimants.

Although Ingersoll noted the beneficial effects of the DLCA—for example, promoting initial migration to the Willamette Valley—the problem remained that those who migrated and took up land were, in Ingersoll's mind, predominantly "vagabond farmers" from the upper South. "They were poor, also, in the sense of having little money, and this helplessness, added to their thriftless habits, made their possession of the land a misfortune to the State." Ingersoll expressed a prejudiced view, for though he was thankful that these "loungers" had declined in influence, he was equally happy that their children, who had taken over farming the Willamette and were apparently a "better class," had also "lost their drawl of speech and action."^[16]

Opinions such as Ingersoll's about the character of the upper South

pioneer, whether right or wrong, had dogged these people across the American frontier all the way to the Pacific Northwest. But regardless of the character of those who settled in the Willamette Valley, the large land claims of the DLCA and their legacy for development were facts of nineteenth-century life in the Willamette. Claim sizes, indicated by the change in farm size, decreased very slowly through the end of the nineteenth century on the Calapooia, in Linn County, and in the Willamette Valley in general. The original 174 claims taken on the Calapooia averaged 352 acres. The 58 farms enumerated in the 1870 agricultural census averaged 455 acres apiece. By 1880, the 209 farms listed in the agricultural census had dropped to an average of 286 acres each. Table 4 more clearly shows the trend in farm sizes through the latter part of the nineteenth century. Therefore, as already discussed and as table 5 demonstrates, large areas of the valley remained uncultivated.