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Updated: June 2, 2025
"Yep; every strap and tie-string," replied Overland, gathering together the dead prospector's few effects. "Cause why? Well, Billy, if this claim ain't filed on, and I reckon it ain't, why, we files on her as the original locators. Nobody gets wise to anything and it saves the chance of gettin' jumped. The bunch over there would make it interestin' for us if they knowed we was goin' to file on it.
Yet notwithstanding these precautions, such was the careless manner in which these surveys were made, that many illiterate persons, ignorant of the forms of law, and the necessity of precision in the specification and descriptions of the tracts on which they had laid their warrants, made such loose and vague entries in the land office, as to afford no accurate information to subsequent locators, who frequently laid their warrants on the same tracts.
These old surveys, taken from the pick of the land, were already nearly all occupied by unsuspecting and peaceful settlers, and thus their titles were demolished, and the choice was placed before them either to buy their land over at a double price or to vacate it, with their families and personal belongings, immediately. Land locators sprang up by hundreds.
The land office accepted our money, eighty thousand dollars. Then the President suspended the law, and we never received our patents. About that time the Chugach forest reserve was made, and we were hampered by all sorts of impossible conditions. Some of us were financially ruined. One of the first locators spent one hundred and fifty thousand dollars, his whole fortune, in development.
"At some period in the history of the Lawrenceburg, which is one of the oldest mines on Bull Mountain, its owners have had reason to believe that their pay streak was going to run the other way to the northeast. They undertook to cover the chance by making these locations quietly, and through 'dummy' locators, on the other side of the spur."
In many homes today, throughout the country, there must exist yellowed copies of the card, the only tangible reminder of an unsuccessful gamble in the government lottery. At midnight one night an old spring wagon rattled up to the shack and we heard the voice of a man one of the locators who had been hauling seekers. He held out a handful of small change.
The land-sharks voraciously attacked these excesses in the old surveys, and filed upon such portions with new scrip as unappropriated public domain. Wherever the identifications of the old tracts were vague, and the corners were not to be clearly established, the Land Office would recognize the newer locations as valid, and issue title to the locators. Here was the greatest hardship to be found.
Dill's orders were to get upon the ground which had been worked in a primitive way by a fellow named Bruce Burt now deceased he was told and relocate it in Sprudell's name together with seven other contiguous claims, using the name of dummy locators which would give Sprudell control of one hundred and sixty acres by doing the assessment work upon one.
To the superstitious mind of Devil's Ford and its few remaining locators, this new partnership seemed to promise that unity of interest and stability of fortune that Devil's Ford had lacked.
Separate zones for aeroplanes, guns and searchlights the latter provided with sound locators forming an outer barrage, were instituted, and aprons, supported by kite-balloons, formed a protective barrage up to 8,000 feet.
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