The Nebraska Forest Reserve Fraud
By Editor
It seems almost incredible in these days of general travel across the country, and of general information on the part of men who have personally traversed the country in western Nebraska, that our public men should not know that there are not 300,000 acres of timber land in any one body along the North Platte River. Yet only last March a “forest reserve” of that dimension was set apart by the government. It has at last been “discovered” that there are hardly more than a hundred trees on the whole reserve, and that the cattlemen have leased it for grazing purposes. The very fact that such a vast body of forest in that country of plains should be almost void of settlers would of itself be a mystery; that it should have escaped the scrutiny of the systematic timber grabbers, would be a double wonder. This scheme of cattle barons to get hold of a lot of grazing land at a nominal lease is only one of the ways by which men scheme to become millionaires in these days when “the world is growing better,” and prosperity for the rich never had a parallel.