Who owns the land?
By Rex Burress
POSTED: 02/07/16, 9:45 PM PST
... It was a big surprise for explorers to find various tribes already occupying America, and colonizers had to contend with their presence on the land. Did the inhabitants own it? Native Americans offered no proof of ownership, and indeed their belief was not to own land, but one of merely using and sharing Mother Earth. “This we know. The earth does not belong to man; man belongs to the earth,” said Chief Seattle. There were a lot of treaties and real-estate land deals in trying to justify modern methods of land management.
The Land Ordinance of 1785 tried to organize state parcels by creating townships, six-mile squares that were surveyed and divided into 36 sections of 640 acres each, sold to settlers for $1.25 per acre for each section, with less desirable lots sold for 12 cents per acre. Thus every inch of each state was accounted for by the human system. The 1812 U.S. Treasury managed public lands and granted patents until the Homestead Act of 1862 formed a new bureau. To homestead, you selected 160 acres of government land, resided on it for five years, built a 12-by-14-foot building and grew crops. Then you could apply for a patent deed of title in Washington, D.C.
Land control was somewhat like gold mining claims in California, where a certain space was allotted to each miner who marked it as required.
Not all government land was sold, as we well know from the Malheur incident. In fact, nearly half of Western land is under control of the government through the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service—very important in providing habitat for wildlife. Congress approved a law in 1976 saying that unclaimed public land would stay under federal control. Grazing laws would limit the size of herds to prevent overgrazing amid other conditions spelled out in the arrangement ...
http://www.orovillemr.com/opinion/20160207/river-watcher-who-owns-the-land
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