Convicted land-fraud scammer Stephen A.D. Puter in his prison cell, working on the manuscript for his tell-all book following his conviction.

Editor’s note: This is the second in a series on early Oregon land swindlers and one of the original scandals in state history.

It was the “swamp lands” grant that gave Oregon its first real experience of wholesale land fraud.

In 1870, the state legislature suddenly realized that if they redefined “swamp” to include bits of land that flooded once or twice in the spring, they could gin up a claim on vast amounts of the land in the state, which they could then hand over to their friends for super cheap.

How the swindle worked

A wealthy landowner — a sheep rancher, say — cultivated a state land agent and bribed or otherwise induced him to proclaim the banks and streambeds of every river, lake, or pond in the area he coveted as “swamp land.”

The landowner could then pay 20 cents per acre to reserve the property. After successfully “reclaiming” it, he would then be allowed to buy it outright for an additional 80 cents an acre.

In the case of our sheep rancher, this worked doubly well, because by snapping up all the land with water running on it, he left nothing behind but dry pasture. He could be pretty confident that no sodbusters would be able to successfully claim any of it under the Homestead Act, so he’d get to graze all his sheep on it for free.

But, you might object: With the state claiming huge swaths of “swamp land” that wasn’t really swampland, almost sight-unseen, wasn’t there a risk that the state would “claim” land that someone had already claimed?

Yes, and that happened a lot. In fact, it was one of the preferred outcomes of the scammers, because after the state had “sold” you someone else’s land, it would have to give you another piece of state property in lieu of the one you’d contracted for. And you got to pick which piece of “lieu land” you got.

There were several other ways the state and federal governments could be hustled out of prime lands, too. The state wasn’t fully surveyed yet. The policy of the state and federal governments was to honor the claims of legitimate homesteaders even if their claims turned out to be in places that were set aside for other things — like local schools, land-grant universities, or government buildings. The government would give those homesteaders their pick of government-owned lands — “lieu lands” — in exchange. So people like Stephen Puter would hurry out to remote mountainous sections that were about to be surveyed, stake virtually worthless claims, and exchange them for valuable timberlands after the survey.

But probably the most common scam, and the one that Puter was especially adept at, was the “dummy entryman” swindle. In this, after a new timber-country township was surveyed, Puter would hire random sailors and North End layabouts to go down to the land office and file land claims in it, with Puter paying their filing fees. These “dummies” would go to the land office, perjure themselves by swearing that they had inspected their claims and intended to “prove them up,” and then basically sign them over to Puter. Puter would bribe a land-office clerk to allow the transaction. He would then lump enough of the claims together to make a decent sized timber patch and sell them to an out-of-state timber baron. This kind of thing went on for decades.

So, how did it all end? Well, first of all, the state’s prime real estate started getting more and more scarce. At the same time, railroads and other organizations that had been given federal land grants were having trouble redeeming them because people like Puter were snapping them up fraudulently.

Happily ensconced in their little bubble of like-minded businessmen and politicians, the land thieves had gotten to be a bit out of touch with how their activities were playing with the public. As the new century dawned, the old “greed is good” ethos of the Gilded Age was wearing very thin. Members of the public, watching fat cats from out of state (or even out of country) take advantage of the situation to build vast absentee empires, were starting to notice.

That was the biggest change that led to the end of the land fraud era — a change in the attitude of regular Americans. The beginning of the end for the land fraudsters came in about 1902, when a random citizen — a Catholic priest, actually — wrote a letter to Interior Secretary Ethan Hitchcock, alerting him to a series of land frauds in the Tillamook area.

The result was that some very highly placed heads started rolling at the General Land Office. Puter and his associates soon found familiar faces at the land office had disappeared, and their replacements were turning out to be a lot harder to bribe.

After investigator Haney flipped Puter, things moved fairly quickly. Puter’s $2,000 bribe to Sen. Mitchell had been in cash, so it was untraceable; but another land agent, Frederick Kribs, paid his bribes with checks, which Mitchell had been imprudent enough to accept and deposit.

Dozens of other operators — land agents like Puter as well as several of their wealthy out-of-state customers — were also tried, and many were convicted. Mitchell and Williamson were among them, but both appealed immediately. Williamson’s conviction was overturned on appeal and Mitchell’s was dropped after he died from a dental abcess before his case could be heard. Hermann’s trial ended with a hung jury.

So, no real high-profile characters spent significant jail time for the land-fraud scandals. But the government had made its point, and after those trials the age of easy land grabbing was over in Oregon.

Unfortunately, by that point most of the good land had been scooped up anyway.

“Oregon Land Fraud Trials,” an article by Oliver Tatom published May 25, 2022, in The Oregon Encyclopedia; “Oregon’s Public Domain: The Sale of Oregon’s Lands,” an article by F.G. Young published in the March and June 1910 issues of Oregon Historical Quarterly; Looters of the Public Domain, a book by S.A.D. Puter published in 1908 by Portland Printing House.