The Santiam Wagon Road Scam - The Land Grant

Most residents of Sisters Country have heard of the Santiam Wagon Road and many have hiked or driven on parts of the road. What many may not know is that the Santiam Road is only part of a much longer road, known as the Willamette Valley and Cascade Mountain Wagon Road, which was supposed to stretch from Albany to Idaho.

In reality, this road was mainly a way to scam the federal government out of more than 860,000 acres of land. This scam greatly enriched a few people, yet it isn’t even clear that the road was ever built.

The Santiam Wagon Road was a well-intentioned effort to give Willamette Valley farmers and ranchers access to potential farm and grasslands in Central Oregon. In 1866, Linn County landowners spent $15,000 (about $300,000 in today’s money) building a road from Lebanon to Camp Polk (Sisters) and then charged tolls to use it.

It wasn’t a great road, being as little as 6 to 7 feet wide, as steep as 8 percent in places, with turnouts for passing wagons located as much as a half-mile apart. Though the road crossed the South Santiam River nine times, there were no bridges until 1887.

Despite these deficiencies, the road proved popular, with hundreds of wagons a day using it on some summer days. Tolls of $2 to $6 per wagon and 10¢ to 37.5¢ per head of livestock easily paid for the road and eventually led to improvements.

However, the people who built the road then got greedy. In 1864, Oregon Senator Benjamin Harding persuaded Congress to pass a law granting three square miles of land for every mile of a wagon road that was to be built from Eugene to Idaho. This was known as the Oregon Central Military Road.

Congress had previously given out two small land grants for wagon roads in Indiana and Ohio in the 1820s, but for the next four decades most land grants were for canals or railroads. Then, in 1863, it gave out land grants for wagon roads in Michigan and Wisconsin, supposedly to assist with the Civil War even though the war never came that far north.

The Michigan and Wisconsin grants may have inspired Oregon’s Congressional delegation to make similar grants here. Within a few years, Congress had issued five wagon road land grants in Oregon, including Eugene-Idaho, Albany-Idaho, The Dalles-Idaho, Corvallis-Yaquina, and Roseburg-Coos Bay.

Although part of the Coos Bay Wagon Road was taken back by Congress due to the failure of the grantees to comply with the terms of the grant, Oregon wagon road builders ultimately received more than 75 percent of the federal acres granted for wagon roads. While Eugene was a close second, the largest land grant went to the Willamette Valley company.

Oregon Senator James Nesmith introduced a bill to offer a land grant for a wagon road from Albany to the Idaho border. Congress passed this without any debate on July 5, 1866. The builders of the Santiam Wagon Road then took several steps to maximize the number of acres they would receive.

First, they lied on government documents about when the Santiam road was completed to make it appear that the road had been built in response to the land grant law and not prior to the law’s passage. Second, when the law was passed, a road had already been built by someone else between Albany and Lebanon, but the Santiam group took credit for it to get an extra 30,000 acres of land.

Third, they basically faked construction of the road from the Deschutes River to the Snake River. They built no bridges. They cleared little or no timber. In one place where they said they had graded the road on a hillside, all they did was install a 10-inch-wide trench to hold the upper wheels of a wagon. In most places they did little more than drive a wagon over the route. In one 80-mile section, they may not even have done that.

Finally, they made the route extra circuitous in order to qualify for more acres of land. For example, east of Burns the road they mapped made a giant S curve that added 32 miles to the route length. Today, a highway from Vale to Burns bypasses this S curve despite going over no steeper grades. The S curve gave the wagon road company an extra 60,000 acres.

Purchasers and recipients of federal land grants couldn’t actually receive the land until it had been surveyed using the system of townships and sections. The Willamette Valley wagon road grant specified that the road company would get odd-numbered sections along the road.

The route they mapped passed dozens of farms built on federal land by families who planned to claim the land under the Homestead Act. Once the land was surveyed, many of these families were stunned to learn that the wagon road company claimed any of the lands they had improved that were in odd-numbered sections. The company offered to sell the land to the would-be homesteaders for more than five times what they would have had to pay under the Homestead Act.

The homesteaders complained to the Secretary of the Interior that the Willamette Valley road was a fraud because no road had been built or, if it had been, it didn’t comply with the requirements of Oregon law. Among other things, the state law authorizing wagon roads called for a 16-foot-wide road and bridges across all streams. In response, the Secretary asked one of his agents to review the road.

The agent, W.F. Prosser, reported that he could find no trace of the road much beyond the South Fork of the Malheur and even where he could find a road, nothing east of Cache Creek in the Cascade Mountains complied with the terms of the grant. Another USDI employee, J.B. McNamee, called it “the most unblushing frauds upon the government.”

After several years of dithering, in 1889 the department took all three eastern Oregon wagon road companies to court, claiming they had failed to build the roads. However, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the road companies. The law didn’t require them to build the roads, the court said, but only to have the governor certify that they had built the roads. Oregon governors had so certified, so they qualified for the land, roads or not.

Why would the governors certify if no road had been built? The governors appointed agents to review the roads but required the wagon road companies to pay the agents. The homesteaders who objected to the land grants charged that the agents were paid in both cash and liquor to get them to approve certification.

Ultimately, the Willamette Valley company received 861,512 acres of land. What happened to that land will be covered in part 2 of this three-part series.

Much of the information in this article is from History of the Willamette Valley and Cascade Mountain Wagon Road, by Cleon L. Clark. The book was published by the Deschutes County Historical Society and is available at the Bend Library.