Ward to Gates, Aug. 22, 1878, Gates to CPH, Aug. 28, 1878, CPH Papers, ser. 1, r. 15; Fremont to Crocker, Jan. 20, 1879, enclosure with Crocker to CPH, Jan. 27, 1879, CPH Papers, ser. 1, r. 16.
Howard Roberts Lamar
, The Far Southwest,1846-1912: A Territorial History (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1966), 40-68.
Richard Taylor to Samuel Barlow, Feb. 10, 26, 1879, March 1, 1879, box 130, Richard Taylor to Samuel Barlow, March 9, 1879, box 110, Barlow Papers.
If the Boyd bill represents payment for votes, it was most likely votes bought in an unsuccessful attempt to block a procedural motion to suspend the rules and bring S 238 extending the time for the construction of the Northern Pacific to a vote of the Committee of the Whole. It passed 133 to 104.
The money also, however, could have been spent on a speakership fight raging among the Democrats or to block an attempt to get T.P. legislation to the floor.
Boyd to CPH, March 5, 1879, CPH, r. 17, ser. 1.
Report of the Commission and of the Minority Commissioner of the United States Pacific Railway Commission . . . (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1887), 84, table 29, showing the gross earnings, operating expenses, and net earnings of the Central Pacific Railroad Company, table 31, Legal Expense Account, PRC, 8:4659, 4747.
Jordan, Roscoe Conkling, 413, 417.
Congress had to decide who was responsible for paying for the survey of a railroad land grant for without a survey, the land could not be patented. Congress then had to determine when a patent could be issued and if the railroads had to apply for a patent. The courts had to rule on whether unsold lands in a railroad grant were open for preemption -- the right to settle on unsurveyed land -- as the grants themselves usually explicitly stipulated. Only in 1910 did Congress finally require railroads to deposit the money to complete the surveys of the grants.