Land swaps are potentially scandalous in losses to the American taxpayers. In just a single land swap in western Washington this year the Huckleberry Exchange taxpayers lost as much as $76 million to Weyerhaeuser Corporation. How did this happen? Weyerhaeuser contracted and controlled the timber appraisal process, according to timber appraisers Roy Keene and Greg Harty.

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it," wrote philosopher and poet Santayana. Corporations, such as Weyerhaeuser and Plum Creek, taking valuable land and wealth from the public is not new. Public-land history of the United States, and especially the West, is marked by taking lands from Indian tribes followed by corporate plunder.

Looters Of The Public Domain: Embracing A Complete Exposure Of The Fraudulent Systems Of Acquiring Titles To The Public Lands Of The United States, published in 1908, is a first-hand account of how forests on the West Coast were stolen from the commonwealth. The author, Stephen Puter, wrote the book in a prison cell while serving a two-year sentence for conspiracy to defraud the Government of its public lands. Puter provided critical evidence to the Department of Justice. These land fraud investigations led to the filing of hundreds of indictments and convictions, including prominent Northwest businessmen, members of Congress, state officials, and former United States Attorneys.

One of America's more notorious land frauds was the Act of March 2, 1899, creating the Mt. Rainier National Park. "Could the human mind conjure a more cunning device for flim-flamming the public than is contained in this measure?" wrote Puter. Corporate interests used the "public interest" of the Park designation to cloak fine print permitting Northern Pacific Railroad Co. (controlled by JP Morgan and James J. Hill) to swap NP grant land for public lands in any state penetrated by NP's lines.

The Act allowed Northern Pacific (and thus Weyerhaeuser, Potlatch, and Boise Cascade) to exchange culled and worthless tracts for some of the richest forests in the nation: 100,000 acres in Washington, 120,000 acres in Idaho, and 320,000 in Oregon. The Mt. Rainier National Park was created "that the Hill corporation might be enabled to exchange its worthless holdings for the cream of creation."

Looters of the Public Domain warns of "a new generation of plunderers, more subtle and swift in their operations, because the looting of the public domain has now become one of the gentler arts, and the 'dummy' timber entryman and perjured homesteader, with their ways redolent of the frontier, have given place to the polished enactments of a subservient Congress, which is interpreting the land laws to meet the requirements of greedy corporations, without any heed whatever to the people's rights."

Today, ninety years later, Congress is considering a massive land exchange involving NP grant lands in western Washington to benefit Plum Creek Timber Company corporate descendant of Northern Pacific Railroad. Meanwhile, massive land swaps are underway or completed along the Northern Pacific checkerboard. The National Forests are, once again, in peril.

President Abraham Lincoln's great mistake of creating the 40-million-acre Northern Pacific checkerboard has yet to be undone. Titles to millions of acres of public land intended for homesteaders are still held illegally by Plum Creek, Weyerhaeuser, and other corporations enriched by our public lands. Swapping the Northern Pacific grant lands for National Forests under the cloak of "public interest" is at best a weak palliation, at worst another huge public land scandal in American history.