WERE "MISSING LETTERS" REALLY LOST?
Were "Missing Letters" Really Lost? LAST week's session of the congressional committee investigating the Interior-Forestry controversy was occupied with hearing the testimony of two witnesses,...
...The territory was retrogressing, he said, because the coal fields were not being opened...
...Ballinger had objected to the expense and annoyance of Brandeis' requests...
...He declared that present surveys had shown 12,000 square miles of coal bearing rocks in Alaska, but that this area did not include the north and northwest part of the territory which appears to be all underlaid with coal and where are probably the most extensive of all deposits in Alaska...
...Mr...
...Without railroads this coal, he said, has but a small speculative value...
...Vertrees, counsel for Secretary Ballinger, Christianson told of Mr...
...He favored leasing on small royalties and said the navy could save a half million a year if it could get Alaska coal...
...of the demand made on Glavis for them...
...On the conclusion of Mr...
...LAST week's session of the congressional committee investigating the Interior-Forestry controversy was occupied with hearing the testimony of two witnesses, Andrew Christianson, who succeeded L. R, Glavis as chief of the Seattle division of the general land office, and Arthur Brooks, a coal expert of the Geological Survey, Just before the committee adjourned First Assistant Secretary Fierce of the Interior Department took the stand and will be heard this this week...
...Christianson would not say that the government had suffered: any loss by the delay in getting these letters and admitted that he could conceive of no advantage to Glavis in keeping them or any motive, unless it might be to charge other government officials with their loss...
...Brandeis announced that he would not recall the three other Seattle witnesses he had been holding for further evidence relative tc-the finding of the missing letters...
...Brandeis: "And yet on September 20 you wrote him charging him with the possession of them...
...When Glavis became convinced that the Interior Department was not giving him the support it should in his efforts to defeat fraudulent coal grabs in Alaska ne had copies made of these letters and many other papers and sent them to the forestry department with an appeal to that branch of the government...
...Brandeis the committee directed Secretary Ballinger to produce with all due speed all papers called for...
...He estimated that of the known coal deposits of the world the United States had 60 per cent, and that the supply might last thousands of years...
...Brandeis protested against this attitude of proprietorship in public records and the reversal of the secretary's former protestations of willingness to aid the committee in every way...
...Glavis' denial of their possession and of the final discovery of them among his effects in an open box in the store room of the federal building at Seattle, shortly after the congressional committee was appointed...
...On direct examination at the hands of Mr...
...and that Glavis had not been in the building or the city afterward...
...Glavis last fall turning over a mass of papers and getting a receipt for them...
...Later some of these letters appeared in Collier's Weekly...
...of the discovery afterwards that twenty-four letters bearing on the Cunningham coal claims were missing...
...On cross examination, Attorney Brandeis brought out the fact that many persons could have had access to the Glavis box in question, that the effects of Glavis had been packed by Andrew Kennedy after Glavis left the city...
...Christianson and others urged a grand jury investigation and prosecution of Glavis, but the United States district attorney advised against it...
...Christianson's testimony Mr...
...Christianson: "Yes, it did sometimes...
...Brooks was put on the stand for the purpose of minimizing the importance of the Alaskan coal interests and to decry the danger of their too rapid exploitation...
...On complaint of Mr...
...of Mr...
...Brandeis: "As an expert for the g'vernment on evidence, a detective, as it were, did it never occur to you as improbable that if a man wanted to practice concealment or embezzlement, against the government, that he would put such papers in an open box where the government would have access to them at all timas and he would not...
...that the box had then been put in the store room...
Vol. 2 • April 1910 • No. 15
