If big companies are allowed to do this, it will
soon be fashionable for small individuals to change their names in order to
beat their debts. As to the methods that Joe Sherburne uses to acquire land for
“nothing” will give an example my own case. The patent was forced on me by
Horace Wilson, without my applying for it. I was young and ignorant. A command
by the Agent of that day was a law not to be disregarded without disgrace and
jail sentence, so I accepted the patent for the same reason that the rest of my
people did. Soon the taxes began to pile up, I could not pay as I had no paying
job, just keeping house for my widowed father on a ranch and helping him to
raise his motherless children. The unpaid taxes made me frantic and no one made
any effort to advise me, least of all my father. The minute I got my patent my
father started in to make me pay his debts after two years he and Joe Sherburne
succeeded in their conspiracy to beat me out of my land, two hundred and eighty
acres. Did the two exert any influence to have the patent forced on me in the
first place? Did I owe Joe Sherburne any thing? “Not a penny” I never bought
any thing on credit at his store in all my life. A few years later he kicked me
out of my home by force in the dead of winter the 2nd day of
February. I could do nothing, my father refused to pay.
-The Sacred Buffalo Vision by Robert J. Juneau and Robert C. Juneau
pg.153
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