Harper's Archive Article on Public Land Use Illustration

This was for a project that the great and wonderful Durwin Talon, John Foerster, and Dick Krepel set up for the MFA grads this year. Harper's magazine is putting up an on-line gallery of public domain articles from the 1800s and my fellow grads and I had the opportunity to do some illustrations for them.
This is my illustration for an anonymous essay on public land use, published in 1884. The government had a policy where individuals could buy 160 acres of land for a very low price, as long as they developed the land. Timber corporations, however, would cheat the system by sending employees to purchase these shares of land and then harvesting the timber. There was no way to thoroughly regulate the land use, and therefore the government and public lost this land. The hand in the foreground represents the corporations and the one in the background represents the government and public interest.