The Kansas Legislature in 1866 gave to certain railroad companies 500,000 acres of land granted to the state under the act of September 4, 1841. These companies were the Northern Kansas (Elwood to Marysville), Kansas & Neosho Valley, Southern Branch of the Union Pacific, and the Leavenworth, Lawrence & Fort Gibson.

In addition to these grants, large tracts of land were purchased by railroad companies at low prices. In Oct., 1867, the Cherokee Neutral Lands were sold to James F. Joy for $1.00 an acre. When the Atchison & Pike's Peak railroad reached Waterville in January, 1868, the company received a grant of 187,608 acres of land and bonds amounting to $16,000 a mile, and the same company purchased 24,000 acres of the Kickapoo lands at $1.25 an acre. In May, 1868, the Osage Indians sold 8,000,000 acres of their lands to the Leavenworth, Lawrence & Galveston Company at 20 cents an acre, and in August of the same year the   Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad bought 338,766 acres of the Pottawatomie lands. Wilder's Annals of Kansas said the railroad land grants in Kansas equaled 8,223,380 acres. This does not agree with Poor's figures, and it may be possible that the latter included in his estimate some of the low-priced purchases above mentioned.

The Kansas Pacific received in bonds from the national government the sum of $6,303,000, and the Central Branch received $1,600,000. Immediately after the war, when railroad building was making rapid strides in the West, the Federal government guaranteed bonds for railroad companies amounting to $27,806,000, a large part of which was for the benefit of Kansas lines. In addition to this national assistance, counties, cities, townships and towns voted bonds in large amounts to aid in the construction of the roads.

Many of the railroad companies did not perfect the title to their lands as required by the terms of the grant, and in 1882 a convention at Salina, Kansas demanded of Congress speedy legislation to compel the Kansas Pacific to complete its title. On March 6, 1883, the state legislature passed an act authorizing the state agent (ex-Governor Samuel J. Crawford) to investigate and secure a proper adjustment of certain railroad land grants. Two days later Colonel Crawford filed a brief and petition for the restoration to the state of lands wrongfully withheld. In April, John A. Anderson, then a representative in Congress from Kansas, made a report from the Committee on Public Lands, in which he estimated the number of acres of Kansas lands granted to railroad companies at 9,407,066, of which only 5,412,411 acres had been patented on June 30, 1883. Anderson introduced a bill to compel the railroad companies to perfect their title to the lands, and many of them hastened to do so, but in his report to the governor in 1890 Colonel Crawford announced that he had recovered a large portion of the original land grants, the largest being from the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad -- 833,900 acres from near Kinsley to the west line of the state.