and power. Others approved contracts that had originally been rejected (after inspection by independent government examiners), without evidence or assurance that the surveys had been properly corrected or completed. Also, at least one such examiner in California was part of the syndicate, attempting to gain payment for some rejected surveys via bogus field "examinations" (which were themselves later rejected as fraudulent as the extent of the group's activities became known). Banks were also involved, providing the deposits and performance bonds required by the government, in exchange for a cut of the enormous profits generated. These banks later also paid for the syndicate's defense attorneys in trials brought by the government in its failed, ten-year effort to convict the syndicate members and recover funds paid for fraudulent work. Reports of the Commissioner of the General Land Office 1887 Detailed information on the Syndicate's history remains fairly sparse. Two Annual Reports of the Commissioner of the General Land Office provide a glimpse of the group's activities. The Report for 1887, pages 25–26, gives this summary of their schemes: "In April last the United States grand jury at San Francisco returned forty one indictments for perjury and conspiracy in connection with fraudulent surveys of the public lands...The operations of this syndicate were not confined to California, but extended to the States of Nevada, Oregon and Colorado, and the Territories of Arizona, New Mexico, Idaho, Montana, Utah, and Washington. Its purpose was to control all surveying contracts in these States and Territories under the deposit system, to manufacture settlers' applications for surveys, to file in the offices of the surveyors-general fictitious field notes of surveys and alleged surveys, and to draw from the Treasury of the United States large sums of money on fraudulent surveying accounts." "The principal portion of the contracts were let in the names of thirty-four alleged deputy surveyors, of whom three were "dummies", two were intimately connected with the surveyor-general who approved the bulk of the contracts, and the remainder were relatives, partners, associates, or employees of the head of the syndicate. There was paid to the order or purported order, of these thirty-four pretended deputy surveyors upwards of $1,000,000, all of which went into the treasury of the syndicate, the parties used as tools being paid stated salaries by the syndicate for the use of their names and services. Three of the alleged deputies, to whom upwards of $190,000