companies. In turn, the companies and colonial governors later made smaller grants of land based on actual surveys of the land. Thus, in colonial America on the Atlantic seaboard, a connection was made between the surveying of a land tract and its "patenting" as private property. Many original colonies' land patents came from the corresponding country of control like Great Britain. Most such patents were permanently granted. Those patents are still in force; the US government honors those patents by treaty law, and, as with all such land patents, they cannot be changed. Many early patents of lands originally granted by Native peoples were contested, occasionally in court, as a result of different understandings of "private property" and "ownership" between those people, who typically held land and its bounties communally, reinforced by oral tradition, and colonizers from Western Europe who held established and finite views on assets, their transfer, and their adjudication in a system of written laws, Crown rights and officials, courts, and permanent records. After the American Revolution and the ratification of the US Constitution, the US Treasury Department was placed in charge of managing all public lands. In 1812, the General Land Office was created to assume that duty. In accord with specific Acts of Congress and under the hand and seal of the US President, the General Land Office issued more than 2 million land grants made patent (land patents), passing the title of specific parcels of public land from the nation to private parties (individuals or private companies). Some of the land so granted had survey or other costs associated with it. Some patentees paid those fees for their land in cash, others homesteaded a claim, and still others came into ownership via one of the many donation acts that Congress passed to transfer public lands to private ownership. Whatever the method, the General Land Office followed a two-step procedure in granting a patent. Firstly, the private claimant went to the land office in the land district in which the public land was located. The claimant filled out entry papers to select the public land, and the land office register (clerk) checked the local registrar records to make sure the claimed land was still available. The receiver (bursar) took the claimant's payment, because even homesteaders had to pay administrative fees. Then, the district land office register and receiver sent the paperwork to the General Land