So, I deal with the checkerboard land issue a lot in my professional life.

Without getting into too much detail, it's well recorded SP got every other section in a 40-mile swatch, 20 miles on each side of the centerline of the track. The intent always was that SP would dispose of their sections, and the alternating government sections would be taken up by private owners through one of the many land disposal acts (Homestead, Timber & Stone, many more). In many places this works, floodplains out here in Nevada, and a good part of the foothills, generally anyplace that could be converted to cropland.

SP did put their land grant lands under the Southern Pacific Land Company, which ended up being one of the assets retained by Santa Fe in the undoing of the SPSF merger. In the documents I deal with (primarily private land grazing leases) there is a very short period of time where SP Land Company disappeared and was replaced by Santa Fe Land Company, or something like that. The lands (at least in Nevada) then passed through Nevada Land & Resource Company and now New Nevada Lands LLC.

Bottom line, no, Anshultz could not sell off the land grants, as they had been stripped off of the SP before he got them. And he couldn't sell off the intermingled public lands either, those that weren't taken up by private remain in government ownership and management to this day...with the exception of some land exchanges and targeted highly specific disposals, the government got out of the land disposal business and into land retention and management starting in the very early 1900s (on the National Forest lands) and after the passage of the National Land Policy and Management Act in 1976 for BLM.

Jeff Moore
Elko, NV