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Show PREEMPTION 243 had not won the expected patents. The attorney for the Houma claimants argued that all were third parties who had long since bought from those responsible for the perversion of the law, had made valuable improvements, and that the government having received its price for the land should apply the relief act of 1846 to theirs as it was doing to other suspended claims.63 The entry business was slowed down by delays in extending surveys. These resulted from small congressional appropriations; cholera and other epidemics which made recruitment of staff impossible; wet seasons and harsh winters; destruction by fire of maps, plats, and surveyors' notes; delay in appointing and confirming land officers; inadequacies of the mails in transmitting instructions, copies of laws, and the plats; resignations, postponements, and suspensions of entries. Frequently settlers found that circumstances prevented them from proving up on their tracts for years. During such time, if they had filed their declaratory statements and no one was contesting their right, they could devote their resources to developing their claims. Such delays were vexatious to others but helpful to the farm maker, unless he wanted title in order to raise additional capital to improve his land more rapidly.64 One can find few indications of the use of the preemption laws after 1837. A block of Miami land, just south of Peru, Indiana, came on the market late as a result of the "Senator Henry Johnson, Feb. 13, 1847, to Robert J. Walker in A, E Series Executive Letters, Letters to the Secretary of the Treasury, GLO Files, National Archives. 64 Illustrative of the delay is the case of Joseph Slater who began cultivating a tract of land, built a house, sowed some seed in 1837, and later hired a tenant to carry on the farming. Meantime, adverse interests appeared, preemption was suspended, and the case dragged on into 1842 allowing the use of the land for at least 5 years before he was required to pay for it. Joseph H. Bradley, Dec. 6, 1842, to the Secretary of the Treasury, N Series, Treasury Department Files, 1842, National Archives. tenacity with which the Indians had clung to their land. Because there was great demand for the land and it might bring well over the government minimum at auction, officials decided to offer it at $2 an acre. In the three land offices at Winamac, Fort Wayne, and Indianapolis, 1,776 preemption entries were made in 1848, the year the land was opened to purchase. Another fragment of data concerns the preemption entries in Illinois from 1837 to 1845, but whether these were all the entries that started with a declaratory statement is not clear. These preemption entries contained a small part of the land being entered in Illinois, even in the poor years after 1839 when the one year of free use of the land permitted by the Act of 1841 would have been helpful. Preemption Entries in Illinois, 1837-1845° 1837___ 270 337 281 1842 1843 1844 1,217 212 201 1838____ 1839..... 1840..... 139 1845 79 a These numbers were taken off the books by Stephen Strausberg. A number of changes modifying and liberalizing the preemption privilege were adopted in the fifties. However, it was so well accepted that settlers creating a farm on the frontier should be able to buy it at the minimum price that none of the changes produced any discussion in the Congress or the bitterness that Clay and other opponents had shown earlier. Land reformers were now concentrating on graduation and free homesteads; the territorial question was causing heated, even angry debates; and both North and South were fighting to make Kansas tributary to their respective ways of life. One issue that might have produced debate seems not to have reached the floor of Congress. John Wentworth, or Long John, of Chicago wished to introduce a bill to amend the Preemption Act of 1841 so that settlers on the public lands would have more than a year |