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Show 346 HISTORY OF PUBLIC LAND LAW DEVELOPMENT within a strip along the line of the project and reserving the other half for sale. The precedent was not fully spelled out, for in the 1827 Act and in an amendatory Act of April 17, 1828, two and three adjacent sections in alternate tiers of sections were granted whereas in later measures no adjacent sections were allowed. In later donations the price of the reserved sections was doubled so that it could be argued, as the Congressional Globe shows ad infinitum, that by giving half the land away and thereby making possible construction of the road, canal, or railroad, the government would recover from the reserved sections as much as it would have received from the whole. The Turnpike Company, capitalized at $100,000, received 31,596 acres toward construction of the route. This was of crucial importance to its completion for the donation provided, when sold, 67 percent of the cost.15 With two turnpikes and the National Road, constituting a total of 336 miles, plus such mileage as was being built by the state through the 3-percent fund Ohio was not doing badly. Roads from Indian Lands The practice of acquiring Indian land for road construction without having it become a part of the public domain was resorted to again in the negotiations with the Pota-watomis in Indiana in 1827. After acknowledging the "attachment" the Indians felt toward the American people (which contemporaries would have regarded as mere mockery), and stating their wish to demonstrate their liberality and to "benefit them- 16 4 Stat. 242, 263; Peters, Ohio Lands, pp. 312 ff.; Harry N. Scheiber, "Internal Improvements and Economic Change in Ohio, 1820-1860" (Ph.D. dissertation, Cornell University, 1962), pp. 362-63. Mention might also be made of Zane's Trace, a route passable for horsemen through the forest from Brownsville to Wheeling for which Ebanezer Zane was permitted to enter 1,920 acres with military warrants on choice spots before the survey lines were run. Peters, Ohio Lands, pp. 184 ff., and map in Francis P. Weisenburger, The Passing of the Frontier, 1825-1850, Vol. Ill of Carl Wittke, (ed.), "The History of the State of Ohio" (Columbus, 1941), 99. selves by creating facilities for travelling and increasing the value of their remaining country," the Potawatomis agreed to cede to the United States, to aid in the construction of a road from Lake Michigan to the Ohio River, a strip of land 100 feet wide and a section of land for each mile of the road. The treaty provided that the land thus ceded should be at the disposal of the State of Indiana, though this was struck out by the Senate before ratification.16 A statute of March 2, 1827, then donated the lands the Indians had ceded to the state. Construction of the road was pressed forward in 1830-35, and completed in the latter year. A total of 170,580 acres was received for the road. Sales came to $252,136 and the cost of construction to $251,848. Rarely did grants turnout so well.17 Canal Era There was much greater public interest in canals than in turnpikes, although the latter probably were used by more people. Preliminary to voting money and land for in- 16Kappler, II, 274; 4 Stat. 234. It was in this same treaty that 44-M sections or 28,480 acres were listed to be conveyed to individual Indians subject to the approval of the President. Like so many other individual reserves provided for in treaties with Indians in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Alabama, Mississippi, and Kansas, the small reserves in most instances seem to have fallen into the hands of whites rather quickly. Tipton, who had a major part in negotiating the treaty, himself was a grantee of numerous individual Indian reserves. He was also a strong advocate of the Wabash and Lake Erie Canal but in arranging to locate some of these individual reserves in the vicinity of the proposed route of the canal he was selecting the most valuable tracts on which towns and cities later developed, thereby depriving the Canal Company of substantial income. He compensated for this later by successfully urging a supplementary grant to make up for the individual reserves he and his associates had selected. I have told this story in considerable detail in my introduction to The John Tipton Papers, Nellie Armstrong Robertson and Dorothy Riker (eds.), (3 vols., Indianapolis, 1942), I, 31 ff. 17 G. Prather, "The Struggle for the Michigan Road," Indiana Magazine of History, 39 (March 1943), 1 ff. and id., "The Construction of the Michigan Road." Indiana Magazine of History, 50 (September 1944). 243 ff. |