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Show 404 HISTORY OF PUBLIC LAND LAW DEVELOPMENT absurd had been President Buchanan's action in ordering this land into market long before settlers or speculators were interested in a region so far west. There were 33,760 acres of state land in the county and the Burlington and Missouri Railroad had 15,720 acres, selected by 1872. Homesteaders were slow to move into the county, the first entry being filed October 1, 1867. A few scattered homestead filings were made in 1868 but the next year 4,160 acres were taken up. Unfortunately, the author of the Pierce County study was not careful to distinguish between original and final entries under both the Homestead Act and the Timber Culture Act and it is not possible to sift through his data to separate the two. Also, he relies partly on acreage and partly on number of entries. He seems to have found that in a county where not an acre had been sold, although offered before 1862, 22 percent of the land available was patented to entrymen under the Homestead Act or its commutation provision, 7 percent was patented under the Timber Culture Act, and 4 percent under the Preemption Act. In other words 33 percent of the land was patented under the settlement laws. Though the first homestead entry was filed in 1867 only 103 had been filed by 1873 but by then purchasers had acquired with scrip, warrants, and cash 170,000 acres or the equivalent of 1,092 homesteads. What is most interesting is the data on the number of relinquish-ments and cancellations. There were 675 cancellations and relinquishments which may be taken as evidence of the extent of the land business, the buying and selling of land, more than anything else. On 222 tracts there was one cancellation or relin-quishment, on 118 there were two, on 42 there were three, on 14 there were four, on three there were five, on one there were six, and on two there were seven.34 The data suggest that many sold relinquishments to raise money for other purchases, that the cancellations may have been required by abandonment of claims, and that many people were filing homestead, preemption, and timber culture claims with the plan of selling one or more. If homesteaders overlooked the possibilities of Pierce County in 1870-72, speculators and land developers did not. In the offered sections-the three eastern tiers-individuals and partnerships bought, in amounts of 1,000 acres or more, 107,620 acres out of the total 276,480 acres available. Depreciated land warrants and agricultural college scrip was used to enter 45,760 acres and the balance was bought for cash. Some of this land was purchased by the Brown-Ives-Goddard group and some by Ira Davenport, one of the most successful speculators and moneylenders in the West. Davenport entered 9,200 acres in Pierce County and 8,160 acres in nearby Wayne County and with his brother and two sons held a total of 65,000 acres, all in Nebraska.35 The Brown-Ives-Goddard hold- 34 John Arnett Caylor, "The Disposition of the Public Domain in Pierce County, Nebraska" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Nebraska, 1951), pp. 36-37. 35 The senior Ira Davenport was an inveterate speculator and moneylender whose far flung operations ranged from his home in Bath, New York, into Michigan, Illinois, and Nebraska and were among the largest of which there are records. The first evidence I have of his buying public land is in 1836 when he entered for cash 785 acres in the Kalamazoo Land Office of Michigan, only to have 625 acres suspended for a technicality. In the fifties he and his brother John were actively entering land in the Detroit and Duncan Land Offices, the total of entries being 17,252 acres. Ira also entered 2,540 acres in the Genesee office. In 1871 and 1872 Ira located 16,949 acres in the Dakota Land Office in Nebraska and large purchases from the Union Pacific and the Burlington and Missouri Railroads brought his Nebraska holdings to 65,000 acres. In addition he purchased with John M. Longyear, a well-known landlooker of the Upper Peninsula of |
