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Show 152 HISTORY OF PUBLIC LAND LAW DEVELOPMENT Robert J. Walker, later to be Senator from Mississippi, Chairman of the Senate Public Lands Committee, Secretary of the Treasury, and Territorial Governor of Kansas, was one of the chief organizers of the combination which dominated the sales. The notoriety of the sales led to a congressional investigation, which revealed that although members of Congress, the Chief Justice of the Court of Appeals of Mississippi, and the Federal Marshal were present, no one could recall that the provisions of the Act of 1830 had been read, as required by the instructions of the Commissioner of the Land Office, or that there had been protests against the clearly illegal actions of the combinations. It was also brought out that the register, Samuel Gwin, had left his office to buy some tracts and had resold them immediately at a 33 percent profit to settlers, but the only unusual feature of his conduct is that he was induced to admit his dereliction.21 The Claims Association By 1824, combinations to prevent competitive bidding by speculators, which had worked too well from the point of view of the government, were adapted to the use of settlers. Sandford C. Cox, an eye-witness of a government sale at the Crawfordsville, Indiana office, wrote of the town being full of strangers when the sales commenced. The 21 The two sales at Columbus and Chocchuma attracted much attention from their completion for the large scale of the speculative operations, the quick and extraordinarily favorable profits the insiders enjoyed, the prominence of the men involved in the sales, and the detailed investigations conducted shortly afterward by the Senate. H. Ex. Doc, 24th Cong., 1st sess., Vol. V, No. 211 (Serial No. 290), pp. 15 ff.; American State Papers, Public Lands, VII, 283, 377-507 and 732-77. For the purchases at Columbus and Chocchuma of Robert J. Walker, Malcolm Gilchrist, and other members of the companies, and the occasions when prices were bid up, see esp. pp. 377-447. Also, Gordon T. Chappell, "Some Patterns of Land Speculation in the Old Southwest," Journal of Southern History (November 1949), pp. 463-77; Young, Redskins, Ruffleshirts and Rednecks, passim. eastern and southern portions of the state were strongly represented, as well as Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Pennsylvania. There was little competitive bidding as "the settlers, or 'squatters,' as they are called by speculators, have arranged matters among themselves to their general satisfaction. If, upon comparing numbers, it appears that two are after the same tract of land, one asks the other what he will take to not bid against him. If neither will consent to be bought off, they then retire, and cast lots, and the lucky one enters the tract at Congress price-$1.25 per acre-and the other enters the second choice on his list." If a speculator "showed a disposition to take a settler's claim from him, he sees the white of a score of eyes snapping at him, and at the first opportunity he crawfishes out of the crowd. The settlers tell foreign capitalists to hold on till they enter the tracts of land they have settled upon, and that they may then pitch in-that there will be land enough-more than enough for them all." Across the Illinois line in the Springfield land district a traveller going through in 1825 learned there were 6,000 squatters "who are not recognized by the government, and who are determined to resist every intruding speculator who may attempt to eject them from it [their land]." The chief difference between the Huntsville combination and the Crawfordsville and Springfield combinations is that the former was composed of speculators and planters with capital whereas the latter were made up of actual residents, squatters, or small claim dealers planning to sell all or part of their land as soon as opportunity offered.22 22 Cox, Recollections of the Early Settlement of the Wabash Valley, pp. 17-18; Monroe Michigan Sentinel, Sept. 16, 1825, quoting the National Intelligencer. Harry Lewis Coles in his "History of the Administration of Federal Land Policies and Land Tenure in Louisiana, 1803-1860" (Ph.D. dissertation, Vander-bilt University, 1949), p. 210, found that the residents of the Ouachita land district of Louisiana who knew each other, being neighborly, agreed not to bid against each other at the land sales held in 1826 and 1829. Only two parcels of land at these sales brought over the minimum price. |