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Show 154 HISTORY OF PUBLIC LAND LAW DEVELOPMENT desirability of holding early sales in Alabama, Indiana, and Illinois. Hayward maintained that the longer the interval between survey and public sale, the greater the embarrassments . . . experienced by Settlers who build Cabins, for temporary residences, and commence clearing a particular tract in the hope of becoming the purchaser ... at the sale. Meanwhile they naturally desire to adopt such means as are in their power, to prevent the tract occupied from being appropriated by another. This results in the establishment of certain rules of etiquette among them, whereby it is made a point of honor not to bid against each other for their respective improvements. When a large population stands thus affected it is futile to attempt to counteract such combinations, which have nearly the same effect on the sales, as the pre-emption privilege, but to a much greater extent.27 Such an admission of the futility of any attempt to prevent combinations from functioning at the public sales, just 3 years after Congress had taken a strong stand to outlaw them, is instructive. Between 1824 and 1836 the claims clubs or settlers' or squatters' associations, as they were variously called, became institutionalized in somewhat the same way as the numerous anti-horse-thief associations, or the miners' camps of a later time. All were designed to meet pressing emergencies which existing political institutions did not, or were not able to handle. Settlers on a new frontier where pioneering was under way, whether farm making or town planning, soon made sufficient improvements that called for protection by the community. Squatters felt that their "right" to their claims should include protection against invaders or claim jumpers, the right to sell their claims, and the right to buy the land for its value before their improvements had been made at the usual government minimum of $1.25 an acre. As Ninian Edwards, Governor of Illinois Territory, said in 1812: "The United States would not wish to receive more than the value of the land in its unimproved State, or that its increased value from the improvements of others should fall into the hands of speculators. . . ."28 To protect these rights the earlier combinations of land buyers gradually developed into settlers' or claims associations, taking on more formality with constitutions and bylaws, regularly constituted officers (such as bidders and registers or recorders), committees to arbitrate disputed claims,, and clearly stated objectives. In northern Illinois in 1835 the squatters on unoffered land arrived at an "understanding" equivalent "to a law of the land," that they would "sustain each other against the speculator, no settler should bid on anothers land. If a speculator should bid on a settler's farm, he was knocked down & dragged out of the office, & if the striker was prosecuted & fined, the settlers paid the expense by common consent among themselves. But before a fine could be assessed, the case must come before a jury" which would find the accused not guilty on grounds of self-defense. "And if these means could not protect the settler, the last resort would be to 'burn powder in their faces.' " Since only the township lines had been run, the settlers had to determine their own boundaries, which were temporarily described by metes and bounds. Members of the associations pledged themselves to reconvey such parts of the quarter-section they acquired as had been improved by and were claimed by adjacent settlers and they were in turn assured that their own improvements, if on another's land, would be conveyed to them. Because of the scarcity of timber in a region primarily prairie, settlers would be allowed to claim no more than 40 acres of woodland. The amount of prairie they could claim varied, running to 320 acres and even 480 acres. It was of the settlers' groups in the Chicago land district that Commissioner Ethan A. Brown said in 27 Letters from Commissioner of the General Land Office to Secretary of the Treasury, 1833-34. 28 Ninian W. Edwards, History of Illinois from 1778 to 1833; and Life and Times of Ninian Edwards (Springfield, 111., 1870), p. 297. |