OCR Text |
Show CASH SALES, 1820-1840 1836 that they pretended to have preemption rights and "resorted to intimidation by threats and actual violence. . . ."29 In Lake County, Indiana, a full-fledged settlers or claims association existed, as is revealed by the constitution of the Squatters' Union, adopted on July 4, 1836. A register was appointed to record all claims and transfers of titles, for many claimants established rights to land for sale rather than for development. Three-man boards of arbitrators were created to adjudicate overlapping claims or other disputes between members, and bidders were elected to represent each township at the approaching sale. All members were required to attend the auction sale and plans were laid for dealing with claim jumpers. Since no settler had a legal title before the auction, and in fact, none had any right under Federal law to be on the land before 1841, the recorder was to register claims which might be described by metes and bounds if the lands had not been surveyed. After the surveys were made and the sale conducted, he was also to register the many minor conveyances made to reconcile the rectangular division of the land with the practical farm divisions based on natural geographic factors. That one of the organizers and one of the three arbitrators of the union was a speculator of substantial means who had bought 11,039 acres in Lake County the previous year seems not to have bothered the members for he was a resident and was developing a part of his land.30 29 Alfred Brunson, "A Methodist Circuit Rider's Horseback Tour from Pennsylvania to Wisconsin, 1835," Collections of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, XV (Madison, Wis., 1900), 277; Iowa Territorial Gazette and Burlington Advertiser, Jan. 5, 1839; H. Ex. Doc, 24th Cong., 1st sess., April 14, 1836, Vol. V, No. 211 (Serial No. 290), p. 3. Brunson says that an association in northern Illinois surveyed the section lines, set off section 16 for schools and protected the timber on it from theft. 30 For the constitution of the Squatters' Union in Lake County, adopted on July 4, 1836, see Herbert A. Kellar, Solon Robinson Pioneer and Agriculturist (2 vols., Indianapolis, 1936), I, 68 ff. 155 By the opening of the auction settlers had to have the cash to buy their land. Many of them had devoted all their resources to making improvements and consequently had to borrow the necessary funds from local moneylenders. The latter were estopped by the claims association from buying the improved land of squatters for speculation but could do as well, if not better, by lending squatters the money to buy their claims at "twenty, thirty and more percent." However, the Panic of 1837 rendered it difficult for the borrowers to pay these excessive interest rates and, as the local historian of Lake County says, after all the time and labor given to the organization of their claims club to save their land from outsiders "considerable tracts of ... land came into the hands of nonresidents."31 The preamble of the Pike River, Wisconsin, Claimants' Union adopted on February 13, 1836, is instructive for its rationale for the union, its evasion of the Act of 1830, its contempt for speculators and its self-pity. The settlers had moved upon the land before it was surveyed and had all the usual troubles about boundaries and squaring their tracts with the survey lines. Almost from the first appearance of settlers there was trouble about tomahawk or settlers' claims, obviously pointing to the need for collective action before struggles over claims reached serious proportions. The pioneers were from Oswego County, New York. They had met together in 1834 to plan for emigration to the West and on March 9, 1835, had organized themselves as the Western Emigration Company, and had selected agents to precede them and to select land for them. It was not difficult then for those who had come from Oswego County to meet with others, mostly from New York, to form a claimants' union. Whereas, a union and cooperation of all the inhabitants will be indispensably necessary, in case the pre-emption law should not pass, for the securing and protecting of our claims: And 31 T. H. Ball, Lake County Indiana from 1834 to 1872 (Chicago, 1873), p. 65. |