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Show CASH SALES, 1820-1840 161 sured one eastern investor that the large advance over cost gave no offence to the purchaser "for he seeks you out knowing your rates." On such terms Ogden lent money for capitalists from Maine, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, and Maryland-$15,000 in 1839 alone.48 Skulduggery, Intimidation, and Collusion In protecting settlers from the competition of speculators the claims clubs flouted Federal law, the territories and states adopted measures that facilitated their work, and western members of Congress used their influence in behalf of settlers and against the Government. For example, the constituents of Lucius Lyon, Senator from Michigan, were demanding the right of preemption on a tract of the Swann Creek Chippewa Indians that had been ceded to the United States and ordered sold. In reply to the letter of protest against the sale of the land at auction, Lyon said that the treaty required sale at auction but urged the settlers "to prevent any bidding against them, so that each occupant may purchase the land he lives on."49 Years later, Henry Rice, Representative from Minnesota, came close to advocating vigilantism to prevent public sales. Immigrants to Minnesota who had recently taken up land and begun their improvements were facing public sales in 1858 and 1859. They had either to raise the funds for the purchase of their claims at the sale or to stand the loss of all the work they had devoted to them. Unable to pay the preemption price and not desiring to borrow from the loan sharks whose rates would soon eat up their equity in the land, they pleaded for postponement. Rice outlined a method by which they might protect their claims, "Letters of W. B. Ogden to Obadiah Sands, Sept. 27, 1839; to Joseph E. Sheffield, Oct. 17, 1839; and to John D. Ledyard, Oct. 15, 1839, in Ogden Letter Book, 1839-1840, Ogden MSS., Chicago Historical Society. 49 Lyon to Charles W. Whipple, Jan. 18, 1839, "Letters of Lucious Lyon," Michigan Historical Collections, XXVII (1897), 515. which went a step farther than previous actions. He said that he could not believe "there is a man within our State, so debased as to bid upon land improved by another; but should such a man be found at any of the sales, I would unhesitatingly recommend that he be invited by the crowd to leave." He advised all persons unable to pay for their claims to attend the sale "and see that no one bids upon the same" and at the conclusion of the sale to file a second declaratory statement under the preemption law which would give them one additional year in which to pay for their homes.50 Ethan A. Brown, Jackson's Commissioner of the General Land Office in 1836, was no friend of preemption or of organized efforts to prevent competitive bidding at the public land sales. In a report to Congress on frauds in the public land system he wrote of the "system of terror that threatens the competitor for the purchase of public land with the vengeance of the settler with whose usurpation he may interfere. In some quarters this state of things is become formidable." He was aware that there were two kinds of combinations, one consisting of capitalists seeking large tracts, who had dominated sales at a number of Alabama offices, and the other made up of numerous settlers anxious to keep out all competition for claims they had established. He cited the sale at Chicago in June 1835 as illustrative of the latter type. All such combinations he blamed on the preemption laws "whose repeated enactment may have led the settlers to the erroneous persuasion, that they have acquired rights not given by law."51 50 The letter of Rice of Oct. 13, 1860, to the editors of the Pioneer and Democrat was published in the Stillwater Democrat, Oct. 20, 1860. Lyon's and Rice's advice about nullifying Federal law was little different from the encouragement Congressman John Wentworth and other Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin members of Congress gave to lumbermen in their efforts to render ineffective laws against timber stealing on the public domain. hlH. Ex. Doc, 24th Cong., 1st sess., April 14, 1836, Vol. V, No. 211 (Serial No. 290), pp. 3, 8. |