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Show CASH SALES, 1820-1840 169 the Hudson, rail, canal boat, and stage coach from Albany to Buffalo, then by boat to Detroit he seemed to have heard little but stories of profits in land speculation. There was nothing in the air to encourage doubts or urge caution. After reaching Michigan he took a long overland tour of possible areas for investment before making his choice and then bought 6,764 acres, mostly in Van Buren and Berrien Counties. His detailed diary with its numerous comments on the people he met on his travels, in the inns and land offices reveals how little doubt he had about the prospect of early returns from his investment. It also shows no awareness of the hostility to absentee owners and their purchases, but then he was mostly in the company of men who were engaged in the land business orwho were providing accommodations for visiting capitalists prepared to invest and who would not reflect that hostility.63 Illinois, with its rich prairie soil and its location on Lake Michigan and the Mississippi, attracted speculators at an early date. It drew more outside capital than any other state and was saddled with very large speculative holdings which were to be kept more or less intact for years. This was notably true in the military tract where most of the 160-acre grants had passed from the soldiers to speculators and land companies, but it was also true of central Illinois, and, by the fifties, of the Grand Prairie of east central Illinois. In the busy middle thirties some 15 percent of the land sales in Illinois were made to speculators, moneylenders, estate builders, and colony organizers. Among the estate builders was Daniel Webster who acquired several thousand acres in the LaSalle prairie of north central Illinois and devoted a considerable amount of capital to their development. The largest of the groups investing in Illinois was headed by John Grigg, a wealthy Philadelphia publisher who with others purchased 63 Douglas H. Gordon and George S. May, "The Michigan Land Rush in 1836," Michigan History, 43 (March, June, Sept., Dec, 1959) 1-42, 129-49, 257-93, 433-78. 124,000 acres near Springfield. Colony pro-motors, carrying on the earlier New England practice, sent out delegations to select and purchase from 5,000 to 30,000 acres to provide adequate land for all their members and an endowment for worthy enterprises such as colleges or seminaries. At least a dozen such colonies were organized in this way and hundreds of New England families with considerable property emigrated to the West. Some left as a legacy, either to an institution, or men associated with it, holdings of large blocks of land.64 During the first 6 years-1835-40-that Wisconsin's lands were subject to purchase, 29 percent of all the land sold was acquired either by moneylenders for settlers or by speculators. In this period 86 individuals or groups bought a minimum of 2,000 acres each, with a total engrossment of 553,000 acres. This was an average of 6,430 acres each. There were no huge holdings like that of John Grigg in Illinois but there were 15 purchases exceeding 10,000 acres and six exceeding 20,000 acres. The Creek and Chickasaw Lands In Mississippi and Alabama the efforts of speculators to gain ownership of choice land before the wave of settlers appeared was both aided and retarded by the presence of the Creek and Chickasaw Indians. These tribes had succeeded in withholding their lands longer than other Indian groups each of the Mississippi save the Potawatomi and Miami Indians of Indiana. The more advanced of the Indian chiefs, and the white men collaborating with them in trade, devised means by which the lands, especially the more desirable, should not, when finally surrendered to the government, be added to the public domain and consequently be opened 64 The family of George Gale, founder of Gales-burg and Knox College, long held many thousand acres in the vicinity of Galesburg. R. Earnest Elmo Calkins, They Broke the Prairie (New York, 1937), passim. |