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Show CASH SALES, 1840-1862 197 down any demand for change by suggesting the laws were working well. He declared that the land system "has been, thus far, effectual; and will, while it is preserved, be effectual in preventing alike large monopolies of land, and speculations injurious to those who purchase for cultivation." The capitalist could not buy up the public domain as long as prices were kept down. "Hence, land is now seldom purchased on speculation, and even those who hold the bounty-land warrants for sale do not find it profitable to locate them, for they are not thereby enhanced in value." The warrants, he thought, added little to the annual sales of public lands.45 According to the table of entries with cash and warrants (App. B), entries of land did substantially increase when warrants became available; and a look at the Iowa and Wisconsin entry volumes would have shown the Secretary that speculation was rapidly recovering from the doldrums into which it had fallen after the Panic of 1837. Elsewhere lists have been compiled showing some of the larger investors who acquired public land in the prairie states in amounts from a thousand to 200,000 and 300,000 acres.46 If these investors were local men of affairs purchasing with the idea of developing their holdings, as Isaac Funk and Matthew T. Scott did in central Illinois, or as Henry L. Ellsworth tried to do in the prairie section south of the Kankakee River in Indiana, they were looked upon as performing a useful 45 H. Ex. Doc, 31st Cong., 1st sess., Vol. Ill, No. 5, Part 2 (Serial No. 570), pp. 6-7. 46 Mary Elizabeth Young, Redskins, Ruffleshirts and Rednecks, pp. 131-32, 165-66; Paul W. Gates, "Land Policy and Tenancy in the Prairie States," Journal of Economic History, I (May 1941), pp. 68, 69, 71; id., "Land Policy and Tenancy in the Prairie Counties of Indiana," Indiana Magazine of History, XXXV (March 1939), 17; id., "Hoosier Cattle Kings," Indiana Magazine of History, XLIV (March 1948), 3-4; id., Wisconsin Pine Lands of Cornell University (Ithaca, 1943), pp. 66-67; James W. Silver, "Land Speculation Profits in the Chickasaw Cession," Journal of Southern History, X (February 1946), 88, 90; Bogue, Patterns From the Sod, pp. 259-60. service to the community. But if they were solely interested in holding for the rise, as Romulus Riggs did in the Military Tract of Illinois, they were excoriated by the local people, nothing removable was safe on their property, and their taxes were sometimes made heavier than usual. It was against the absentee-nondeveloping owner that the West directed its opposition and it was the purchases of these men that drove the West to advocate measures to prevent the purchase of land in other than small lots. One incomplete but systematic tabulation of large land acquisitions in Illinois lists 59 acquisitions of 2,000 to 5,000 acres; 43 acquisitions of 5,000 to 10,000 acres; 15 acquisitions of 20,000 to 40,000 acres; four acquisitions of 40,000 to 60,000 acres; three acquisitions of 60,000 to 100,000 acres; and one in excess of 100,000 acres. Over 2 million acres, or 6 percent of the acreage of Illinois, was engrossed by holders of 5,000 acres or more. It is important to note that, with some exceptions, these large ownerships were in the better parts of Illinois. Speculators, estate builders, and bonanza farm developers did well, on the whole, in their selection of land. In Indiana the story is somewhat the same: 234 individuals entered 1,000 acres or more. Their holdings totaled 1,237,000 acres. Among them were 64 holdings of 2,000 to 5,000 acres; 19 holdings of 5,000 to 10,000 acres; 10 holdings of 10,000 to 20,000 acres; five holdings of 20,000 to 40,000 acres; and one holding of 90,000 acres. Both the Illinois and Indiana tabulations include some purchases in each of the three eras of large speculative purchasing: 1816-18, 1833-37, and 1850-57. The heyday of the bonanza farmer in the prairies of Indiana and Illinois was in the sixties and seventies, when the demand for land to be rented and worked by incoming immigrants was so constant that these landlords could develop their land with hired labor or tenants. These great bonanza farms-in Indiana they were as large as 40,000 and 45,000 acres-rivaled in size of |