| OCR Text |
Show CASH SALES, 1840-1862 205 ton and Missouri River, later the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad. After the adoption of the Swamp Land Act of 1850 the State of Iowa had selected its wet lands very promptly and the easy-going land officers had been most liberal in determining what were swamplands. The state had conveyed the swamplands to the counties which thereafter tilted with the General Land Office about selections. Subsequently the Burlington Railroad claimed as part of its alternate-section grant 47,193 acres in western Iowa which the state had already selected as swampland, and 12,050 acres elsewhere. The state and the counties insisted on their right to its selections, as did their purchasers. In addition, persons who had settled upon the lands with the intention of preempting them as public land maintained their rights to do so against the state and counties and their buyers, and against the Burlington Railroad. Decisions of the Attorney General, the Commissioner of the General Land Office, and the Secretary of the Interior in the fifties had repeatedly favored the settlers, encouraging them to believe that they would eventually win, either as preemption claimants or as buyers of swampland titles from the state. But after 1861 with an Iowan as Secretary of the Interior the bulk of the lands in suspension were approved to the railroad.66 The counties continued their efforts to upset the decision of the Department of the Interior, at which point the railroad threatened to move its line from the route already established and on which towns were growing up, thereby blackmailing local business interests into favoring a compromise. In 1869, just when Mills County, which had most at stake, was signing a compromise, the United States Supreme Court made a final award in favor of a nearby county, the principle of which would also apply to Mills.67 The Court's decision was the same 66 Richard C. Overton, Burlington West. A Colonization History of the Burlington- Railroad (Cambridge, Mass., 1941), pp. 122 ff./l86 ff. In 1861-63, 55,000 acres of 75,000 in dispute were confirmed. 67 Ibid., pp. 265-66, 405. as that which the Secretary of the Interior had rendered in 1858: favorable to the state and counties. It led to further litigation in the seventies when it must have seemed to many that this dispute, like the controversies over the Des Moines River lands and the Half-breed Tract, would never cease. In 1880 the Burlington brought ejectment suits against many settlers in Mills and other counties who refused to contract for land to which the railroad claimed title or to make further payments on land they had bought when it appeared the railroad's title was sound. No wonder the local paper reported that many discouraged people who had not been able to acquire land or who were mere tenants were abandoning Iowa and striking out for Nebraska and Dakota where there still was free land.68 Another river improvement and canal company to which a land grant was given, and twice enlarged, also fell into controversy with settlers on its lands, thereby creating another group of people who were critical of the way public land policies were functioning. In 1846 Congress first granted half the land within a strip 6 miles wide for the improvement of the Fox and Wisconsin Rivers and for the construction of a canal to connect their headwaters so as to permit boats to travel from Lake Michigan to the Mississippi. By sharp and clearly questionable means the promoters induced Congress to enlarge the land grant to include half the land within a 10-mile wide strip and to apply the mileage to the sinuosities of the Fox River rather than on a straight line. Various difficulties between the company and settlers purchasing from it or squatting on its land resulted in some of the same "anti-rent" agitation that has been seen in Iowa. It is probably no coincidence that much the same group of New York capitalists in control of the Fox and Wisconsin Improvement Company also owned the lands in the Half-breed Tract, the Des Moines River improvements 6SGlenwood Opinion, Jan. 28, 1880, March 10, 17. 1883; Roscoe L. Lokken, Iowa Public Land Disposal (Iowa City, 1942), pp. 198 ff. |
