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Show LAND GRANTS FOR RAILROADS AND INTERNAL IMPROVEMENTS 349 given for it and for the Ohio canals generally, were largely located in northwestern Ohio. For many years northwestern Ohio had good reason to complain about the withholding of both canal and Federal lands from sale, considering the degree to which speculation in them was permitted and the retarding effect the large speculative purchases had upon the growth of the area. The development of this area, which had been somewhat lacking in transportation facilities, was perhaps held back by the land policies adopted more than it was aided by the construction of the canal. Yet one must not discount the nearly $1,800,-000 the State of Ohio received from the sale of its canal lands which aided materially in getting canals under way and in providing financial aid when it was most needed. Indiana interpreted the grant for the Wabash and Lake Erie Canal to extend from Lake Erie or, after 1828, from the Ohio boundary to the head of navigation on the Wabash River at the mouth of its tributary, the Tippecanoe, near where the town of Lafayette had developed. For that purpose it received 234,246 acres and in 1830 was allowed to select from the alternate sections reserved to the United States an additional 29,528 acres to compensate for the land John Tipton and his associates had located for individual Indian reserves. (The privilege of selecting lieu lands from the reserved sections was rarely permitted for in effect it was a subversion of the theory that by granting part of the land away the government would the more readily sell the half it reserved, possibly at higher prices.26) On February 27, 1841, the Canal Company was also permitted by Congress to select from any land subject to private entry in the state lieu lands equivalent in amount to what it had lost because of existing preemption rights on its alternate sections.27 The next year it was authorized to select 24,219 acres of unsold land in place of the same amount to which it was entitled 264Stat. 416. 27 5 Stat. 414. but which had been previously selected by Tipton and others for individual reserves of Miami Indians under the treaties of 1837 and 1839.28 Among other projects adopted by Indiana in its Mammoth Internal Improvement Act of 1836 was the extension of the Wabash and Erie Canal from Lafayette to Terre Haute. The route was then to be diverted to the White River, which it was to follow for a considerable distance, and then to cut across the state to the Ohio River at Evansville. The vagueness of the 1827 Act of Congress, granting land for the canal, seemed to Hoosier representatives to justify selecting alternate sections along the route from Lafayette to Terre Haute, which portion of the canal had apparently not even been contemplated in 1827. Congress sanctioned these selections in an Act of February 27, 1841, and 4 years later extended the grant from Terre Haute, where the canal leaves the Wabash River, to Evansville. It also granted to Indiana one half of all the remaining public lands in the Vincennes district, except for the alternate reserved sections within 5 miles of the canal. By this time the best of the lands in the district had already been selected but an 1845 Act did bring the state an additional 796,630 acres. The last of this series of measures granting land for the Wabash Canal was adopted in August 7, 1848, when the state was authorized to select an additional amount of land then subject to private entry that would provide it with five sections of land for the entire mileage of the canal from the Indiana-Ohio line to Evansville. The Wabash Canal, 458 miles in length from Evansville to Toledo, was the longest to be carried to completion in the United States. The state was entitled to receive in Indiana under the Act of 1848 and earlier acts a total of 1,238,400 acres, but with the bonus of half the unallotted and unreserved lands remaining in the Vincennes district it 28 Ibid., p. 542. |