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Show 354 HISTORY OF PUBLIC LAND LAW DEVELOPMENT Grants in Iowa and Lake States By 1846 two new projects had gained sufficient support to win the approval of Congress and to receive land grants, one for Wisconsin and one for Iowa. Wisconsin politicians were not content with their grant for the construction of a canal to connect Lake Michigan with the Mississippi River by way of the Rock River. They induced Congress to consider a land grant for a canal to connect the waters of the Fox River flowing into Green Bay with those of the Wisconsin flowing into the Mississippi. Both Senate and House Committees on Public Lands reported favorably, envisioning steamboats ascending well up the Wisconsin, except in low water, and imaginatively describing a "remarkable" divide or portage between the Wisconsin and the Fox with water sometimes 3 feet deep flowing from the Wisconsin to the Fox. The cost of the canal, estimated at $550,000, could be met, the committee reported, by a grant of alternate sections for 2 miles on each side. The first tier should be sold at $2.50 an acre, the second tier at $1.25 an acre, and the government-reserved sections should be sold at $2.50. The grant would include 320,000 acres and should produce $600,000. Congress responded by granting to Wisconsin when it was admitted to statehood one half the land in alternate sections for a distance of 3 miles from the route of the canal on each side, without naming either odd or even sections. Reserved sections were to be sold at a minimum of $2.50 an acre but the state was permitted to sell its land at any price not less than $1.25 an acre. It was well known in Wisconsin that landseekers would not buy the government-reserved lands at $2.50 when not far away other lands were available at $1.25. Hence the constitutional convention, in bargaining with the Federal government on terms for admission, succeeded in inducing the latter to lower the minimum price on those lands to $1.25. Congress was more definite than it had been in earlier measures in determining the limits of the grant and in stipulating that land sales should only be made as construction advanced.42 Construction now was pressed forward but soon the plans proved defective. Locks were built too high, a dam was improperly constructed and was soon breached, other repairs and replacements were necessary, and most distressing, the Wisconsin River proved to be unnavigable by steamboats except in high water season because of many shifting sandbars. Also, original estimates of construction costs proved too low. Meantime, the property of the canal was incorporated into the Fox and Wisconsin Improvement Company which soon passed into the control of a group of New York capitalists who were also in control of the Half-breed Lands in Iowa and who built the St. Mary's Falls Ship Canal (the Soo) and acquired control of its rich land endowment.43 Included in this group of capitalists and politicians were Erastus Corning, iron manufacturer, railroad promoter, and president of the New York Central Railroad, and other powerful figures. They succeeded in getting Congress to reinterpret the land grant of 1846 so as to allow the grant to be determined by the total distance of the right-of-way, including all twists and turns, rather than by a straight line. This brought the canal an additional 150,000 acres. Next they asked Congress to grant the same acreage per mile that other canals had received. 42 House Reports, 29th Cong., 1st sess., Vol. 3, No. 551 (Serial No. 490), includes both the Report of the House Committee on Public Lands of April 6, 1846, and the Report of the Senate Committee on Public Lands of Jan. 8, 1844, on the Fox and Wisconsin project; Act of Aug. 8, 1846, 9 Stat. 83. Mention should at least be made of the Act of June 15, 1844, in which the United States gave to the Territory of Wisconsin a section of land for the improvement of Grant River, near Potosi, a lead mining community in Grant County. The land was to be surveyed into lots and appraised without regard to the improvements on them and sold to the occupants. 5 Stat. 663. 43 Irene Neu tells the story of the St. Mary's Falls Ship Canal Company and its lands in "The Building of the Sault Canal: 1852-1855," Mississippi Valley Historical Review XL (June 1953), 25 ff. |