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Show LAND GRANTS FOR RAILROADS AND INTERNAL IMPROVEMENTS 355 Their request was acceded to, further increasing the grant by 268,310 acres. Finally, they sought to have the grant extended down the Wisconsin River to the Mississippi, which would have doubled it. Here they were unsuccessful.44 Wisconsin had failed to link up Lake Michigan with either the Rock or the Wisconsin Rivers, as planned, though Congress had generously donated 820,000 acres for the two projects. The state was not through with canals, however. On April 10, 1866, Congress was induced to give Wisconsin 200,000 acres for a canal across the Door Peninsula. Alternate odd sections nearest the canal and Sturgeon Bay were to be selected. Altogether 1,022,348 acres were given Wisconsin for canals and river improvements, plus the 500,000-acre grant given states after 1841 for internal improvements. The latter was not used for the purpose for which it was granted but was assigned to public schools.44* A second river improvement grant was given in 1846 to the Territory of Iowa for improving the navigation of the Des Moines River "from its Mouth to the Raccoon Fork. . . ." By failing to make clear what tributary was the Raccoon Fork Congress opened up a host of controversies that remained unsettled and led to complicated and expensive litigation lasting half a century. Alternate sections of land for a distance of 5 miles on each side of the river were granted. 44 The Act of Aug. 3, 1854, allowed the state to select lieu lands for those sections it had failed to secure, from lands held at the minimum price elsewhere in Wisconsin, and applied the formula for determining mileage of the canal and hence the acreage to which it was entitled on the basis of the formula worked out for the Wabash and Erie Canal in 1848. 10 Stat. 345, 724. Joseph Schafer, The Winnebago-Horicon Basin. A Type Study in Western History (Madison, Wis., 1937), pp. 112-13. Schafer has shown how the New York capitalists used the promise of land fees to lobby the two measures enlarging the grant through Congress, pp. 188 ff. 44a 14 Stat. 30. For obvious reasons-principally because the school section, 16, would reduce the number of acres if even sections were selected-the state elected to take the odd sections.45 Congress made a third river improvement grant in 1868 proposed by Ignatius Donnelly of Minnesota, which was based more on the plan for the improvement of the Muscle Shoals in the Tennessee River than on the plan for the improvement of the Des Moines River. In an Act of July 23, 1868, it granted to Minnesota 200,000 acres of odd numbered sections to aid in constructing a lock and dam on the Mississippi River at Meeker's Island between St. Paul and Minneapolis. Selections of land were confined to one section in any township but, except for mineral land and tracts on which preemption or homestead claims had been established or railroad lands, any government land was available to the state. The construction work was to be done under the Corps of Engineers of the Army. Unlike the railroad land grants the act provided that if the work was not completed 2 years from the date of acceptance "and disposition of this grant by the legislature" of Minnesota "the lands hereby granted shall revert to the United States." Had this clause been included in the railroad grants it might have avoided the long lasting difficulties over the unearned grants. No work was done on the project and the land reverted to the United States.458 Three land grants were given to Michigan for the building of canals, one from Lake Superior to Lake Huron, one across the Keweenaw Peninsula by way of Portage Lake, and one from Lac La Belle to Lake Superior. The first, consisting of 750,000 acres, was transferred to the St. Mary's Falls Ship Canal Company which built the canal between 1852 and 1855. Because of the short- 45 9 Stat. 77. 45a 15 Stat. 169; William Watts Folwell, History of Minnesota (4 vols., St. Paul, 1926), III, 325-26; Samuel Trask Dana, John H. Allison, and Russell N. Cunningham, Minnesota Lands (Washington, 1960), pp. 99, 416. |