USA > Illinois > Illinois in 1818, 2nd ed > Part 5
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#3Hubbard, Incidents and Events.
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CHAPTER II
THE PUBLIC LANDS
No more important and interesting story can be found in the annals of the human race than that of the progress of settlement across the North American continent,-the transfor- mation of successive areas of wilderness into highly organized agricultural and industrial communities. The significance of this phase of American history has been widely recognized in recent years, and the region undergoing this transformation at any particular period has come to be known as the frontier. The process is a long one, however, with many diff- erent stages that appear simultaneously A TRAPPER [From Hall, Forty Etchings, owned by Illinois State Histor- ical Library] in different areas so that the frontier at any given time includes a wide belt of territory whose boundaries shade away on one side into the wilderness, on the other into civiliza- tion. Using the term as here defined, the whole of Illinois can be said to have been frontier country in 1818. The northern part of the state had passed through the stage of the explorer's frontier and represented the frontier of both the Indian trader and the military post, while the southern part had emerged into the frontier of the pioneer settler.
The expression "frontier" may also be used in another but closely allied sense, as connoting the extreme limit of progress of some phase of the movement. Thus the frontier of explora- tion is the line between the territory which has been visited by explorers and that which has not, and similarly there are fron- tiers of Indian land cessions, government surveys, land sales,
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THE PUBLIC LANDS
and actual settlement. The fact that the lines of several of these frontiers run through the Illinois of 1818 adds interest to a study of the region at that time. Progress along some of these lines was always irregular, however; and the frontier in such cases can be indicated only approximately, by drawing a line to connect up the extreme points. Considering the nation as a whole, these frontiers were in the main, north and south lines; but various factors, principally geographical, resulted in their running in Illi- nois from east to west across the state.
The southern limit of the Indian country in Illinois in 1818 was a line drawn east from the mouth of the Illinois river to a point about ten miles west of the Wabash and then northward bearing slightly to the east to the Vermilion river. The location of this line was determined by a series of treaties between the United States and the various Indian tribes. By a treaty nego- tiated at Vincennes in 1803, the Kaskaskia surrendered to the United States all their claims to land in Illinois covering an immense tract stretching from the Mississippi on the west to the divide between the Kaskaskia and the Wabash on the east, and from the Ohio on the south, northward to a line running in a northeasterly direction from the mouth of the Illinois river. Previous to this the United States had secured, at the treaty of Greenville of 1795, which was participated in by most of the tribes of the northwest, a recognition of grants made by the Indians during the French and British periods of a tract of land about Vincennes, part of which lay west of the Wabash. In 1803 the limits of this grant were defined by another treaty at Fort Wayne. Two years later the small tribe of the Piankashaw ceded to the United States their claims to the land between the Kaskaskia cession on the west and the Wabash river and Vin- cennes tract on the east, extending north a short distance beyond the thirty-ninth parallel.44
"The cessions are listed chronologically, with the essential data, and ex- cellent colored maps, in Royce, "Indian Land Cessions" in Bureau of Amer- ican Ethnology, Eighteenth Annual Report, pt. 2. The treaties can be found in full in Kapper, Indian Affairs, Laws, and Treaties, vol. 2. The two volumes. of American State Papers, Indian Affairs contain many documents relating to the negotiations.
38
ILLINOIS IN 1818
In 1809 a narrow strip of land along the boundary between Illinois and Indiana, stretching from the Vincennes tract to the Vermilion river, was acquired by treaties negotiated by Governor William Henry Harrison with various tribes of Illinois and In- diana Indians, including the Potawatomi and Kickapoo. The purpose of this cession was to open the way for the advance of settlement up the Wabash river. When the Illinois tribes had been driven out from northern and central Illinois, the territory had been occupied by a stream of northern tribes, the Sauk and Fox, Kickapoo, Winnebago, and Potawatomi. Mingled with the latter were also fragments of the Ottawa and Chippewa. New- comers in the region, these various tribes had illy defined hold- ings, and a large number of overlapping cessions had to be se- cured before their claims were extinguished. In 1804 a treaty was made with certain members of the allied Sauk and Fox tribes by which the United States claimed to have acquired from these tribes the vast stretch of country lying between the Mississippi on the west and the Illinois and Fox rivers on the east and extending northward into what is now Wisconsin. The validity of this cession was denied by the Indians, however, on the ground that it was made by men who had no authority to represent the tribes; and in 1815 and 1816 when peace was made with the Sauk and Fox respectively, after the war of 1812, the United States secured confirmations of this grant. The Indians retained the privilege of living and hunting on the land so long as it remained the property of the government. The region between the Mississippi and Illinois rivers having been selected for mili- tary bounty land, the United States was desirous of perfecting its title in order that the surveys might proceed. For this pur- pose it was necessary to secure a relinquishment from the asso- ciated Potawatomi, Ottawa, and Chippewa. By a treaty nego- tiated at St. Louis in August, 1816,45 these tribes gave up their claims to the Sauk and Fox cession south of a line drawn due west from the southern extremity of Lake Michigan to the
"Such tracts, not to "exceed the quantity that would be contained in five leagues square" as the president might reserve, were excepted. It was ex- pected that these would be so located as to include the Galena lead mines. See Wisconsin Historical Collections, 13:286.
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THE PUBLIC LANDS
Mississippi river, while the United States in turn relinquished to them its claim to the part of the cession lying north of that line. By the same treaty, these Indians also ceded a strip about ten miles wide from the Fox river to the Kankakee along the north side of the Illinois and about twenty miles wide from the mouth of the Kankakee on both sides of the Desplaines river and the- portage to Lake Michigan. The purpose of this cession was to make possible the construction of a canal from Lake Michigan to the Illinois river, and the Indians were allowed to continue to hunt and fish on the ceded land.
The title of the United States to the military tract having been cleared up, it was expected that settlement would follow rapidly, and the desirability of securing a cession of the area between that tract and the Kaskaskia cession of 1803 was realized. In 1817 commissioners were appointed and instructions issued, and on September 25, 1818, representatives of all the remnants of the Illinois tribes met Governor Edwards and Auguste Chouteau, United States commissioners, at Edwardsville and agreed to a treaty. The remnant of the Peoria had not been a party to the treaty of 1803, and so, in order to quiet any claim which they might have, the cession here made included the whole of the earlier cession as well as all the land beyond that cession and south of the Illinois and Kankakee rivers. A week later the Potawatomi ceded their claim to a tract northwest of the Wabash, lying mostly in Indiana but including a small triangle in Illinois between the Vermilion and the state line. Neither of these treaties, however, gave the United States undisputed claim to any additional territory in Illinois, for the Kickapoo, a numer- ous and powerful tribe, for many years claimed by right of con- quest and possession the whole of central Illinois including not only all the new area covered by the treaty of 1818 but also all the original Kaskaskia cession and the Piankashaw cession north of an east and west line through the mouth of the Illinois river. Not until July 30, 1819, were the Kickapoo induced to give up their claim and to agree to move west of the Mississippi. By this cession of 1819 the land claimed by Indians in Illinois was reduced to the region north of the canal cession and of an east
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ILLINOIS IN 1818
and west line through the southern extremity of Lake Michigan, and a smaller tract along the Indiana line extending south from the canal cession and the Kankakee river to the Vermilion. Not until the years 1829, 1832, and 1833, were these claims given up by the Potawatomi, Ottawa, Chippewa, and Winnebago.
When Illinois was admitted to the union in November, 1818, therefore, the land in the state upon which all Indian claims had been extinguished, or, more accurately, of which no further ces- sions were made, lay in two detached areas. The first included all south of the east and west line through the mouth of the Illinois and also a narrow strip along the eastern border of the state extending as far north as the Vermilion river; the second consisted of the military tract and the strip connecting it with Lake Michigan.
After the Indian title to the land was extinguished, it was government land, and the first step in the transition to private property was its survey into the familiar rectangular townships and sections. By an act of 1804 the surveyor-general in charge of this work in the northwest was authorized to arrange for the survey of all the land north of the Ohio and east of the Missis- sippi to which the Indian titles had been extinguished.46 The system of rectangular surveys based on a principal meridian and a base line had already been worked out for the land in Ohio; but the tracts to be surveyed in Indiana territory were widely separated from this land; and it was necessary to select a new point of departure. For the second principal meridian, there- fore, the surveyor-general established a line running due north and south through the northeast corner of the Vincennes tract, as confirmed by the Indians in 1803; and this meridian governed most of the surveys in Indiana and those in Illinois east of a line running north from the mouth of the Wabash. In the rest of Illinois south of the Illinois river the surveys were governed by the third principal meridian, which was run north from the mouth of the Ohio. For both of these systems an east and west line, selected because it ran through the westernmost corner of Clark's grant on the Ohio, served as the base line. Ranges
"Statutes at Large, 2:277.
Indian Land Cessions in Illinois 1818
Cessions completed before 1818
Covered by cessions both before and after 1818.
Ceded and retroceded to the Indians before 1818.
Not covered by cessions before 1818.
.
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ILLINOIS IN 1818
were numbered east and west from the principal meridians and townships north and south from the base line. Each township was divided into thirty-six sections one mile square.47
While the work of locating the main township lines in Illinois was begun in 1804, the same year in which the surveys were authorized, the principal work of the surveyors for a number of years was the marking out of the numerous private claims. Not until about 1810 was the detail work in the townships taken up in earnest, and then it progressed so slowly that much was uncompleted when the sales began in 1814. With the close of the war of 1812, however, the surveys proceeded more rapidly ; in 1816 a surveyor-general for Illinois and Missouri territories was appointed; and at the close of the territorial period most of the land to which the Indian titles had been extinguished was surveyed.48 The frontier of government survey then, in 1818, started on the Mississippi near Alton and ran east to the third principal meridian, then south thirty miles to the base line, east again to the southwest corner of the Vincennes tract and then northeastwardly along the boundaries of that tract and the Har- rison purchase to the Indiana line near the boundary between the present Vermilion and Edgar counties. West of the meridian, the line was only a few miles below the frontier of Indian ces- sions but between the meridian and the Vincennes tract the two frontiers were thirty-six miles apart.49
In this statement of the extent of surveys, the triangle be- tween the Mississippi and the Illinois rivers has been left out of consideration. When this land was purchased from the Indians in 1804, it was apparently intended that it should be disposed
"Treat, National Land System, ch. 8; Niles' Weekly Register, 12:97-99; 16:362.
"Land records in the auditor's office at Springfield; Statutes at Large, 3:325.
"Additional surveys were frequently urged by the land officers and dur- ing the late summer of 1818, thirty-six townships above township 5 north, and west of the third principal meridian were surveyed. This land was not offered for sale, however, until 1819, and the line described above is for convenience referred to as the "frontier line of survey in 1818." Orders were issued September 26, 1818, for the survey of the tract north of the base line and east of the meridian, and the work was completed the following year. Land records in the auditor's office, Springfield; Intelligencer, Octo- ber 21, 1818.
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THE PUBLIC LANDS
of in the ordinary way, for an act of congress of March 3, 1805 attached it to the Kaskaskia land district. At the beginning of the war of 1812, however, congress, by the act of May 6, 1812, directed that two million acres of this land with like quantities in Michigan and Louisiana territories be reserved for the pur- pose of satisfying the bounties of land promised to soldiers, --- 160 acres to each, -- by acts of December 24, 1811, and January II, 1812. The surveys of the "military tracts," as they were called, were delayed by Indian hostilities but they were under way in the summer of 1815. As the work progressed, the offi- cials reached the conclusion that the Michigan lands were not suitable for the purpose, and so congress was induced to pass the act of April 29, 1816, substituting for the Michigan lands an additional million and a half acres in Illinois and an additional half million acres in Missouri.50 This increased the amount of bounty land in Illinois to three and a half million acres, and car- ried the northern boundary of the tract to a line from the Illinois river at the mouth of the Vermilion due west to the Mississippi. As this region was wholly separated from the other surveys in Illinois, it was necessary to run a fourth principal meridian, fixed by the mouth of the Illinois river, with a base line run due west from the point where the meridian crossed the Illinois in the vicinity of the site of Beardstown.
The survey of the Illinois bounty lands progressed rapidly during the winter of 1816-17; and on September 25, 1817, the commissioner of the general land office announced that the sur- veys had all been received and that the distribution of the land by lot as provided by law would begin on the first Monday in October. Warrants had been issued to the soldiers entitled to bounties, or to their heirs, and between October 6, 1817 and January 28, 1819, some eighteen thousand of these warrants were exchanged at the general land office for patents to quarter sections of land in Illinois, covering the greater part of the mili- tary tract. While the warrants were non-transferable there was no requirement that the patentee settle upon the land and nothing
60 American State Papers, Public Lands, 3:162-164; Statutes at Large, 2:344, 669, 672, 728; 3:332; Niles' Weekly Register, 9:15.
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ILLINOIS IN 1818
to prevent him from disposing of the patent as soon as received. As a matter of fact the title to most of this land passed at once into the hands of eastern speculators; and no settlement appears to have resulted from this wholesale distribution of land until after the admission of the state to the union.51
The regular procedure in the disposition of the public lands at this time was sale by the government without distinction between settlers and speculators. To facilitate its sale, the region in which the land was located was divided into districts, in each of which was established a local land office. In 1818 there were three such land offices with their corresponding districts wholly in Illinois, while the strip along the eastern border north of the base line was included in the Vincennes district, the greater part of which lay in Indiana. Land offices had been established at Vincennes and Kaskaskia as early as 1804; but their only work for many years was the settlement of claims, of which there were a large number, based on the rights of the old French inhab- itants and on various donations by congress to the early settlers. It was obviously desirable that the validity of each of these claims and the location and limits of those which stood the test should be determined before the remainder of the land was offered for sale. The process of settlement dragged on from year to year, however, and it was not until 1814, only four years before the state entered the union, that land could be purchased from the government in Illinois. In the meantime another land office had been authorized at Shawneetown in 1812, the boundary between the two Illinois districts being the third principal meridian. With the beginning of sales and the progress of the surveys the need for another land office in the west, north of Kaskaskia, was apparent, and in 1816 one was established at Edwardsville for the sale of the land north of the base line and west of the meridian. This left in the Kaskaskia district the triangle be- tween the Mississippi, the meridian, and the base line. While the acts establishing the Shawneetown and Edwardsville districts
"1"Lands in Illinois to soldiers of late war," Executive Documents, 26 con- gress, I session, no. 262; Illinois State Historical Society, Transactions, 1910, p. 151; Chicago Historical Society manuscripts, 52 :29, 177; 53:59; Intelligen- cer, November 6, 1817.
THE FLATBOAT, OHIO-BOAT, OR KENTUCKY-BOAT [From A History of Travel in America, by Seymour Dunbar, used by special permission of the publishers. The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Indianapolis]
[From A History of Travel in America, by Seymour Dunbar, used by special permission of the publishers, The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Indianapolis]
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THE PUBLIC LANDS
had not definitely fixed their northern boundaries, these coin- cided in practice with the frontier of survey; that is, the base line for the Shawneetown district, and a line five townships or thirty miles farther north for the Edwardsville district. The Kaskaskia district, then, contained approximately 2,188,800 acres or ninety-five townships, the Shawneetown, 3,018,240 acres. or 131 townships, and the Edwardsville, 1,059,840 acres or forty-six townships.52
The system of public land sales in operation in Illinois in 1818 was that inaugurated by the act of congress of May 10, 1800, with some modifications by later acts. The land was first offered at public sales on dates fixed by proclamations of the president ; all land for which two dollars or more an acre was offered was sold to the highest bidder. After land had once been offered at public sale without finding a purchaser, it could then be bought at private sale for the minimum price. Under the act of 1800 all the land was to be sold in half sections or 320 acre tracts ; but in 1804, the sale of quarter sections was authorized and an act of 1817 permitted six specified sections in each township to be sold in half-quarter sections or eighty acre tracts. Of the pur- chase money, one-twentieth had to be paid down to hold the land, and enough more to amount to twenty-five per cent was due in forty days. The remainder was due in three equal install- ments at the end of two, three, and four years from the date of entry. No interest was charged if payments were promptly made; but if not, they drew six per cent from the date of sale. A discount of eight per cent was allowed, however, on all advance payments, which reduced the minimum cash price to $1.64 an acre. If the installments were not all paid at the end of five years from the date of entry, the land reverted to the United States and was offered at public auction. Should it then bring more than the amount still due with interest, the balance went to the original purchaser. As a rule, in Illinois, only a small pro- portion of the land offered was disposed of at the public sales, and the bulk of that brought only the minimum price. It was
12Statutes at Large, 2:277, 684; 3:323; American State Papers, Public Lands, 3:312.
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ILLINOIS IN 1818
possible, therefore, for anyone with eighty dollars to enter a quarter section of land, "looking to the land to reward your pains with the means of discharging the other three-fourths as they become due," as Morris Birkbeck expressed it.53 From the records of land sales in Illinois it appears that practically all the purchasers took advantage of the credit system and most of them bought only the minimum amount.
The protracted delay in the opening of the land sales resulted in a situation which is well described in a memorial addressed to congress by the first territorial legislature in 1812. This de- clared that, "from the establishment of a land office in the Terri- tory several years ago, a general opinion prevailed that the public land would shortly thereafter be offered for sale, whereby the great majority of the citizens now residing in the Territory were induced to move into it and settle themselves, hoping that they would have an opportunity of purchasing the land they occupied before they had made such ameliorations thereon as would tempt the competition of avaricious speculators, in which reason- able expectation they have been hitherto disappointed in conse- quence of the unexampled postponement of the sales owing to canses [sic] which are well understood and which it is unneces- sary to detail; . . . . those good people have made valuable and permanent improvements on the land they thus occupied (at the same time that they have risked their lives in defending it against the barbarous savages who invaded it), but are now in danger of losing the whole value of their labor by competition at the sales or by the holders of unlocated claims being permitted to locate on their improvements."54
In the eyes of the law these settlers on the public domain were intruders with no legal rights to their "improvements," and con- gress had in the past usually refused to recognize the claim of such settlers, on the ground that to do so would encourage illegal settlement. The sales in Illinois had been so long postponed, however, that the justice of some measure of relief was obvious,
63Birkbeck, Letters from Illinois, 97; Statutes at Large, 2:73, 277; 3:346; Niles' Weekly Register, 12:99.
64 James, Territorial Records, 109.
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THE PUBLIC LANDS
and on February 5, 1813, congress passed an act of great im- portance to the people of that territory. By the terms of this measure, settlers who had "actually inhabited and cultivated a tract of land, lying in either of the districts established for the sale of public lands, in the Illinois territory" before the passage of the act, were granted a preemption right to not more than the quarter section on which they had located; that is, they were allowed to purchase the tract at the minimum price at any time up to within two weeks of the opening of the public sales in the district. The terms were the same as for other purchases at private sales, but the settler was relieved from any danger of
John T. Lors ...
OLD FRENCH HOUSE. IT .PRAIRIE DUROCHER. ILL
[Original owned by Chicago Historical Society]
having to bid against others for the land which he had occupied. About a year later, before any sales had been made in the Kas- kaskia district, congress passed another act, dated April 16, 1814, which enlarged and extended preemption rights in that section of the territory. The greater part of the Kaskaskia district, includ- ing what was later set off as the Edwardsville district, was designated as a reserved tract in which the numerous confirmed unlocated claims must be located. Settlers within this tract who had established themselves before February 5, 1813, the date of the original preemption law, were allowed preemption rights
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ILLINOIS IN 1818
to not less than a quarter nor more than a whole section, appli- cation to be made on or before October 1, 1814. Settlers holding confirmed unlocated claims were allowed to use them as pay- ments for the land to which they had preemption rights while other holders of such claims might locate them within the tract between October 1, 1814 and May I, 1815. It was expected, apparently, that the situation would thus be cleared up by May I, 1815, so that the public sales could take place; but another act of February 27, 1815, extended the time for preëmptions to May 1, 1816; and an act of April 27, 1816, made a further extension in certain cases to October 1, 1816. By this last act, also, holders of unlocated confirmed claims were allowed to locate them in the tract up to the same date.55
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