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All this happened a hundred years ago; and to-day that old Louisiana territory is, in natural resources, the wealthiest part of the whole United States. Without that territory in our possession we should have no Colorado and no Wyoming, no Dakotas, or Nebraska, or Minnesota, or Montana, or Missouri, or Iowa, or Kansas, or Arkansas, or Louisiana, or Oklahoma, or Indian Territory.

The land grants, especially in the West, were so enormous that Parsons compares them as follows: Those in Minnesota would make two States the size of Massachusetts; in Kansas they were equal to two States the size of Connecticut and New Jersey; in Iowa the extent of the railroad grants was larger than Connecticut and Rhode Island, and the grants in Michigan and Wisconsin nearly as large; in Montana the grant to one railroad alone would equal the whole of Maryland, New Jersey and Massachusetts.

The act of Congress of June 12, 1838, provided for the division of an existing Territory and the continuation of Territorial government in the western part thereof under the name Iowa. When, however, all this is conceded, the propriety of referring to the Organic Act of a Territory as a Constitution is questioned.

If we first settlers in Iowa had possessed the sense the Lord gives to most, we could have built better and warmer, and prettier houses than the ones we put up, of the prairie sod which we ripped up in long black ribbons of earth; but we all were from lands of forests, and it took a generation to teach our prairie pioneers that a sod house is a good house.

He could not have secured a delegate against me from Iowa, Nebraska, or Kansas. In Colorado and California he could have made a fight, but even there I think he would have been completely beaten. However, long before the time for the Convention came around, it was recognized that it was hopeless to make any opposition to my nomination. The effort was abandoned, and I was nominated unanimously.

From what he has said I gathered that until that evening he had hardly noticed the woman. I suppose that of all the men in the house he had been the most indifferent to her. In the room something happened. The landlady followed the woman when she ran to LeRoy, and the two women confronted him. The woman from Iowa knelt trembling and frightened at his feet. The landlady was indignant.

They realized that the proposition to remove the seat of the Territorial government from Burlington to some point east of the Mississippi was likely to rob them of much political influence and some distinction. They felt that a Territorial government located somewhere "in the vicinity of the Four Lakes" could not successfully administer constitutional government in the Iowa District.

You could take a map of Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, North and South Dakota, Iowa, Illinois, Missouri, Nebraska and Oklahoma, place them all on the map of Peru and have territory left. The country runs largely north and south, having some fourteen hundred miles of sea coast.

To have attempted to force upon the people the payment of the debts their leaders had fixed upon them would have caused wholesale migrations to Wisconsin, Iowa, and Texas. The people of the West, of the country as a whole, perhaps, were still in the position of frontiersmen as compared to Europeans.

The Chicago and Northwestern being the first to reach there, and its first train ran into Council Bluffs on Sunday, January 17th, 1867. Consequently all supplies, other than those coming to them via the Missouri River, had to be wagoned from Des Moines, Iowa, one hundred and thirty-three miles.