File:The Saturday evening post (1910) (14761541701).jpg

Identifier: saturdayeveningp1835unse (find matches)
Title: The Saturday evening post
Year: 1839 (1830s)
Authors:
Subjects:
Publisher: Philadelphia : G. Graham
Contributing Library: University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Digitizing Sponsor: University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

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ut for themselves, thebest they could without a surveyor, what they thoughtthey would like to hold as their own. But this was theprocess of auction and speculation in the public lands; and it was a fight of surveyor and squatter—ding-dong, giveand take, fight and move, clear across to the MississippiRiver—and, indeed, across that river. It was in this way that the settlements advanced west-ward until about the opening of our Civil War—say, theyear 1862. By that time the Mississippi Valley was set-tled up to about one-half of the first tier of states west ofthe Mississippi River, the Indians having been pushed outand the whites having come in about as far as midway ofIowa and Missouri. And now came an epoch in our his-tory, an event somewhat forgotten in the confusion of thewar. Reference is made to the Homestead Act. This legislation, the first of actual grasp and foresightever known in our land laws, was introduced and fatheredby the Honorable Galusha A. Grow. It was the wisest
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At the end of our Civil War a vast army, clad in bluecape overcoats, passed westward, until at length it rolled upat the base of the Rocky Mountains, by which time most ofthe blue overcoats were lost in fathers attic. Had it notbeen for that Civil War, that horrible mistake of ours,yonder army would not have been blue-clad, but it wouldhave been far more American. As it was, sons of Amer-icans and sons of immigrants, and immigrants themselves,passed west to take up lands under this Homestead Act. Inthose days a man could get one hundred and sixty acres ofland for nothing, simply by living on it and improving itfor five years. It was the intent of that act to build uphomes. Plows, babies, homes and freedom—these cousinswere kin under the intention of Galusha A. Grow. Andthat was an honest land act, one well conceived and formany years wholly beneficentin its working out. But at the base of theRocky Mountains, as we mayphrase it for the sake of easycomprehension, the Home-stead Act ra

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