The Rock Island Argus. (Rock Island, Ill.) 1877-1885, 1882-03-27

| is to get held Of the five million acres o.
| landssset apart by the government for com
mon schools. They look forward to con,
| trolling the state, and therefore hope te
bring about their sale at prices much be
low their value. and of which they viii
| have the best facilities for taking advan.
tage. Already they have actual possession
| of large tracts of these lands, and are cul
tivating them as il they were their own
property. In some counties considera-
BILE number of the school sections are oecu
pied by settlers, and some have been thus
occupied for years. Where they have
contained valuable timber, that has been
stripped off. .ses~ss.z.
These trespasses, according to a report
of the Governor of the territory, made last
October to the Secretary of the Interior,
are not persisted in most strongly by the
poor or the helpless, but by the rich and
the strong. THE large wheat farms, he
tells US, include hundreds of acres OF
school lands which have been cultivated
with great profit for many years. Cap
itallsts, spectators. and persons high in
official station, or those associated with
them, have persisted in similar
trespasses Already these combined inter
ests carry considerable political force.
When the time shall come for the State to
act, these interests combined with others,
and largely in the name of the poor settler,
will endanger the integrity of this vast
trust
Governor Ordway gives an account of a
raid made upon these school lands in antici-
patton of the admission of Dakota as a
State. The last Legislative Assembly Of
the Territory passed acts providing for the
establishment of five normal schools, the
buildings for which were to be erected out
of the proceeds of the sale of one hundred
selected sections of these lands, six months
after the admission of Dakota as State.
Five normal schools for that thinly peo
pied territory! And these schools were to
be in the proposed Southern Dakota only.
If the whole territory was equally provided
with such schools, their number would
need to be at east fifteen or twenty.
OF course there was a huge job here. 1t
was the first step toward getting hold of
the whole of the valuable part of the
school lands. The Governor voted all the
acts except one; but of course the job has
not been abandoned.
This is the only one of the jobs described
in the report Of the Governor. A bonded
debt of 1875, 600, bearing ten per cent.
interest, was loaded on Lawrence county
after it had been organized
only two or three years. And
nearly $500 900 of the sum event into the
pockets of the operators of this scheme,
who had bought up the floating paper at
about IS or 80 cents on the dollar, that be-
ing nearly the amount the county received
when it was issued, and to which this
fraudulent paper should have been scaled
through the action of the courts before
funding into bonds" The people of the
country, he tells US, have nothing to show
for this enormous debt, except log jail
and the vacancy created by the sudden de-
parture of these whom. they had elected to |
egislate for and protect the interests of
Lawrence county" A job for the erection |
Of expensive county buildings in Pembina |
county was also pushed through the As |
sembly, and the business of bonding coun |
lies, school districts, and cities has been |
carried on with free hand i
Suspicious of jobbery, as well as very
obvious schemes which are purely politi- /
al, must deter all honest Congressman |
rom lending their aid to the project for |
making state out of Dakota at this time /
N 7. Sun.