This particular land owner, Mary Hooker (CBQ 753.8, #3286), rented the land from Benjamin Millage and was unable to pay her land debt. Most of the delinquent contracts I read contain a standard tale of agricultural woe: owner makes improvements on their land, builds a house, and is met with a bad harvest, a plague of grasshoppers, dozens of dead livestock, or sickness in the family. Owner then pleads with CB&Q to extend his or her contract, based on a better outlook for the next harvest, a debt that will soon be repaid to the owner, or whatever money they can front at that time, if not all of it.

This is not the case with Mary Hooker. Unlike most female land owners, the examiner on Hooker’s case refers to her as “she” instead of “he,” deferring to a male member of the family rather than the woman who owns the property. The examiner notes that “she wants to keep [the land] and has $50 due her in the spring which she will pay.” The examiner goes on to explain that John M. Landon, son of Hooker, wants and has the means to pay for the land, but she refuses him.

I was surprised, perhaps naively, that the examiner recommended stepping in on this family squabble instead of following more common CB&Q procedure. He refers to Hooker (age 50) as “an old lady” with “no prospect of anything better” and recommends that CB&Q seize the land and sell to Landon.

The more personal tone of this examination, and the derogatory nature of the examiner’s assessment of Hooker, given the circumstances, caught my attention. The extenuating circumstances of the female land owners in Iowa seems especially noticeable here.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Pony_Express_Map_William_Henry_Jackson.jpg, retrieved Apr. 20, 2-13

Map of the Pony Express Route, by William Henry Jackson, 1861.       Source:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Pony_Express_Map_William_Henry_Jackson.jpg

Since 1860 and the inception of the Pony Express to facilitate speedy mail delivery from St. Joseph, Missouri to Sacramento, CA, the U.S. railroads and post office worked on increasing the speed and efficiency of the system.  The Hannibal & St. Joseph Railroad set the speed record in that year when the new line traveled across Missouri from Hannibal to St. Joseph (206 miles) in just over four hours.  This convinced the U.S. postal system that mail delivery by train clearly beat out the old way of mail delivery by steamboat.  Soon after, the railroads ordered special mail cars for transport, and in 1862 the Hannibal & St. Joseph inaugurated the first railway postoffice car that was designed to facilitate pre-sorting of mail in transit, so that it was ready to go by the time it reached its destination in St. Joseph.

Advertisement for the Burlington Route, 1926

From the correspondence of CB&Q’s initial investors to the complaints of early laborers, from the cost-cutting measures of CB&Q president C.E. Perkins to the institution of an employee benefits system, from the heady days of westward expansion to the Burlington Northern merger, it’s all here. We look forward to making these research-rich records available at the Newberry in the very near future…stay tuned!

Hendricks . . . told Berlin that the payments were all paid up and that he would not have to pay anything until next fall. Berlin and his wife being unable to read did not know the difference.

In 1879 correspondence under Hendricks’ initials, he ends up forfeiting the contract, which he blames on the delinquency of his tenants, the Berlins. He leaves out the narrative presented by the land examiner the year before and instead discusses death, sickness, and crop failure, begging the mercy of B&MR RR. Decatur’s own lack of mercy and goodwill came back to hurt him in the end.

My curiosity was piqued by the illiteracy factor of the unknown for settlers in Iowa. According to the National Assessment of Adult Literacy, 20% of adults were illiterate in 1870. Although this is the first instance in my processing where illiteracy allowed agents to take advantage of settlers, I move forward in my work with the knowledge that illiteracy, in addition to unfortunate economic, ecological, and social issues, may have made settlers prey for land agents trying to unload blighted and indebted properties.

Each of the surveys from land agents includes a question about the delinquent’s standing in the community. I had been waiting for a response that was not a simple “good” for days as I waded through these surveys, and Catherine’s was the first. The words “Mean Irishman” are used to describe “her” standing in the community. The words appear to refer to Conway’s charming husband. The agent goes on to describe his interaction with Mr. Conway:

This man bought this in his wife’s name and when I went to see them he commenced cussing the company for making him pay too much for the land, and got on his car and would not say anything about his crops or pay. Think they will pay.

The optimistic land agent, J.H. Brown, may have responded not to Catherine’s husband with his final statement, but instead to Catherine herself, who appears to have written all of the correspondence to B&MR Railroad and had a firm handle on her farm’s finances, not to mention a more respectful and apologetic tone. Although it may be true, as Brown says, that the land was simply in Catherine’s name, it appears that she may have saved her grant from being canceled by virtue of handling her husband’s affairs with grace. Mean Irishman, perhaps, but not mean Irishwoman.

In addition to the text, the examiners also included drawings for each 40 acre tract illustrating the land’s characteristics as well as any man-made boundaries and structures. Page 21 to the left features a wet marsh bordered by a “sand ridge 10 feet high” and a “meadow, rising to the foot of bluffs partially overflowed in the flood seasons.” While the examiners’ books are all fascinating in their attention to detail, the  precise, almost pretty drawings in examiner J.W. Ames’ books stand out. Ames’ careful, painstaking style and graceful markings lend an artistic quality to these  rather utilitarian books. Ames’ talent for sketching is also expressed in several of the inside covers of his reports, where he left multiple doodles of ships. Though his job may have somewhat fulfilled an inclination to wanderlust, after seeing these ship sketches, it’s easy to imagine that J.W. Ames might have had  greater aspirations than working as a land examiner for the B&MRR.

There is no official deed with the papers, but other documentation suggests that Lucinda Wilson bought at least a portion of the tract from another settler who acquired it through preemption: the process by which a settler could purchase public domain lands at a federally mandated minimum price, to be paid over twelve months, on promise of improving the land. By the early 1860s, however, the Homestead Act had rendered preemption obsolete, and large swaths of the midwest and west had been granted to the railroads by the federal government.

Alone on the land, Lucinda Wilson’s reluctance to pay the B&MRR, and her belief that that company could be a “humbug,” or hoax, is understandable, given the multiple changes to land acquisition procedures and the behavior of land speculators. She eventually reconsiders, though, writing, “…I hope you will not take advantage of our neglect under the circumstances, if you will give us a deed for the land the money is ready at any time…this is our home..”

A quick internet search for Mingers turned up obituaries for both him and his wife Hindertje, themselves emigrants from Germany in 1857. Interestingly, Hindertje’s obituary is more informative, revealing that the couple married in the North German town of Aurich in 1855, and came to the United States two years later. After some time in Chicago the couple moved to Minonk in 1864, where they operated a grocery and dry goods store until retiring in 1871. No mention is made in of J.U. Mingers’ other work in Minonk, though he was said to be “honored with a number of local political offices” after his retirement. Obviously not an idle retiree, Mingers evidently kept very busy helping his fellow Germans transition into new lives in the United States.

Record Group 71 (Private Land Companies), 1873

The “Russell Trust” was a company established by John M. Forbes and Nathaniel Thayer in 1872 to buy and sell land in Iowa, specifically along the Burlington & Missouri River Railroad. The company placed the legal title of the land in the name of H. S. Russell, Forbes’ son-in-law. The actual business of buying and selling would be done by one Charles E. Perkins.

The major financial players of CB&Q had set up several of these land companies in Iowa and Nebraska whose primary purpose was to promote settlement around their railroads. In 1873 Perkins was an official of the B&M, not yet on board with CB&Q as he would be only a few years later. But he was the point person, along with Colonel H. B. Scott for most of the land companies formed by the CB&Q.

In the papers of Record group 71, Private Land Companies, correspondence reflects the excitement and urgency of these growing settlements. Towns were being surveyed, mapped, and named, and immigrants, sold on the promise of good farmland, were lured to purchase land on time from companies such as the Russell Trust. Things did not always work out. Many letters of woe were sent to Perkins from settlers unable to make payments on their land, because of sickness, or bad weather, or plain bad luck.

The town of Creston is in southwestern Iowa. It began in 1868 as a survey camp for workers on the B&M, and was incorporated as a town in 1871. This list of books purchased for the Creston library was included in the correspondence of the H. S. Russell Trust. It is a fascinating peek into the reading habits of rural Iowans in 1873, books about the United States’ recent past, biographies of great Americans, a book promoting temperance. The Creston library was built by the Burlington railroad in 1873, at the corner of Union and Maple. Letters in the collection show not only this list of books, but the bargaining that took place for the land  on which to build the library. The building, now known as the Gibson Memorial Library, is still standing and is a functional library to this day.

Expanding west into Nebraska, in 1873 the B&MRR decided to have trees planted on the vast, barren prairie land where they built their tracks. Trees would be helpful for multiple  reasons: they would provide a wind break, and would also prevent snow from drifting onto tracks and slowing down the trains. Also, trees would provide a consistent supply of lumber for railroad ties, a persistent need. The company hired E.F. Stephens in 1872 to experiment with an assortment of trees, planting them on the prairie and evaluating their hardiness, cost, suitability for lumber, and whether or not they could be grown from cuttings, among other factors. In his lengthy report to Perkins, Stephens details his findings regarding several tree varieties, including the Box Elder (“succeeds very well and makes a good and quick windbreak but is not long lived”); Ash (“we only planted a small quantity because it was too dear in price…our success with it was almost perfect”); and Sugar Maple (“an entire failure, because the trees were frozen on the way last November..looked well in the spring and leaved out but afterwards failed”).

This fascinating report, excerpted below, provides an unusual angle into the CB&Q’s business practices and problem-solving capacity, and also illustrates the impact of the railroad on the land it used.