Page:History of Iowa From the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the Twentieth Century Volume 1.djvu/270



of the Territory. Later in the session an act was passed denning the boundaries of the counties of Lee, Van Buren, Des Moines, Henry, Louisa, Muscatine and Slaughter and locating their county-seats. All of these counties had been established at the first session of the Legislature, excepting Slaughter, but as the government survey of the public lands had not been completed at the time, the act designated the boundaries to correspond with the recent survey. A resolution was passed at this session providing for an investigation of the Miners’ Bank of Dubuque, the report to be made at an extra session to be held in June following. At the extra session held at Burlington, beginning June 11, 1838, an act was passed providing that all territory lying west of Van Buren County and east of the Missouri River, not embraced in any other county, should be attached to Van Buren.

In the fall of 1837 the United States negotiated another treaty with the Sac, Fox and Sioux Indians by which 1,250,000 acres of land lying west of, adjoining the Black Hawk Purchase of 1832, was ceded to the Government and opened to settlement. This tract consisted of a strip of land about twenty-five miles in width, lying immediately west of the Black Hawk Purchase. The Sacs and Foxes also ceded to the United States all of their interest in the country south of the boundary line established between them and the Sioux, August 19, 1825, and between the Mississippi and Missouri rivers. This was rather an indefinite claim to lands on the Missouri slope. The lands opened to settlement west of the Mississippi were now attracting a large immigration and the people of that portion of Wisconsin Territory were working earnestly for a division and establishment of a new Territory on the west side of the river.