Page:History of Iowa From the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the Twentieth Century Volume 3.djvu/280



On the 10th of April, 1862, Cabel B. Smith, then Secretary of the Interior, states officially.

To show the intent of Congress in passing this joint resolution it is necessary to turn to the explanations made in the report of the committee on public lands in the House of Representatives, by the chairman of that committee when he reported the resolution as follows:

In the Thirty-sixth Congress on the 2d of February, 1861, Mr. Trimble said in explanation of the purpose of the resolution:

“In 1846 Congress made a grant of land to the State of Iowa to aid in the improvement of the navigation of the Des Moines River. The Secretary of the Interior certified to the State some 400,000 acres of land above the mouth of the Raccoon Fork of that river. It has been decided by the Supreme Court of the United States that those lands were improperly certified. A subsequent grant made by Congress to the State of Iowa for railroad purposes, covers the whole of these 400,000 acres, with the exception of about 1,000 acres. These lands, therefore, do not revert to the United States in consequence of that decision but are still to be