Page:History of Iowa From the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the Twentieth Century Volume 3.djvu/288

 of land upon an odd numbered section within the five mile limit of the Des Moines River above the Raccoon Fork.

On the 17th of June the officers of the Des Moines Navigation Company brought suit in the United States District Court to enjoin the officers of the Des Moines Land Office from carrying out the orders of the Secretary of the Interior in the case of Herbert Battin and others. The Secretary immediately instructed the Des Moines officers to employ counsel at the expense of the United States to defend the action of the Department.

On the 28th of August, 1868, the Commissioner of the Land Office, under instruction of the Secretary of the Interior, instructed the Land Office at Des Moines to receive and file all declaratory statements from actual settlers in all cases falling under the ruling made in the Battin case regardless of the injunction. The officers of the Fort Dodge Land Office were instructed to admit preëmption and homestead applications upon this class of lands.

In July, 1855, a man by the name of Riley made a claim and settled with his family on the northwest quarter of section thirty-three, in township eighty-nine, range twenty-eight, near Fort Dodge, in the county of Webster. He built a house and improved the land. In 1857 he died and his wife, Hannah Riley, with her children, continued to live on the farm. In July, 1860, after the public lands had been surveyed in that part of the State and a Government Land Office had been established at Fort Dodge, Mrs. Riley filed a preëmption claim to it and in 1862 located a land warrant upon it at the Fort Dodge Land Office. On the 15th of October, 1863, she received a patent for it signed and executed by Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States. This is the highest and best title that the Government can give to a citizen who purchases a tract of public land.

At a time when the Des Moines Navigation Company claimed the odd numbered sections north of the Raccoon Fork and within five miles of the Des Moines River, a