Page:History of Iowa From the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the Twentieth Century Volume 4.djvu/26

 States were coming into the Union, created from the wild lands of the Louisiana Purchase.

The first settlers in the Black Hawk Purchase were largely from the immediate valley of the Ohio River and Missouri. Many came to a land dedicated by the Missouri Compromise to freedom from slavery, because of its dedication to freedom. They preferred homes where labor was honorable and bore no badge of abject servitude to a class exempt from toil.

While many of them retained prejudices imbibed from environment in early life, which found expression in legislative acts in pioneer years, as the immigration from New England, New York, northern Ohio and Michigan increased, the policy of local government and free schools gradually became engrafted upon the statute books. Race prejudice was slowly overcome, liberal support was given to education by public funds, a sound banking system devised and the restrictions to corporations so modified as to encourage works of internal improvement. The pioneers found a vast domain of wild prairie and woodland, fertile soil, navigable rivers, abundant water power and a genial climate. The foundation was here for a great and prosperous State. It devolved upon them to develop its boundless resources, frame a Constitution and a system of laws.

How well and wisely the people of the Nineteenth Century who occupied Iowa, accomplished this mission, has been partially recorded in the preceding volumes of this history. The generations to come will want to know more of the lives of the leaders in the work of founding the State which, in the opening years of the Twentieth Century, has attained a position among the members of the Union which by general consent is regarded as creditable to its architects. While it would be impracticable to give even a brief sketch of the thousands who have contributed to the founding and development of Iowa in the various