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The Squatters and the Law. — Zachary Taylor, in command of United States troops at Prairie du Chien, sent Jefferson Davis, at this time a young army officer, with a detachment of troops to drive the Dubuque miners and other settlers back to the east side of the river; for Congress had as early as 1785 and again in 1807 declared that no settlements should be made on any part of the public domain until the Indian title thereto had been extinguished and the land surveyed. And again in 1833 the act of 1807 was revived with special reference to the Iowa country. But as Professor Benjamin F. Shambaugh aptly says in his History of the Constitutions of Iowa, ". . . the pioneers on their way to the trans-Mississippi prairies did not pause to read the United States Statutes at Large. They outran the public surveyors. They ignored the act of 1807. And it is doubtful if they ever heard of the act of March 2, 1833. Some were bold enough to cross the Mississippi and put in crops even before the Indian title had expired; some squatted on unsurveyed lands; and others, late comers, settled on surveyed territory."

The Character of the Squatters. — When the Congressional survey was first begun in Iowa in 1836, there were