Pg 325

          “As the country began to develop and the demand for cabins began to be active, land sharks of various descriptions began to harass the people with their schemes of exorbitant rapacity and extortionate speculations. Early in the county’s history, a ring of mercenary characters, anticipating immigration, claimed all the untaken groves and wooded tracts in the county, and when an actual settler—one who wanted land for a home and immediate occupancy and settled on a portion of the land rings’ domain, he was immediately set upon by the bloodhounds, and it was demanded of him that he either abandon the claim or pay them for what they maintained was their right. If the settler expressed doubts of their having previously claimed their site, the ‘ring’ always had one or more witnesses at hand to testify to the validity of the interest they asserted. The result was nearly always the same. The settlers, more to avoid difficulty than from any other reason, would purchase their pretended right for forty, fifty or one hundred dollars, more or less, according to value, after which the ring was ready for operation is some other locality.

          “When one of the number had collected fees for original possession over a considerable area, and come to be known and suspected, he would change fields of operation with a confederate at some distance, and thus guard against arousing public indignation and resentment. These outrageous impositions upon the settlers who came to find homes at last became unbearable, and the pioneers resolved they would tolerate them no longer, and mutual protection leagues were formed which effectually resisted the plans and practices of these sharks and bogus land claimants. They were enemies to the settlers and to public economy and hindered and crippled the growth and development of the country.”

         Greedy, conscienceless, unscrupulous speculators and capitalists formed another combination that was only one degree removed from the bogus claims thieves and claim jumpers, that plundered and terrorized over the honest, industrious settlers. Only that they possessed money and more the garb of respectability were they different from the other class. In fact, they were the worst and most to be feared and dreaded, just as the modern savings bank manager, who, under cover of respectability and the authority and protection of law, . . .

Pg 326

. . . robs and plunders men, women and children—helpless widows and orphans—without remorse or compunctions of conscience is more to be feared, dreaded and despised than the highwayman, who, without any claims to respectability and outside of all law commands one to “stand and deliver.”

         At the general land sales at Dubuque, in the Spring of 1840, speculators, although present in force, were awed into silence, subjection and non-interference by the presence, in large numbers of pioneer citizens, with their rifles and revolvers, and had any of the speculators presumed to bid against an actual claim occupant he would have paid the penalty with his life. The men who pioneered the way to the timbered sections and prairie slopes of Cedar County possessed courage and resolution, and, coming here to secure and found homes, they were ready to defend them at the peril of their lives. In defending their homes and driving from their midst the ring of claim thieves and defeating the purposes of the ring of capitalists who attended the Dubuque land sales, the pioneers proved themselves iconoclasts with whom it were madness to trifle. They broke the “rings,” secured their homes and their industry has made the forest and prairie wilderness blossom with the rose.