gressmen upon their constituents; millions more were poured out among the districts to improve the navigation of rivers that were only navigable at flood time and to annually dredge harbors of shifting sand, while the pioneers whom the courts had dispossessed of their homes, plead in vain for justice and common honesty at its hands.
In the meantime the United States marshals were driving the settlers from their farms and imprisoning them for resisting the evictions. Some became insane over the loss of their homes, some were reduced to abject poverty in their old age and became finally inmates of the poorhouses, others wandered off to the distant Territories with their families in emigrant wagons, to find cheap lands and again endure the privations of the pioneer which they had years before, in youthful days encountered in Iowa. Many purchased the title of the Navigation Company and its grantees and encumbered their homes with heavy mortgages which absorbed their hard earnings for the remainder of their lives. During all of these long years of fruitless struggle and suffering many of the settlers still had a hope that the decision of the Supreme Court might be reversed; and in order to give them an opportunity of again placing their claim before the courts. Senator James F. Wilson, in 1888, secured the passage of a bill through Congress requiring the United States Attorney-General to begin proceedings in the courts, to cancel the claim or title of the old Des Moines Navigation Company to the lands conveyed by the Government to the actual settlers. This bill passed both branches of Congress but was vetoed by President Cleveland, for which he gave the following reason:
“I am not unmindful of the fact that there may be persons who have suffered loss through a reliance upon the erroneous decisions of Government officials as to the extent of the original grant from the United States to the Territory of Iowa. I believe cases of this kind should be treated in accordance with the broadest sentiments of equity and that
