Although the treaty of 1842 opened the lands in 1845 they were not surveyed until 1847 and title could not be obtained until late in 1848. Meantime claims in large numbers had been entered. In 1848 speculators and "landsharks" came in and roamed about regarding the settlers' claims with envious and designing eyes. Fear of them was a leading motive in the formation of the Claim Club of 1848. Strangers were closely watched. Any suspicious action led to the suspect being warned that discretion was the better part of valor. There were some disturbances but none were serious. The most notable arose within the club itself. One Perkins jumped his neighbor Flemmings's claim. The latter appealed to his club members. A "war" ensued in which Perkins narrowly escaped hanging. When the sale took place at Iowa City, 125 miles east of Des Moines, the club's agent bid in at $1.25 all of the claims and soon thereafter the club ceased to play any part in the life of the community.

The first local government to which the inhabitants of Des Moines were subject was the county government of Polk County provided for by the Territorial Legislature in January, 1846. The town government was not organized until 1851. By this time Fort Des Moines had become a thriving place. It was an important way station on one of the main stage routes to the West. In 1852, the establishment of a Government land office brought to the town for the entry of lands the multitudes of speculators and settlers then rushing into Western Iowa. In the days of the gold fever and during the border wars in Kansas and Nebraska her ferries and hostelries did a bustling trade.

In those early days life was free, easy, simple, and buoyant. The population of Fort Des Moines was made up of people from both Southern and Northern States. They lived in log huts or simple frame buildings. Pork and "corn-dodgers," coffee, sometimes made of parched corn, and tea, often made from native plants, constituted in the main their diet. They had to go many miles to get their flour ground. Oxen were generally used in drawing wagons and ploughs. Stage coaches were the common carriers until the railroads entered the city in 1866. Prior to 1858 the State constitution prohibited the establishment of banks of note issue and the money of the citizens was chiefly "wildcat" and "red dog" currency. In 1857-58 the City Council so far trenched on the powers of Congress as to issue "City Scrip," with the twofold object of paying the city's debt and affording the citizens a circulating medium. As the scrip did not become popular, in a short time the city called in its paper and redeemed it. Like most frontier towns a certain reckless disregard of the sober customs of the Eastern cities characterized the social life. Sunday was a sort of gala day, when horse and foot races between whites and Indians, accompanied by more or less gambling and carousal, were not infrequent. But the garish and reckless life soon gave place to the staid habits of well-ordered communities, and since the Civil War Des Moines has justly sustained the reputation of a "conservative" Western city.

[IOWA SOLDIERS AND SAILORS MONUMENT.]

The navigation of the Des Moines River was a great factor in the first years of the city's growth. Steamboats came up the river from Keokuk in the spring and summer months and brought most of the city's supplies. The people living along its course soon perceived that the river could be made a great waterway for commerce. Those were the days of "internal improvements." Congress was induced in 1846 to give to the new State every alternate section of unsold land in a strip five miles wide on either bank of the river to be used for the improvement of the channel. A River Improvement Company was formed. River traffic increased rapidly and the people went wild over the project. As usual the matter soon drifted into politics and decided the fate of political parties. Demagogism ran riot. A story is told of two candidates for Congress in 1850, campaigning together, who rushed across a field to greet a farmer. The first one to reach him, extending his hand, cried:

"Hurrah for river improvement!"

The farmer so eagerly sought proved to be a scarecrow.

The net result of all the excitement and speculation attending the various efforts to improve the river was failure and collapse. The State after expending immense sums abandoned the task in 1862. Worse still, complications arose over the extent of the grant from the Government, and left the people above the city a sorry heritage of costly litigation that continued till 1892 over the titles to their homes. The entire experiment was an instructive illustration of the futility of most of the attempts at "internal improvements" fostered by congressional land grants.

In the summer of 1894 the river achieved notoriety in connection with the epidemic of "Commonweal Armies" that disturbed the public that year. One division, mobilized at San Francisco under a "General" Kelley, when it reached Council Bluffs was refused transportation by the Iowa railroads. The horde then marched overland, levying on communities for provisions, reaching Des Moines Sunday evening, April 29th. The citizens, in much trepidation, lodged the tramps in an abandoned stove factory. The people were frantic to pass them along, for their sojourn threatened plague, pilfering, and multitudinous evils. But the tramps refused to walk farther. The citizens were in despair. Finally some genius suggested that the army be floated down the river. The "General" agreed to evacuate the stove works when the fleet of flatboats was ready to launch. On May 9th, amid general rejoicing, Kelley and his army floated away. The voyageurs reached the Mississippi only to suffer ignominious discomfiture.

In ante-bellum days the subject of slavery made life and politics keenly interesting in Des Moines. Many stanch Southerners and not a few abolitionists generated an electrical atmosphere. The first resident Governor, James W. Grimes, who later brought Iowa fame in the United States Senate, spoke out strongly against the arrogance of the slaveholders and the border outrages. The city was on John Brown's "underground railway," and the spiriting of slaves through the town gave zest to public discussion. When Brown came through with the slaves he had captured in Missouri he stopped over night, February 16, 1859, with James C. Jordan, a State senator. The next day his ferriage was paid by the editor of the State Register, John Teesdale. One of Brown's most trusted companions, who died by his side when Lieutenant Robert E. Lee recaptured Harper's Ferry, was a Des Moines boy, Jeremiah G. Anderson, who had joined Brown's forces in Kansas in 1857.