Biography

"The origin of the Iowa Land Records Collection is a fascinating tale which dates from the period 1957 -- 1962. In these years descendants of the Sac and Fox Nation and the Iowa Nation of Indians filed various damage suits before the Indian Claims Commission of the United States Court of Claims to collect damages for several unconscionable land treaties which the federal government had forced upon them in 1839 and 1843. Congress created the Indian Claims Commission in 1946 to consider these long-standing grievances of their recalcitrant aboriginal wards. The so-called "cession lands" involved in the recent claims cases covered the entire southeastern half of the state (Royce Cessions 175, 226, 244, 262) and totaled almost 21 million acres. The legal proceedings involved two steps: validation of title and valuation of the land. The second step -- to determine the value of the land as of the treaty date -- was most important for future scholars since these hearings prompted the collection of extensive information on land sales in the treaty areas. The valuation hearings for eastern Iowa lands (Cessions 175, 226, 244) were held in Washington in 1962; those for south central Iowa (Cession 262) were in 1965." "Determining the "fair market value" of the various cession areas in Iowa prior to or on the valuation date was complicated by the lack of an active land market at the time. Federal law forbade Indians to sell their land to private American citizens. As a matter of general policy, therefore, the Indian Claims Commission recognizes subsequent land sales in the subject area as a highly relevant indicator of prospective value as of the valuation date. On this premise, legal counsel for the Indian claimants undertook a massive study of county land records in the cession areas. Some 360 land record books covering the pioneer years from 1838 through 1860 were microfilmed and reprinted by Xerox process. Skilled abstractors then codified the vital information which was transferred to punch cards and eventually to magnetic data tapes. The processing cost was extremely high, running into the tens of thousands of dollars, but the stakes were even higher for the Indian petitioners, amounting to more than twenty million dollars."   From Swierenge, Robert P. "The Iowa Land Records Collection: Periscope to the Past." Books at Iowa, Vol. 13:No.20, pp. 25-30.

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