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Grenville M. Dodge correspondence with Thomas C. Durant, Council Bluffs, Iowa, 1858
Page 02
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Lands but in order to secure these lands (as they must be secured this Fall or else they will be Preempted and lost to the Company) there must be something done = promises or Agreement, will now avail nothing. I have kept Pottawattamie & Douglass Counties nearly Eight months now from diverting our loans to a Southern Road. Which I am aware can do nothing, but which the people are not, and a continual howl at the East End of the Road against the Company. has caused distrust here without any just cause, and interested parties who were never friends of the Road take advantage of it and want an Eastern or Southern connection. With the Hannible & St Joseph or Eastern [illegible] Burlington their hobby. Both of these roads keep their agents here all the time hard at work the former, having just completed and are running 40 miles East of St Joseph, and promise here to be through from Mississippi to Missouri by April 1st. They also propose to stock & run the road from St Joseph to Council Bluffs and take our bonds to grade it here you see under what disadvantage we rest here I am aware how futil such promises are, others are not and are governed accordingly. A road being pushed East, south of us and drawing to it all our Floating and much of our Farming population has caused this excitement. It has more terror to western Iowa than double the ammount of Interest on our Bonds St Joseph under the pressure and emigration drawn mostly from this portion of Iowa & Nebraska, has nearly doubled in population and capital this year. Notwithstanding
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Lands but in order to secure these lands (as they must be secured this Fall or else they will be Preempted and lost to the Company) there must be something done = promises or Agreement, will now avail nothing. I have kept Pottawattamie & Douglass Counties nearly Eight months now from diverting our loans to a Southern Road. Which I am aware can do nothing, but which the people are not, and a continual howl at the East End of the Road against the Company. has caused distrust here without any just cause, and interested parties who were never friends of the Road take advantage of it and want an Eastern or Southern connection. With the Hannible & St Joseph or Eastern [illegible] Burlington their hobby. Both of these roads keep their agents here all the time hard at work the former, having just completed and are running 40 miles East of St Joseph, and promise here to be through from Mississippi to Missouri by April 1st. They also propose to stock & run the road from St Joseph to Council Bluffs and take our bonds to grade it here you see under what disadvantage we rest here I am aware how futil such promises are, others are not and are governed accordingly. A road being pushed East, south of us and drawing to it all our Floating and much of our Farming population has caused this excitement. It has more terror to western Iowa than double the ammount of Interest on our Bonds St Joseph under the pressure and emigration drawn mostly from this portion of Iowa & Nebraska, has nearly doubled in population and capital this year. Notwithstanding
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