and record entries in secret, and have the land surveyed in secret, if
they feared a dispute over a title; no one save the particular deputy
surveyor employed needed to know. [Footnote: Draper MSS. in Wisconsin
State Hist. Ass. Clark papers. Walter Darrell to Col. William Fleming,
St. Asaphs, April 14, 1783. These valuable Draper MSS, have been opened
to me by Mr. Reuben Gold Thwaites, the State Librarian; I take this
opportunity of thanking him for his generous courtesy, to which I am so
greatly indebted.] The litigation over these confused titles dragged on
with interminable tediousness. Titles were often several deep on one
"location," as it was called; and whoever purchased land too often
purchased also an expensive and uncertain lawsuit.

The two chief topics of thought and conversation, the two subjects which
beyond all others engrossed and absorbed the minds of the settlers, were
the land and the Indians. We have already seen how on one occasion Clark
could raise no men for an expedition against the Indians until he closed
the land offices round which the settlers were thronging. Every hunter
kept a sharp lookout for some fertile bottom on which to build a cabin.
The volunteers who rode against the Indian towns also spied out the land
and chose the best spots whereon to build their blockhouses and
palisaded villages as soon as a truce might be made, or the foe driven
for the moment farther from the border. Sometimes settlers squatted on
land already held but not occupied under a good title; sometimes a man
who claimed the land under a defective title, or under pretence of
original occupation, attempted to oust or to blackmail him who had
cleared and tilled the soil in good faith; and these were both fruitful
causes not only of lawsuits but of bloody affrays. Among themselves, the
settlers' talk ran ever on land titles and land litigation, and schemes
for securing vast tracts of rich and well watered country. These were
the subjects with which they filled their letters to one another and to