Pioneers and profits: land speculation on the Iowa frontier

From dust jacket notes: "Iowa was opened for pioneer settlement in 1833 when a 50-mile strip west of the Mississippi River was made available. Within 20 years the prairies and woodlands of this heartland state contained 200,000 people. Pioneers and Profits is the interesting story of this settlement looking from the viewpoint of frontier land speculations and practices in the mid-nineteenth century. Land records of the county recorder's offices, state land office, and of the National Archives in Washington, D.C., the contents of business letters of land speculators' offices, as well as private collections of memorabilia have been studied and their information correlated into the first major study of the economics of land speculation in Iowa, scene of the greatest land boom in the history of the United States. Our knowledge of the general problem of frontier land speculation is far from complete. Pioneer and Profits is a definitive study that fills the information gap on the subject in Iowa."