Early in 1796, a petition was sent from Kaskaskia to Congress. The petitioners desired that they might be permitted to locate their donation of four hundred acres per family on Long Prairie, a few miles above Kaskaskia, on the Kaskaskia River, and that the expense of surveying the land might be paid by the United States. The act granting the donation-land had provided for its location between the Kaskaskia and the Mississippi. This land the petitioners declared to be private land and some of it was of poor quality.(155) Confirmation of land claims directed to be made upon the Governor's visit in 1790 were delayed by the lack of a surveyor and the poverty of the inhabitants.(156) The petition was signed by John Edgar, William Morrison, William St. Clair, and John Demoulin(157) "for the inhabitants of the counties of St. Clair and Randolph"(158)--the Illinois counties. The petitioners ranked high in the mercantile and legal life of the Illinois settlements, but they must have been novices in the art of petitioning if they thought that a petition signed by four men from the Illinois country, with no sign of their being legally representative, would be regarded by Congress as an expression of the opinion of the Northwest Territory. The part of the petition relating to lands was granted, but the major part, which related to other subjects, was denied on the ground that the petitioners probably did not represent public sentiment.(159) During this same year Congress denied a number of petitions for the right of preëmption in the Northwest Territory, because such a right would encourage illegal settling. It was also during this year that the first sales of public land in the Northwest Territory were authorized. The land to be sold was in what is now Ohio. No tract of less than four thousand acres could be purchased.(160)
In 1800, two hundred and sixty-eight inhabitants of Illinois, chiefly French, petitioned Congress that Indian titles to land in the southern part of Illinois might be extinguished and the land offered for sale; that tracts of land at the distance of a day's journey from each other, lying between Vincennes and the Illinois settlements, might be ceded to such persons as would keep taverns, and that one or two garrisons might be stationed in Illinois. The petitioners state that the Kaskaskia tribe of Indians numbered not more than fifteen members and that their title to land could be easily extinguished; that not enough land is open to settlement to admit a population sufficient to support ordinary county establishments; that roads are much needed, and that many of the inhabitants are crossing the Mississippi with their slaves. The petition was not considered.(161)