verance scarcely less exhaustible than the soil they cultivated!

In the location of a home the pioneer was usually discriminating. His
was not a chance "squatting" here or there on the prairie or among the
trees. The necessities--water and fuel--led him as a rule to settle near
a stream or river, and never far from timber. The pioneers settled in
groups. One, two, three, or more families constituted the original
nucleus of such groups. The groups were known as "communities" or
"neighborhoods." They were the original social and political units out
of the integration of which the Commonwealth was later formed.

But the vital facts touching the pioneers of Iowa are not of migration
and settlement. In political and constitutional evolution the
emphasis rests rather upon the facts of character. What the pioneers
were is vastly more important than where they came from, or when and
where and how they settled; for all law and government rests upon the
character of the people, Constitutions being simply the formulated
expressions of political Ethics. It is in this broad catholic sense that
the ideals of pioneer character became the determining factors in Iowa's
political evolution and the pioneers themselves the real makers of our
fundamental law.

Two opinions have been expressed respecting the early settlers of Iowa.
Calhoun stated on the floor of Congress that he had been informed that
"the Iowa country had been seized upon by a lawless body of armed men."
Clay had received information of the same nature. And about the
same time Senator Ewing (from Ohio) declared that he would not object to
giving each rascal who crossed the Mississippi one thousand dollars in
order to get rid of him.

Nor was the view expressed by these statesmen uncommon in that day. It
was entertained by a very considerable number of men throughout the East
and South, who looked upon the pioneers in general as renegades and
vagabonds forming a "lawless rabble" on the outskirts of civilization.
To them the first settlers were "lawless intruders" on the public
domain, "land robbers," "fugitives from justice," and "idle and
profligate characters." Squatters, they held, were those "who had gone
beyond the settlement and were wholly reckless of the laws either
of God or man." Nay more, they were "non-consumers of the country,
performing no duties either civil or military." In short, gentlemen who
had never even visited the Iowa frontier talked glibly about