Decline
In the latter part of the 1850s claim clubs came under pressure from the federal government, and lost public support in many communities. In an 1858 ruling, the United States Department of the Interior addressed claim clubs directly, stating that, "A member of a claim club, organized for the purpose of illegally appropriating and selling public lands, will be held to the strictest proof of honest intent, when asserting an individual claim."
The violent actions of the Omaha Claim Club may have brought about the demise of claim clubs across the country. In 1860, in in Baker v. Morton, the Supreme Court ordered that city's club to disband. Other sources say that with the arrival of several United States Land Offices across the West, the claim clubs simply were not needed.
The Omaha Claim Club, along with many claim clubs around Nebraska, disbanded by 1860.
Read more about this topic: Claim Club
Famous quotes containing the word decline:
“But only that soul can be my friend which I encounter on the line of my own march, that soul to which I do not decline, and which does not decline me, but, native of the same celestial latitude, repeats in its own all my experience.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“We have our little theory on all human and divine things. Poetry, the workings of genius itself, which, in all times, with one or another meaning, has been called Inspiration, and held to be mysterious and inscrutable, is no longer without its scientific exposition. The building of the lofty rhyme is like any other masonry or bricklaying: we have theories of its rise, height, decline and fall—which latter, it would seem, is now near, among all people.”
—Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881)
“Where mass opinion dominates the government, there is a morbid derangement of the true functions of power. The derangement brings about the enfeeblement, verging on paralysis, of the capacity to govern. This breakdown in the constitutional order is the cause of the precipitate and catastrophic decline of Western society. It may, if it cannot be arrested and reversed, bring about the fall of the West.”
—Walter Lippmann (1889–1974)