Samuel Gwin dating history

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...what transpired at Chocchuma prompted a fraud investigation by the Senate Committee for Public Lands, and even though that investigation concluded no laws had been broken, the activities of the Chocchuma Land Company clearly circumvented the spirit behind the auctions. For one thing, company investors effectively hijacked for their own gain sales whose benefits were supposed to accrue to the federal government, and by extension to the American people. Every transaction in which prices remained artificially low because the company short-circuited the bidding process represented the loss of money that should have entered the national coffers. Furthermore, it all happened with the knowledge if not the complicity of the land office register at Chocchuma, Samuel Gwin. Every evening at a tavern just yards from Gwin's office the Chocchuma Land Company held private sales of the land its agents had purchased during the day. Gwin could not have failed to grasp what was happening, and among the questions that dominated the Senate investigation was whether Gwin lined his own pockets by colluding with company agents...The company represented its actions as benefiting the majority of the settlers and facilitating the efficient and democratic sale of public lands. In reality, those who belonged to the company got almost exactly what they wanted while hundreds of settlers got an "arrangement" that was, in the words of one of their representatives, "the best that we could form".