222                     ANCESTRY, LIFE, AND TIMES OF
however, shows that the company put into the hands of these
legal gentlemen the altered text of the Minnesota land bill,
not stating that the bill passed by the senate was not the bill
passed by the house, and that, both before the fraud and after
it, the company was excluded, by the proviso, from any interest
in said lands. It may be true that the company was technically
organized after the bill was passed, but it was none the less
true that it was essentially constituted before that passage.
Able lawyers in Congress held that, to argue, in this case, the
distinction between the terms constituted and organized, was
an empty plea. It may be true that a territorial statute can
annul the rule of common law, and a grantor convey, or give
in fee, what he does not own. All this was irrelevant. Mr.
Sibley's position, viz., the right reserved to Congress by the
organic act, March 3,1849, establishing the territory, the right
to disapprove and disaffirm territorial legislation, was impreg-
nable and unassailable, so long as that organic act had not
been decided unconstitutional. Nor could the right of Con-
gress to protect its official record and its legislation from fraud
be denied. It remains only to add here, that February 19,
1855, the same two-thirds of the legislature of Minnesota, as
before, voted down a resolution, offered in the house, to in-
vestigate the charge "openly made in the streets, and almost
universally accredited as true," that members of the legisla-
ture had been "bribed and corrupted."1
Such was the celebrated legislature of 1855, and such were
Mr. Sibley's relations to it. Such, also, was his service to the
people of the territory. Neither the cunning, nor art, em-
ployed in Congress or in the legislature availed to evade, or
destroy, the proviso whose insertion in the Minnesota land
bill his foresight secured before it was passed.
The years 1857-1858 evoked new scenes and events in
which Mr. Sibley again appears as a presiding genius, stand-
ing firm amid storms, as before, bringing order from chaos
and light out of darkness. The time had come for Minnesota
to seek entrance into the sisterhood of states. The popula-
tion was between 150,000 and 200,000. Great quantities of
land had been settled upon; counties had multiplied; villages,
towns, and cities had sprung up; schools had been planted,
roads completed, business established, and printing presses
increased.    Immigration poured in like a spreading stream;
1 House Journal, Monday, February 19,1855.