Papers Of Abraham Lincoln

1
Resolved, That the committee on Finance be instructed to enquire into the expediency of so amending the estray laws, as to require the surplus, after paying all reasonable expenses, to be paid into the county treasury.2

1Richard G. Perry introduced the resolution in the House of Representatives on December 24, 1840, and the House adopted it. The Committee on Finance, which included Abraham Lincoln, took no action.
Illinois House Journal. 1840. 12th G. A., 155.

2An estray is any domestic animal found wandering, whose ownership is unknown; the term also applies to water craft found adrift. Settlers only slowly brought the Illinois prairies stretching through the central third of the state under cultivation, and the sparse timber made the erection of extensive wooden fences impractical. Farmers commonly turned livestock loose to graze freely on the prairies in mild weather, thus requiring rules for how and when loose animals could be claimed and by whom. Open-range methods of livestock raising were common into the 1850s and in some areas continued into the 1870s, when the advent of inexpensive, durable barbed wire made possible the fencing of large tracts of grazing land.
Henry Campbell Black, ed., Black’s Law Dictionary, 6th ed., (St. Paul, MN: West Publishing, 1990), 552; Paul C. Henlein, Cattle Kingdom in the Ohio Valley, 1783-1860 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1959), 19, 62-64; Allan G. Bogue, From Prairie to Corn Belt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 73-79, 140.