It is a fact worthy of note that the years that witnessed the beginnings in Ohio, Indiana, North Carolina and Illinois of this curious method of assailing the slave power, precede but slightly those that witnessed the formulation of three several bills in Congress designed to strengthen the first Fugitive Slave Law. The three measures were drafted during the interval from 1818 to 1822. The abolitionist enterprises of the more western states, Iowa and Kansas, came too late to be in any way connected with the proposal of these bills. The settlement of these territories was, of course, considerably behind that of Ohio, Indiana and Illinois, but the nearness of the new regions to a slaveholding section insured the opportunity for Underground Railroad work as soon as settlement should begin. Professor L. F. Parker, of Tabor College, Iowa, has sketched briefly the successive steps in the opening of his state to occupancy. "The Black-Hawk Purchase opened the eastern edge of Iowa to the depth of 40 or 50 miles to the whites in 1833. The strip ... west of that which included what is now Grinnell was not opened to white occupancy till 1843, and it was ten years later before the white residents in this county numbered 500. Grinnell was settled in 1854, when central and western Iowa was merely dotted by a few hamlets of white men, and seamed by winding paths along prairie ridges and through bridgeless streams."[105] One of the early settlers in southeastern Iowa was J. H. B. Armstrong, who had been familiar with the midnight appeals of escaping slaves in Fayette County, Ohio. Mr. Armstrong removed to the West in 1839, and settled in Lee County, Iowa. His proximity to the northeastern boundary of Missouri seems to have involved him in Underground Railroad work from the start, on the route running to Salem and Denmark. When in 1852 Mr. Armstrong moved to Appanoose County, and located within four miles of the Missouri line, among a number of abolitionists, he found himself even more concerned with secret projects to help slaves to Canada. The lines of travel of fugitive slaves that extended east throughout the entire length of Iowa were more or less associated with Kansas men and Kansas movements, and their development is, therefore, to be assigned to the time of the outbreak of the struggle over Kansas (1854). Residents of Tabor in southwestern Iowa, and of Grinnell in central Iowa, agree in designating 1854 as the year in which their Underground Railroad labors began. The Rev. John Todd, one of the founders of the college colony of Tabor, is authority for the statement that the first fugitives arrived in the summer of 1854.[106] Professor Parker states that Grinnell was a stopping-place for the hunted slave from the time of its founding in 1854. [105] Letter from Professor L. F. Parker, Grinnell, Iowa, Aug. 30, 1894.