 The court order required that it be served personally on the proprietors of Porter & Company, but this proved to be difficult as they were located in Chicago.By mid-April 1871, the homesteaders made a formal complaint in Circuit Court reporting to the court that Porter & Company had failed to comply.Under the pretense of starting a rival timber company, Nathan Pierce and Theodore Heiss had purchased a strip of land in 1867 from Andrew Shanks about a mile south of the Portage Mill on the narrow sand isthmus between Portage Lake and Lake Michigan.