Homesteaders

8 Key excerpts on "Homesteaders"

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  The Citizen's Share

  Putting Ownership Back into Democracy

  • Joseph R. Blasi, Richard B. Freeman, Douglas L. Kruse(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Yale University Press

    (Publisher)

  By the 1880s, both political parties supported the homestead idea that the lands should go to citizen settlers and not corporations. 48 The original Homestead Act eventually allowed some six hundred thousand Americans to get a property stake in society. Between 1860 and 1900 it created 4 million farms. It did not live up to its promise quickly because the government’s administra-tive apparatus was not widespread or efficient enough to man-age the program, because of fraud and favoritism. After the Civil War the government passed many additional homestead acts to allow for the different land needs associated with different types of farming. The Homestead Act continued until it was finally re-pealed in 1976. Similar legislation continued in the state of Alaska until 1986. The distribution of public lands through homestead-ing helped build many western states that today value rugged in-dividualism and small government. These laws represented a major implementation of the Found-ers’ policy of broad-based ownership. Between 1862 and 1938, 10 percent of the landmass of the United States—nearly the area 40 THE AMERICAN VISION of Texas and California combined—was claimed and settled by 1.6 million homesteads under the different homestead acts. This represents about 20 percent of all public land and is comparable to all the land granted to states and sold or awarded to corpora-tions and land grant colleges. While Congress granted four times more land to railroad corporations than it allotted under the original Homestead Act, railroads sometimes granted “home-steads” to citizens to encourage the building of settlements and create markets for their services. 49 When the original Homestead Act became law in 1863, Afri-can Americans could not become citizens and so could not enjoy its benefits.

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  City on a Hill

  Urban Idealism in America from the Puritans to the Present

  • Alex Krieger(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Belknap Press

    (Publisher)

  Timber, mining, oil extracting, and trapping companies could falsely petition as individual citizens to assemble large landholdings or even gain rights to a water source at the expense of neigh-boring landholders equally dependent on the water. Families with children all petitioning for claims independently could also gain control over substantial territory. The limit of 160 acres was itself an occasional problem, as there was no assurance, given diverse geographic and climatic conditions, that a farm of that size could prove financially viable, especially as farming became more industri-alized rather than family-run. Historians continue to debate the ultimate merits of the homesteading policy. Some point to it as a path to upward mobility. As during colonial days, when only landholders had the privilege of voting, nineteenth-century land-holders were held in higher esteem and considered more financially secure. By Seeding Settlement 141 the time of the act’s termination in 1935, somewhere between 245 million and 287 million acres of public land were granted or sold to Homesteaders, with approximately 1.5 million individual homestead patents registered. That is im-pressive, especially considering those Homesteaders’ several generations of de-scendants, many of whom benefited from the land, as well. As sociologist Trina Williams Shanks has noted, the number of ultimate beneficiaries could be in the scores of millions. 10 On the other hand, due to poor administration of the program and the rate of false claims by individuals or companies, the number of actual farms result-ing from the Homestead Act might have been as low as four hundred thousand. More than a few of these, too, would gradually succumb to consolidation, mechanization, and the emergence of agri-business, or fail due to competition in international grain and produce markets.

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  U. S. History

  • P. Scott Corbett, Volker Janssen, John M. Lund, Todd Pfannestiel, Paul Vickery, Sylvie Waskiewicz(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Openstax

    (Publisher)

  We are the nation of human progress, and who will, what can, set limits to our onward march? Providence is with us, and no earthly power can. —John O’Sullivan, 1839 Think about how this quotation resonated with different groups of Americans at the time. When looked at through today’s lens, the actions of the westward-moving settlers were fraught with brutality and racism. At the time, however, many settlers felt they were at the pinnacle of democracy, and that with no aristocracy or ancient history, America was a new world where anyone could succeed. Even then, consider how the phrase “anyone” was restricted by race, gender, and nationality. 482 Chapter 17 | Go West Young Man! Westward Expansion, 1840-1900 This OpenStax book is available for free at https://cnx.org/content/col11740/1.3 Visit Across the Plains in ‘64 (http://openstaxcollege.org/l/iowaoregon) to follow one family making their way westward from Iowa to Oregon. Click on a few of the entries and see how the author describes their journey, from the expected to the surprising. FEDERAL GOVERNMENT ASSISTANCE To assist the settlers in their move westward and transform the migration from a trickle into a steady flow, Congress passed two significant pieces of legislation in 1862: the Homestead Act and the Pacific Railway Act. Born largely out of President Abraham Lincoln’s growing concern that a potential Union defeat in the early stages of the Civil War might result in the expansion of slavery westward, Lincoln hoped that such laws would encourage the expansion of a “free soil” mentality across the West. The Homestead Act allowed any head of household, or individual over the age of twenty-one—including unmarried women—to receive a parcel of 160 acres for only a nominal filing fee. All that recipients were required to do in exchange was to “improve the land” within a period of five years of taking possession.

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  Public Lands and Political Meaning

  Ranchers, the Government, and the Property between Them

  • Karen R. Merrill(Author)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • University of California Press

    (Publisher)

  and, by implication, that ranching was not an occupation that involved their wives and children. 38 But the way these ranchers conceived of the homesteader was also shifting during this period, particularly around the time of the Kinkaid Act. As Congress turned, in a very limited way, to the “grazing home-stead” to solve the crisis of settling the public domain, the definition of who could be a homesteader began to expand. And both in and outside of the ANLSA, the “public domain question” came increasingly to in-volve how the government could best encourage homebuilding on the range. Some of the attempts to get cattlemen recognized in these terms revolved around the familiar evolutionary argument that the cattle or sheep rancher had helped to settle the West as much as the homesteader had. 39 Occasionally, too, ranchers claimed a rather paternalistic ground about their status as real homebuilders. For instance, at the 1907 Pub-lic Land Convention, which showcased western anti-conservation senti-ment, the longtime president of the Wyoming Wool Growers Associa-tion, J. M. Wilson, grew vexed that only small-time settlers who came out West to take up lands were seen as homebuilders. Noting that he himself was considering settling two hundred families on his “irrigation enterprise,” he declared: “When the representatives of the government say that they are trying to hold [the public domain] for the homebuilder, they certainly cannot mean that the people of the West are not the home-builders, the people who have come here from the beginning and have withstood the privations of frontier life . . . . If they are not the home-builders I would like to know in the name of Heaven where the home-builders come from.” 40 Speakers at the ANLSA conventions tried explicitly to include ranch-ers in the category of homebuilders.

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  Working on the Land

  • Nancy F. Cott(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Saur

    (Publisher)

  WORKING ON THE LAND 219 WOMEW Homesteaders ON THE GREAT PLAINS FRONTIER Sheryll Patterson-Black Introduct ion On the agricultural frontier of a century ago, it was often stated that l i f e was great for the men and horses, but hard on the women and cattle. Life was hard on some women. In one early ac-count, I Went to Kansas, Marian Colt Davis describes her family's western migration, in which in rapid succession she lost her hus-band and child to epidemic. Devastated, remorseful, and exhausted, she hastily retreated to her point of origin, and there her memoirs end. Marian Colt Davis is typical of the image of women as reluc-tan. pioneer, a stereotypic image which is perpetuated by history oooks (or at least, not destroyed by them). However, this image is refuted by my study of homestead women. Homestead lands became available to women with the passage of the Homestead Act alloting free land to western settlers. In.1862 Senator William Borah jubilantly announced, The government bets 160 acres against the entry fee of $14 that the settle^ can't live on the land for five years without starving to death. Since land ownership equals economic power in our society, his announcement had implications that have not until now been consid-ered: that is, for the f i r s t time in American history, working-class women had the possibility of access to land^ownership, because the land was free if certain conditions were met. The law required continuous residence on, and Improvement of, the land for five years, at which time proof for final t i t l e could be made. The home-steader had to be head of a family or twenty-one years of age. The law did not restrict homestead entries to men, and suddenly single Sheryll Patterson-Black Is coordinator of the Women Studies Program at the University of Colorado, instructor-of an experi-mental course, Women Homesteaders on the Great Plains Frontier, and author.

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  Food Insecurity

  A Reference Handbook

  • William D. Schanbacher, Whitney Fung Uy(Authors)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  The Homestead Act of 1862 was another impactful piece of legislation that was largely detrimental to Native Americas. Under the act, the government enabled adult male citizens to claim up to 160 acres of surveyed land. This contributed to increased western expansion, which further dispossessed Native Americans. Although the intent of the act was to encourage Homesteaders, much of the land that was claimed went to land speculators, loggers, miners, and cattle ranchers and for railroad construction (“Homestead Act (1862),” n.d.).

  During the period from 1863 to 1939, approximately half a million households received titles to 246 million acres of land, or roughly, 20 percent of U.S. land was given to around two million households. This new European form of land parceling and enclosure of common lands was, in many ways, anathema to the Indigenous conception of land and how it was to be inhabited. Moreover, given that indentured servants, recent immigrants, and slaves were barred from citizenship, the Homestead Act largely benefited white males.

  Through the parceling of land across the country, the Homestead and Morrill Acts—along with other conciliatory pieces of legislations—compensated Indigenous tribes with only a sliver of what that land was worth in comparison to the income it is generating today. For example, with respect to the Morrill Act, although estimates are difficult to determine, over 500,000 acres of unwillingly donated land remain in trust for at least 12 universities, and in 2019, estimates suggest that more than $5.4 million was generated in college revenue. Groundbreaking reports by High Country News on the lasting effects of the land-grant university system of land appropriations found that Indigenous people remain largely absent from student populations, staff, faculty, and the curriculum (Ahtone 2020).

  Reconstruction Era (1865–1877)

  After the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment and the official abolition of slavery, the United States entered a paradoxical new period of both opportunity and harsh oppression known as the Reconstruction Era (1865–1877). The Civil Rights Act of 1875 afforded freed slaves with new hopes and opportunities including the prohibition of public discrimination and inclusion in jury services. However, these short-lived changes were soon challenged in a series of court cases that culminated in the infamous Plessy v. Ferguson

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  Food in America

  The Past, Present, and Future of Food, Farming, and the Family Meal [3 volumes]

  • Andrew F. Smith(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • ABC-CLIO

    (Publisher)

  Of the estimated 500 million acres of public-domain land that passed into private ownership from 1862 to 1904 as a result of this Act, only 80 million acres went to small farmers and other Homesteaders. The remaining 420 million acres ended up in the possession of speculators and corporate interests. Following is the complete text of the Homestead Act. An Act to secure Homesteads to actual Settlers on the Public Domain. Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That any person who is the head of a family, or who has arrived at the age of twenty-one years, and is a citizen of the United States, or who shall have filed his declaration of intention to become such, as required by the naturalization laws of the United States, and who has never borne arms against the United States Government or given aid and comfort to its enemies, shall, from and after the first January, eighteen hundred and sixty-three, be entitled to enter one quarter section or a less quantity of unappropriated public lands, upon which said person may have filed a preemption claim, or which may, at the time the application is made, be subject to preemption at one dollar and twenty-five cents, or less, per acre; or eighty acres or less of such unappropriated lands, at two dollars and fifty cents per acre, to be located in a body, in conformity to the legal subdivisions of the public lands, and after the same shall have been surveyed: Provided, That any person owning and residing on land may, under the provisions of this act, enter other land lying contiguous to his or her said land, which shall not, with the land so already owned and occupied, exceed in the aggregate one hundred and sixty acres. SEC. 2

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  Frontier Ways

  Sketches of Life in the Old West

  • Edward Everett Dale(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • University of Texas Press

    (Publisher)

  AMID THE TURMOIL of civil war, the Congress of the United States passed the Homestead Act. This granted 160 acres of land from the public domain to every person 21 years of age or the head of a family who was a citizen of the United States or had declared his intention of becoming a citizen and who did not already own more than 160 acres of land elsewhere. During the stress of war no large number of persons took advantage of this but immediately after the close of the conflict, and the return of so many thousands of soldiers to civil life, there was a great outpouring of eager homeseekers to the Prairie West. By 1870 this movement had gathered enormous momentum and during the next two decades the increase of population in most states forming the second tier west of the Mississippi River was truly startling. During the next decade the increase continued and Oklahoma Territory’s population grew from 61,000 in 1890 to 400,000 in 1900. Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico show a similar trend.

  Regardless of the state or the region in which the homesteader settled, his first desire was to become acquainted with his neighbors. He was above all eager to know what sort of people these were among whom he had cast his lot. Were some of them natives of his own state or members of his own church? How many children were in the community who might be brought into a school or Sunday School? Were these nearby settlers a kindly and hospitable people who would make good neighbors, and among whom he could live on friendly terms and with mutual respect and confidence? On the answer to these questions depended to a great extent the future happiness and well being of the new homesteader and his family.

  He soon discovered that neighboring settlers were asking themselves exactly the same questions about him. In a new country co-operation and the development of a community consciousness is most important. The answers to such questions were, moreover, in most cases satisfactory. The people who came to these new prairie regions did so to make homes for themselves and their families. They were for the most part an honest, industrious, God-fearing folk eager to succeed and to build up a stable society in a raw and untamed land. Any members of the rougher element that had drifted in soon found themselves so far outnumbered that they departed in search of more congenial associates and an environment more suited to their tastes.

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