The Homestead Act of 1862 offered Americans the opportunity to claim parcels of "public land," occupy and improve it for five years, and then receive title to it. This map visualizes over time and space the more than 2.3 million claims and 900,000 "patents" granting ownership made and issued in the half century after passage of the act. By 1912, homesteaders had transformed more than 125 million acres—more than 5% of the total acreage of the entire United States—from public lands to private property.
During the same period, Native Americans were dispossessed of large portions of the American West. While not doing it full justice, this map pays particular attention to the dispossession of the lands of Native Americans through violence and claims on Indian reservations that the federal government defined as "surplus."
Introduction
The Homestead Act, passed in May 1862, shaped agricultural and social development in the western United States for many decades. Into the second half of the 1920s, millions of settler households used the law's offer to farm and reside on a parcel of public land for five years, after which they would receive the full property title to the land. A smaller number even used the law in the years after World War II. In the lower forty-eight states, the settlement practice did not officially end until 1976, and in Alaska not until 1986.
It is difficult to summarize the homesteading experience as a whole, even if one only takes the perspective of the people who claimed land under the law. Settlers took land in very different regions and over a long time, during which new technologies and infrastructure dramatically changed the nature of farm-building. While the first homesteaders in remote areas still struggled to procure building materials and transport crops by wagon, later settlers had access to railroads, better roads, and eventually even cars. Despite these developments, homesteading remained an uncertain business, also in later years. During all phases and in all regions, the number of homesteaders who registered a claim far exceeded the number who succeeded in turning their claim into a final patent. Unsuccessful attempts to build farms were always an integral part of the settlement practice.
Homesteading was controversial from the beginning. Land reformers had hoped the passage of the free land law would result in a more harmonious society overall, with less harsh class antagonism. But they were quickly disappointed. Most prominently, many lamented the widespread practice of "commuting" homesteads, meaning the early purchase of land parcels by claimants before the expiry of the law's standard five-year residency requirement. Many, including a fair number of lawmakers and later historians, suspected that massive fraud was hiding behind this practice. Instead of supporting the agrarian, Jeffersonian ideal of a society of independent farmers, the Homestead Act seemed to unleash a fierce competition for land to resell, in which influential speculators were coming out on top.
Historians of the neo-progressive school around Paul W. Gates, which dominated the field from the 1930s to the 1970s, found truth in these complaints. In recent years, however, historians have questioned some of these assumptions. In addition, researchers have also gone beyond measuring the practice of homesteading against its ideals. Instead, studies ask the following questions: To what extent have homesteaders contributed to and benefited from the dispossession and marginalization of Indigenous peoples? Was the opportunity of obtaining land in practice available to all citizens, including non-whites? Or did the land donation program contribute to the existing racial wealth gap by effectively (if not by law) limiting the land to white claimants? How did the law affect the division of labor and the position of women in settler households? What ecological implications did homestead settlements have in different contexts?