Homesteading the Plains

With newly digitized Government Land Office (GLO) records, geospatial methods, and a rigorous re-examination of long-compiled statistical data, the authors of this impressive collaborative work seek first to dispute the largely negative conclusions set out in a long-unchallenged body of mid-twentieth century scholarship concerning U.S. land policy and pioneer settlement of the American West under the 1862 Homestead Act. Examining seventeen western states in the period from 1860 to 1900, the authors are largely successful in demonstrating that twentieth-century historians, such as Benjamin Hibbard, Fred Shannon, and Gilbert Fite, commonly misinterpreted GLO records and relied too much on anecdotal evidence to obscure the fact that homesteading was the most significant way that western settlers started their farms; most homesteaders “proved up” their 160-acre claims within the designated five-year period; and the incidence of fraudulent claims, whether involving settlers, railroad officials, or well-capitalized land speculators, was likely no more than 9 percent. Assessment of digitized records of a study area comprising ten townships situated in Custer and Dawes counties, Nebraska, which includes 621 successful homesteads, indeed demonstrates that instances of stolen soldier identity, marriage fraud, and other illegalities were far less common than the mid-twentieth-century scholarship suggests. Except for the Dakota and Indian territories, homesteaders commonly arrived to stake their claims years after treaties, “title clearance,” and federal reservation reduction programs had put the “surplus” land once possessed by tribes such as the Crow, Blackfeet, and Sioux into the public domain.

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