Homestead Acts: 270 Million Free Acres, Dawes Allotments and the Dust Bowl

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Free land for settlers stalled in Congress for years because Southern Democrats feared small farms would tilt power away from the plantation system, and President James Buchanan vetoed a homestead bill in 1860. Once the Southern states seceded, the gridlock broke, and Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act on May 20, 1862. Any head of household or 21-year-old who had never borne arms against the United States could claim 160 acres, live on it and cultivate it for five years, then prove up with witnesses for a permanent patent. The law said nothing about race or gender, so single women, widows, immigrants and U.S.-born Latinos could claim land on the same terms.

The same public domain came from Native nations. Native people could homestead only by renouncing tribal citizenship, and the Dawes Act of 1887 broke communal reservations into allotments and opened the surplus to settlers, cutting Native landholding from about 138 million acres in 1887 to 48 million by 1934. As good land ran out, Congress offered larger grants on arid ground, from the Timber Culture Act to the Kincaid Act and the Enlarged Homestead Act, and plowed-up prairie grass helped bring on the Dust Bowl. Homesteading formally ended in 1976, with Alaska open until 1986.

• Around 1,200 Russian Jews fleeing pogroms claimed homesteads on the North Dakota plains.
• Syro-Lebanese Muslim homesteaders in Ross, North Dakota built what the episode calls the first mosque in the United States.
• The Southern Homestead Act of 1866 offered freedpeople mostly pine barrens and swamps, and most lacked money for tools and fees.
• Ken Deardorff proved up 80 acres on Alaska's Stony River by 1979 but did not receive his deed until May 1988.
• About 1.6 million homesteads transferred 270 million acres, and an estimated 93 million living Americans descend from recipients.