Late Homesteading: Native Land Dispossession Through Strategic Occupation

Abstract

U.S. homesteading has been linked to establishing federal economic property rights over western lands where sovereignty was threatened by the Confederacy, foreign powers, and the Indian Wars of the mid-nineteenth Century. However, the bulk of homesteading actually took place in the early twentieth century, long after these threats to federal ownership ceased. We argue that this “late homesteading” was also an effort to enforce federal property rights, but in response to a different threat — a legal one. Turn of the twentieth century federal land policies dispossessed massive amounts of Indian treaty lands, and exposed the federal government to legal, rather than violent, conflict. Late homesteading was used to make the dispossession permanent, even in cases where legal disputes were lost. Using data on the universe of individual homesteads, and linking these with federal land cessions across the sixteen western states, we find evidence consistent with this hypothesis.