Late Homesteading: Native Land Dispossession through Strategic Occupation

U.S. homesteading has been linked to establishing federal sovereignty over western lands threatened by the Confederacy, foreign powers, and the Indian Wars in the last half of the 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 rights, but in response to a different threat—a legal one. Questionable federal land policies in the late nineteenth century dispossessed massive amounts of Indigenous 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 a legal defeat eventually occurred. Examining the qualitative evidence, and using data on the universe of individual homesteads and federal land cessions across the 16 western states, we find evidence consistent with this hypothesis.