Abstract
“Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That any person who is the head of a family … shall … be entitled to enter one quarter section or a less quantity of unappropriated public lands, upon which said person may have filed a preemption claim. …” So begins the Homestead Act of 1862, signed into law on the 20th of May by President Abraham Lincoln. The work of this extraordinary piece of writing is well known: more than 270 million acres of public land were parceled out to private citizens before the act’s repeal in 1976. Famously, the Homestead Act encouraged widespread Euramerican settlement of the western states and territories, but in so doing, it accelerated the infamous expropriation of land from native peoples and intensified federal initiatives that hastened their relocation, confinement, and genocide.
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