Development of Settlement 1835–1862

Lesson 3 traced migration across the Plains. This lesson covers a subtly different story: the moment when Americans began to think of the Plains not just as a route to somewhere else but as a place to live. Two federal laws passed in the same year, 1862, made that shift concrete: the Homestead Act offered free land to anyone who could farm it; the Pacific Railroad Act funded a transcontinental railroad to link the West to the East. Together with the first systematic reservation treaty — the Fort Laramie Treaty 1851 — they set the rules of the game for everything that followed.

The Changing Attitude to the West

The "Great American Desert" label had held up through the 1830s and 1840s because it matched settler experience. Tall-grass prairie broke ordinary ploughs; short-grass Plains offered no timber; summers were dry; winters blizzarded. By the late 1850s, however, attitudes were shifting for three reasons.

1. Mormon success. Irrigation in Salt Lake showed that the drylands could be farmed if people accepted new methods.
2. Industrial innovation. The John Deere steel plough (patented 1837, refined into the 1850s) could break prairie sod that wooden or iron ploughs could not. Windmills for drawing well water, and eventually barbed wire (Lesson 6), were on their way.
3. Political pressure. Anti-slavery Republicans in Congress wanted the West settled by small free-labour farmers to prevent the expansion of slavery. After the Republican Party won the presidency in 1860, this pressure became law.

By 1862 the Plains were starting to look less like an empty desert and more like a frontier waiting for the right laws and technologies to unlock it.

The Fort Laramie Treaty 1851

Before you can understand 1862's laws, you need the first great US–Plains treaty. The Fort Laramie Treaty 1851 was negotiated between US commissioners and representatives of the Lakota Sioux, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Crow, Shoshone, Assiniboine, Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara nations. Around 10,000 Plains people gathered at Horse Creek near Fort Laramie for the talks — one of the largest diplomatic assemblies in the history of the Plains.

Provision	Meaning
Defined tribal territories	Each signatory nation recognised a specific area as its homeland
Right of safe passage	US citizens could travel the trails through those territories
Annual annuities	US government paid $50,000 a year in goods for 50 years (later reduced to 10)
US forts and roads	US could build forts and roads for trail protection

From the US side this was a crude real-estate deal: a promise of payment and recognised territory in exchange for trail rights. From the Plains side, however, signing chiefs did not have the authority over whole nations that US negotiators assumed. When individual Lakota or Cheyenne warriors attacked wagon trains, the US government treated the whole nation as having broken the treaty — even though the signing chief had no power to control every band. The mismatch between diffuse Plains authority and centralised US legal thinking, introduced in Lesson 2, is visible here in its first major form.

The Treaty is also significant for a second reason. By formalising tribal territories it began the logic of the reservation system — confining Plains nations to specified areas — which would harden into coercive policy in the 1860s and 1870s.

The Homestead Act 1862

On 20 May 1862 President Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act. Its core provision was remarkably simple and extraordinarily influential.

• Any US citizen (or intending citizen), male or female, over 21, could claim 160 acres of surveyed federal land.
• The claimant had to live on and farm the land for five years.
• At the end of five years, on payment of a small registration fee (around $18), the land became theirs in freehold.

The Act was a Republican anti-slavery measure as much as a settlement measure. By putting land in the hands of small free farmers, Congress hoped to "plant" the West with loyal Union citizens and prevent southern slaveholders from expanding into the Plains.

Who actually used the Act?

Over the period of the Act's operation (1862–1934, though our course concerns roughly 1862–95), around 1.6 million claims were filed across the West. Key features:

• A significant minority — roughly 12% — of claimants were women (often widows or unmarried settlers taking advantage of the Act's explicit inclusion of female claimants).
• African American families, particularly "Exodusters" moving to Kansas after 1879, made tens of thousands of claims.
• European immigrants (Germans, Scandinavians, Irish) used the Act as their route into American citizenship and farming.

However, the Act was not a cure-all. Roughly 60% of claims ultimately "failed" — the claimant gave up before five years, defeated by drought, locust plagues, isolation, or economic collapse. Land speculation by railroads and cattle companies ate into the available acreage. And 160 acres, a generous farm by eastern standards, was often too small to be viable on the semi-arid Plains, where a family might need two or three times as much land to make a living.

Mini-example: a worked Q3 paragraph on the Homestead Act

Explain the importance of the Homestead Act 1862 in the development of the West.