Book Description

"'The process of transfer to private ownership of government land or government-supervised Indian land was the woof thread on the loom of the frontier,' the author writes in his preface. 'This thread was continually interlaced with hard experiences in the struggle for existence, thus weaving the fabric of the social and economic history of the American frontier. My aim in this book is to trace this thread from government ownership of the land into private hands.' Although Thomas Jefferson reckoned that the march of population from the Appalachians to the Pacific would take one hundred generations, by 1935 the western wilderness, created by law in the 1780s as the 'unreserved and unappropriated public domain,' had all but vanished. It is the human side of this process of land distribution that Professor Dick examines--'how the land-hungry pioneer interpreted the land laws, or ignored them; his success in "handing up laws" to Congress by frontier usage when existing statutes were inadequate for his needs; his custom of illegally exploiting the natural resources; and the final end of exploitation and the coming of a policy of conservation.' After a brief discussion of colonial land policies and the formation of the public domain in the post-Revolutionary period, the author describes the adoption of the surveying system, the actual work of the surveyors, and how the land was distributed to settlers. There follow chapters on the squatter; the use of land by lumbering interests; the struggle for pre-emption; the campaign of the West for free land and the passage of the Homestead Act; the problems which accompanied the acquisition of land from foreign governments; the occupation and exploitation of the mineral lands; the occupation and use of the grasslands with a discussion of the range wars; land given for internal improvements such as railroads; the openings of Indian reservations with their land rushes or drawings; the final occupancy of the dry land for use by dry-land farming or irrigation; and finally the coming of conservation and the establishment of the permanent public domain in the form of national forests and grazing land. Professor Dick's work goes beyond present books on land in the realm of human interest, for it deals with the people themselves, not with acts of Congress or legal decisions. It also goes deeper than previously published works into such areas as the development of claim clubs, squatting, and the holding of public land by individuals for extended use or speculation while waiting to sell at an advance over the government price."--Dust jacket.