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Show HOMESTEADING, 1862-1882 403 It seems best to consider homesteading first in offered areas where the lands had been open to purchase for some years by settlers and speculators. Lands in Michigan, Wisconsin, Missouri, and Iowa had been open to entry for 5 to 10 or more years; those in the Central Valley of California and eastern Kansas and Nebraska, for approximately 3 years. Altogether some 54 million acres were open to homestead, preemption or cash entry in these areas in 1863. This acreage was equivalent to all the entries that went into homestead from 1863 to 1879 in the entire country. Settlers, landlookers, small and large investors had worked over these areas searching for the better lands and discarding from their lists those that were remote from timber, lacked easy access to water, were rough, broken, or seemingly infertile. Sometimes they made bad guesses. After the process of selection had left few tracts unentered, newcomers preferred to go into other and more recently opened areas where they hoped to find better land. I have estimated that of some 1,180,000 acres of offered lands in the eastern third of Kansas that remained unsold in 1862, 400,000 acres were thereafter acquired in amounts of 2,000 acres and more with cash, scrip, and warrants. The balance of 780,000 may have been entered under the homestead or preemption laws. Generally, the large entrymen got in first and had their choice.32 In Nebraska 8,663,000 acres, or roughly one-sixth of the state, had been offered before the Homestead Act went into effect and approximately 1,050,000 acres had been 32 Lawrence Lee has shown that in a band of 21 townships extending from the Missouri River to the western boundaries of Morris County in Kansas a total of 27,320 acres were homesteaded or 1,301 acres, on the average, per township. All these townships, plus the next four tiers farther west had been offered. If we apply that same average of 1,301 acres to the 600 townships in the eastern third, we have 780,000 acres. entered with cash or warrants. Of the remainder of the offered land, a part was granted to railroads, possibly 2,500,000 acres, leaving 5,108,000 acres subject to homestead or cash entry. During the first 8 years homesteaders filed on 1,879,401 acres and for a short time had their pick of the land. Then in 1867-73 speculators and estate builders entered 400,000 acres of what seems to have been the best land remaining available. Two of these large purchasers-William Scully and the Brown-Ives-Goddard group of Providence, Rhode Island-acquired 148,000 acres which they developed into the largest and most stable landlord estates in the United States.33 Studies of two Nebraska counties (Pierce and Gage) throw considerable light on early homesteading in an area where all the land had been open to cash entry except one tier of townships in Pierce. In this county west of the Missouri and east of the 98th meridian, the eastern 12 of the 16 townships had been offered at public sale in August 1860. Not an acre was sold then or for many years thereafter, showing how 33 The Scully and Brown-Ives-Goddard (now the Brown Land Company) estates should be equated with the somewhat smaller Wadsworth estate in the Genesee Valley of New York which has been in existence 177 years. Russell La Verne Berry has much recent information on the ownership and management of the Scully lands in Illinois, Kansas, and Nebraska, especially in Marion County, Kansas, and some on the Brown Land Company operations in northeastern Nebraska in "The Scully Estate and Its Cash-Leasing System in the Midwest" (Brookings, S. Dak., mimeographed, 1966). Scully added substantially to his purchases of government land by buying largely from private owners. The extensive western land and lending operations of the Davenport family of Bath, N.Y., have been traced in Allan Bogue, Money at Interest. Unfortunately, access to the Brown-Ives-Goddard manuscripts, of which I am told there are great chests full in the John Carter Brown Library, were denied. James B. Hedges, who was making a detailed study of the commercial operations of the family and published one volume, The Browns of Providence Plantations Colonial Tears (Cambridge, Mass., 1952), had his second volume well along toward completion at the time of his death. |
