Homestead act: small farms :: dawes act:

The 1887 Dawes Act was essentially the Homestead Act for Plains Indians. Each Plains Indian family was allotted 160-acre homesteads from their reservation land. Any leftover land was freed up for white settlers to buy. The aim of the act was to break up the power of the tribe by encouraging individual families to farm for themselves, rather than relying on the structure of the tribe.

The 1887 Dawes Act was essentially the Homestead Act for Plains Indians. Each Plains Indian family was allotted 160-acre homesteads from their reservation land. Any leftover land was freed up for white settlers to buy. The aim of the act was to break up the power of the tribe by encouraging individual families to farm for themselves, rather than relying on the structure of the tribe. It also aimed to make Plains Indians more self-sufficient, encourage Plains Indians to be more like white-Americans, and free up more land for white settlers.

From the US government’s perspective, the act was successful. By 1890, Plains Indians had lost over half of their lands to whites. For Plains Indians however, life became even tougher. They found it almost impossible to make a living farming on the Plains. Most gave up trying to farm, sold their land to whites for little money and became landless. 

Unfortunately, the migration was also fueled by false rumors. One common misconception was that the government would pay for passage to Kansas as well as provide land plots free of charge, leaving many stranded in the middle of their passage, unable to farm their claimed land upon arrival.

Exclusively Black Settlements

Several exclusively black settlements began to emerge in Kansas after the Homestead Act. The most well-known was a town called Nicodermus, established in 1877. Founded by land prospector W.R. Hill and advertised by black minister W.R. Smith to black communities throughout the south, the town steadily increased in size, and by 1880 over 100 people had settled there. As African Americans slowly became disheartened and disillusioned by the difficulty of homesteading, migration numbers tapered off. However, between the years of 1869 and 1879, 27,000 blacks moved to Kansas, and though few found the success they had been hoping for, a considerable number stayed, finding it a better alternative to the South. 10 An 1879 issue of the Topeka Colored Citizen stated: “Our advice…to the people of the South, Come West, Come to Kansas…in order that you may be free from the persecution of the rebels. If blacks come here and starve, all well. It is better to starve to death in Kansas than to be shot and killed in the South.” (24:41) In the end, the challenges of African American homesteaders mirrored those of other settlers: some persevered and stayed, while others went into debt and left, discouraged by an Act that they had hoped would bring them prosperity or, at the very least, a small pocket of land and a home to call their own.

“Unused” Land?: Native Americans, The Homestead Act, and the 1887 Dawes Severalty Act

As land was claimed and turned into private property, arriving settlers aggressively encroached on Native American territory, and began to agitate for the expansion of territory into sovereign Native land, sometimes with violent results. The Indian Appropriations Act (1851) relegated Indians to reservations in the West. For Indians, reservation life was restraining, and the land Natives were forced to occupy were often too small to raise animals or hunt on and not viable agriculturally. Still, many settlers believed that Indians had gotten the choicest land, and pressed for their availability to claim. The government responded to this crisis in favor of the white settlers and land speculators, stripping Indians of the last semblance of sovereignty they had by abolishing the reservation system as well as their honoring of tribes as separate entities from the United States. The 1871 Dawes Act stated that “hereafter no Indian nation or tribe within the territory of the United States shall be acknowledged or recognized as an independent nation, tribe, or power with whom the United States may contract by treaty.” It also marked the beginning of increased efforts to integrate Indians into American society rather than cordoning them off into isolated reservations. This was continued to a larger extent with the 1887 Dawes Severalty Act (also called the General Allotment Act), which was a Homestead Act directed at breaking up Indian reservation holdings as well as tribes themselves.

Henry Dawes and “Civilizing Indians”

Congressman Henry Dawes believed his second namesake act had a “civilizing effect on Indians because it forced them to cultivate land, live in European-inspired houses, ride in Studebaker wagons…[and] own property.” 11 Under the act, lands were broken up into 160-acre allotments, and any individual who agreed to claim a plot and leave reservation lands would become an American citizen. Indians not only lost bargaining power as united tribes, but they lost considerable land holdings, as unused tribal land that had not been doled out to individuals was sold off in parcels to speculators and railroad companies. Moreover, many Indians who had taken individual plots through the 1887 act went into debt due to a lack of starting funds and eventually lost their claims to speculators. The breaking up of tribal lands, coupled with the loss of individual plots, ultimately caused Indians to lose much their remaining landholdings without fair compensation. 12

Below Humboldt State University Professor Joseph Giovannetti, a member of the Tolowa tribe, discusses how the Dawes Act of 1887 impacted Native Americans:

Goals of the Homestead Act

The Homestead Act had two main goals: to assist the government in selling off its land to ordinary citizens, and to use the land in what they considered to be an economically efficient manner. The act was meant to favor the ordinary American, and to make assimilated citizens out of immigrants, African Americans, and, through later legislation in the form of the Dawes Act, the forced assimilation of Indians, thought to be for their own good. The realities of the plains – unfavorable climate, the proliferation of railroads, bad crop years and debt – meant that many settlers either lived sparsely or moved around constantly in search of better conditions. Despite these hardships, many settlers prevailed or felt they would not get better opportunities anywhere else. Subsequently, plots of land slowly grew into small collections of farms, then into towns, and finally, with the help of railroads, into permanent, economically productive settlements that easily connected people and goods all across the Western region. The Homestead Act’s lasting legacy is the regional development and demographic changes it sparked through encouraging migration, creating a distinct and oft-romanticized Western culture on the last great frontier in American history.

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