- ∗ The author wishes to express appreciation to Professor Leslie Hewes for reading a draft of this paper and providing a constructive critique.
- 1 Carl Sauer, in his Presidential Address “Foreword to Historical Geography,”Annals, Association of American Geographers, Vol. 31 (1941), pp. 1–24, suggested use of “valuable material in the Land Office plats” and of “Factual data, precisely localized … of land titles …, “but these sources are still little used. Douglas R. McManis, The Initial Evaluation and the Utilization of the Illinois Prairies, 1815-1840, Department of Geography Research Paper No. 94 (Chicago: Department of Geography, The University of Chicago, 1964), p. 73, used entry maps and dates to illustrate the time lag between settlement of forest and adjacent prairie land. Maps of land claimed and claims are used by D. W. Meinig, The Great Columbia Plain (Seattle: by J. Hudson, “Two Dakota Homestead Frontiers,”Annals, Association of American Geographers, Vol. 63 (1973), p. 446. W. Kollmorgen, “The Woodsman's Assaults on the Domain of the Cattleman,”Annals, Association of American Geographers, Vol 59 (1969), p. 223, provides a map illustrating the use of Desert Land Act entries to obtain water rights. Both entries and patents are used by M. Bowen, “Environmental Perception and Geographic Change in Southwest Sheridan County,”Nebraska History, Vol. 51 (1970), p. 324, and in “Mormon Land Selection in the Greybull Valley Wyoming: Rationale and Implications,”Ecumene, Vol. VIII (1976), pp. 40–49, to illustrate change in settlement density, and by C. B. McIntosh, in “Forest Lieu Selections in the Sand Hills of Nebraska,”Annals, Association of American Geographers, Vol. 64 (1974), pp. 87–99, and in “Use and Abuse of the Timber Culture Act,”Annals, Association of American Geographers, Vol. 65 (1975), pp. 347–62 to explain settlement processes.
- 2 Land entry, as used in this paper, refers to the initial act of having the entry filed and recorded in the Land Office Tract Book. This was only the first in a succession of steps in the total land alienation process; the first few steps were referred to as the “Original Entry” and the latter steps as the “Final Entry.” Thomas Donaldson, The Public Domain (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1884), identifies the steps and illustrates the forms required in each step; see Preemption, p. 688, Homestead, p. 1032, and Timber Culture, p. 1091. The forms used in the Homestead and Timber Culture entries most often referred to the applicant making the entry, while the term claimant was used in the preemption forms. I have used the term entryman as an all-inclusive term identifying the person filing the initial entry form, regardless of the law under which the filing was made.
- 3 Several states having the necessary storage space retained the Local sets; those sets not retained were sent to Washington, D.C., for storage. Local sets returned to Washington may be found at the Washington National Record Center in Suitland, Maryland. The Headquarters sets for states west of, and including, the line of states from North Dakota south through Oklahoma are also found in the Suitland storage facility. The Headquarters sets for states east of the above mentioned line (Minnesota south through Louisiana and on eastward) are found at the Interior Department storage area at 7981 Eastern Avenue, Silver Spring, Maryland.
- 4 The books were designed when the prevailing system of land alienation was cash sale; as other forms of alienation were legislated, the date of sale column was retained but was used to list the date of entry in most Tract Books I have used.
- 5 Entries and patents processed under alienation laws which had limited use, either in area or numbers, were sometimes kept in separate sets of books. See National Archives published lists of entry and patent records: Harry P. Yoshpe and Philip P. Brower, Preliminary Inventory of the Land-Entry Papers of the General Land Office, Preliminary Inventory No. 22 (Washington: National Archives Publication No. 49–30, 1949); Richard S. Maxwell, The Public Land Records of the Federal Government, 1800-1950, And Their Statistical Significance (Mimeographed Preliminary Draft Prepared for the Conference on the National Archives and Statistical Research, 1968).
- 6 A declaratory statement (DS) was a declaration of intent to enter a given tract of land generally by preemption. Such a Statement had to be filed within thirty days after actual settlement in offered land, or within three months on unoffered land. Reservoir declaratory statements (RDS) and Soldiers homestead declaratory statements (SDS or HDS) were other types of declaratory statements used in the Sand Hills and found in Abstract books grouped by type and arranged by number and date. Declaratory statement data were generally written with pencil in the Tract Books since they represented little more than a temporary hold order. These pencil notations are not always discernible on microfilm of Tract Books. Declaratory statements did not always result in entry filing.
- 7 The environmental boundary along which settlement hesitated was early referred to as a physical barrier, but it was often a barrier only because a given culture was not immediately capable of coping with the different environment. The hesitation period was a time of adjustment during which new inventions, new cultural practices, or political decisions were fashioned making a fresh settlement advance possible. A. P. Brigham, Geographic Influence in American History (Boston: The Athenaeum 1903) and E. C. Sample and C. F. Jones, American History and Its Geographic Conditions (Cambridge: The Riverside 1933); both wrote chapters discussing the Appalachian Barrier. Semple writes, p. 54, “The Appalachian barrier had the effect … of keeping the colonies to the hem of the continent.” Yet, on p. 67, she identifies the “successful ending of the French and Indian War” as “the signal for a western advance of the population.” W. P. Webb, The Great Plains (New York: Ginn and Company, 1931), and “Geographical-Historical Concepts in American History,”Annals, Association of American Geographers, Vol. 50 (1960), pp. 85–93, emphasizes the inventions and cultural adjustment concept in settlement movement from the forests onto the Texas prairie and from the tall grass to the short grasslands of the central states. J. C. Malin, “The Grassland of North America: Its Occupance and the Challenge to Continuous Reappraisal,” in W. L. Thomas, ed., Man's Role in Changing the Face of the Earth (Chicago: The University of Chicago 1956), p. 356, states that settlement stopped at the Missouri River for lack of water transport and moved on westward when the railroads built into the area. H. H. Barrows, Geography of the Middle Illinois Valley, Illinois Geological Survey Bull. 15 (Springfield: Illinois State Journal Co., 1910), pp. 77–79, lists five reasons why “the prairies were generally shunned by the first comers,” and that the first prairie settlers located marginally to the timber land. L. Hewes, “Some Features of Early Woodland and Prairie Settlement in a Central Iowa County,”Annals, Association of American Geographers, Vol. 40 (1950), pp. 40–57, found that farms on the Iowa prairie by 1860 occupied “only prairie within three miles of woodland.” A. L. Meyer, “The Kankakee ‘Marsh’ of Northern Indiana and Illinois,”Papers, Michigan Academy of Sciences Arts and Letters, Vol. 21, 1935, and “Circulation and Settlement Patterns of the Calumet Region of Northwest Indiana and Northeast Illinois (The Second State of Occupance—Pioneer Settler and Subsistence Economy, 1830-1850),”Annals, Association of American Geographers, Vol. 46 (1956), pp. 312–56, presents the settlement sequence from forest to the marsh and wet prairie lands. McManis, op. cit., footnote 1, p. 73, in his entry study at the forest-prairie boundary found earlier settlement in the forest than on adjacent prairies by as much as five to seventeen years. One of many settlement descriptions found in county soil surveys is G. B. Jones, et al., “Soil Survey of Benton County, Indiana,”Field Operations of the Bureau of Soils, 1916 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1921), p. 1681, which says “Settlement was first made in this region about 1830. … Later settlement spread to other forested sections. About 1845 settlement began to encroach upon the higher parts of the prairie sections, the settlers making use of small open and “mole” ditches for drainage, but it was not until about 1875 that tile drainage was resorted to and the reclamation of the wettest lands was begun.”
- 8 McIntosh, op. cit., footnote 1 (1975), pp. 355–60, illustrates how entry types may be mapped to analyze process in settlement progression.
- 9 Entries “A” and “B”, interspaced within the first group of entrywomen, represented earlier homestead entries; both had been patented by commutation.
- 10 Janet Hargett, Washington National Record Center in Suitland, Md., and Don Snoddy, Nebraska Historical Society, Lincoln, Neb., provided verification of the soldier widow status for each of the women filing homestead entries along the mapped line. A war veteran, his widow, or children had the advantage in homesteading of having the five year residence requirement, with specified limitation, reduced by the number of years the veteran had been in the service.
- 11 Addison E. Sheldon, Land Systems and Land Policies in Nebraska (Lincoln: Nebraska State Historical Society, 1936), pp. 182, 185, 191, 202.
- 12 United States of America vs. Bartlett Richards, Will G. Comstock, et al., United States District Court, District of Nebraska, No. 101. June 15, 1906.
- 13 United States of America vs. Bartlett Richards, op. cit., footnote 12, Doc “O”, pp. 396–404. This reference provides the legal description of the fenced portion of the Spade Ranch. The number of acres calcualted from this description assumes 640 acres in each section. The first land survey of this area, however, was so poor that a second survey was required. A limited portion of the ranch area, as a result of the resurvey, has fewer than 640 acres to a section and section lines platted there are at odds with the four cardinal points of the compass. The acreage figure quoted here, because of the mapping irregularities, may be as much as several hundred acres more than the actual area fenced.
- 14 McIntosh, op. cit., footnote 1 (1974), identifies and characterizes the use of Forest Lieu lands in the Nebraska Sand Hills.
- 15 The unsettled rectangular area inset into the settled table area of example “A” was the area occupied by Fort Niobrara and its associated woodlot reserve.
- 16 Other new lands, where a general survey system was developed and land acquired in accordance with that system, might suggest a similar method of settlement mapping.
Annals of the Association of American Geographers
Volume 66, 1976 - Issue 4