ABSTRACT
It is easy to assume that those pioneers moving on to earlier uncultivated land in the cotton states, the Prairies, the timbered regions of the upper Lake district, and out into the only partially charted Great West, generally took up free homesteads in areas where they could make a living. Cash sales of government land included the transactions under the Desert Land and the Timber and Stone acts as well as the Pre-emption Act, and commutation under the Homestead Act. The land reformers of the 1840's had hopes of devising a measure that would forever end land speculation and monopoly and that would dispose of government land by gift only—and to persons who would have inalienable title. They wanted the remainder of the public domain to be held as a reservoir to furnish relief to wage laborers and release for servile tenants for ages to come.
