The Homestead Act promised a simple bargain: any adult citizen could claim 160 acres of public land, and after living on it for five years the property was theirs. In a progressive twist for the time, the law allowed women and Black Americans to claim land alongside white men. The act had stalled in Congress for years because Southern legislators feared it would create new abolitionist states and upset the balance of power in the Senate. It finally passed only after the South seceded from the Union.
The strongest champion of the Homestead Act was a congressman with the wonderfully allegorical name Galusha Grow. Grow had a nearly religious belief in the “honest toiler” and the moral virtue of giving ordinary citizens a chance to own land. Opening millions of acres of public domain to those willing to work it struck him as both practical and just. On paper, the idea made perfect sense.
But buried in the law was a small provision that would open the door to enormous fraud: the commutation clause. Instead of living on the land for five years and receiving it for free, a claimant who could prove six months of residence could purchase the property outright for $1.25 an acre.
For men with enterprise, a clever mind, and perhaps a flexible sense of morality, the clause opened an endless horizon of forgery and cheap land.
Almost immediately, speculators with cash began to exploit the law. Their method was simple: hire “dummy entrymen” to file claims, pretend to live on the land for six months, and then swear before the General Land Office that they had met all the legal requirements. Sometimes the entrymen built a crude shack or plowed a token furrow so their affidavit had some semblance of truth. The land offices were overwhelmed with applications and lacked the resources to verify them, so they largely relied on sworn testimony. The entrymen were paid handsomely for their services, sometimes as much as one hundred dollars. That was a lot of money for six months of make-believe farming.
Once the entrymen received title, they quickly transferred the property to their sponsor. The entrymen themselves might be laborers, relatives, or almost anyone respectable enough to sign a document and in need of a buck. Some made multiple claims, altering the spelling of their names or using a middle name as a surname. Because the land offices were poorly coordinated, it was easy to move from district to district filing new claims. So began a quiet labor market for phoney signatures.
Large cattle interests accelerated the process in the 1870s by filing strategic claims near water sources. They understood that in the arid West, control of water meant control of the surrounding range. The tactic became known as “keying the land,” and large ranchers were the first to organize the fraud at scale.