The Homestead Act and Daniel Freeman

On the last night of eighteen sixty-two, a young Union Army soldier named Daniel Freeman slipped away from a New Year's Eve party in Brownville, Nebraska, found a federal land office agent willing to conduct business just after midnight, and filed the first homestead claim in the history of the United States. The Homestead Act had gone into effect at the stroke of midnight on January first, eighteen sixty-three. Freeman filed his claim at twelve-ten in the morning.

The story of that midnight filing has been repeated often enough that historians treat it with some care. The essential facts are documented: Freeman did file a claim in Gage County, Nebraska, on January first, eighteen sixty-three, and it was the first claim officially processed under the new law. He returned from the war, built a farm and a cabin, raised a family, and farmed that land for the rest of his life. He died in nineteen oh-eight and was buried on his claim.

The land now sits within Homestead National Historical Park, near Beatrice, about an hour south of Lincoln. The park marks the site of the Freeman cabin and commemorates what followed his claim: one hundred sixty acres per claimant, free to anyone willing to live on it and improve it for five years. Between eighteen sixty-three and nineteen thirty-four, when the program largely ended, homesteaders claimed roughly two hundred seventy million acres of public land across the American West.

It was the largest land redistribution in American history. The beneficiaries were mostly white settlers from the eastern states and from Europe. The land itself had been home to Lakota, Pawnee, Omaha, and other peoples for centuries. The act could not acknowledge that. It assumed the land was empty and waiting. In southeast Nebraska, on the first morning of eighteen sixty-three, a young soldier with muddy boots put his name on a hundred and sixty acres and the century began.