On January 1, 1863, a Nebraska farmer filed the first claim under the new Homestead Act signed into law by President Lincoln. Settlers were already moving onto the vast federal lands in the West, and they were using their own sweat equity to make it habitable. They didn’t want to pay for the land, too. Many early homesteads failed, but more than 1.6 million farmers and ranchers eventually fulfilled their contracts and became landowners in the West.
