"How The West Was Really Won"
Inspiring piece by Fergus M. Bordewich in the WSJ on The Homestead Act, signed by Abraham Lincoln, which celebrates its 150th anniversary this week, and which transformed the country -- especially the American West:

The Homestead Act offered 160 acres of free public land to settlers who would build a home on it and farm it for at least five years. Anyone 21 years old who was either a citizen or declared the intention to become one could stake a claim.

The law, declared Horace Greeley, the editor of the New York Tribune, was "one of the most beneficent and vital reforms ever attempted in any age or clime--a reform calculated to diminish sensibly the number of paupers and idlers and increase the proportion of working, self-subsisting farmers in the land evermore." Bombast aside, his words were not far from the truth.

In all, four million settlers would file homestead claims to 270 million acres in 30 states, 10% of the land mass of the United States. (The size permitted for homesteads was eventually increased to 640 acres as settlers moved into drier regions.) Although the number of claims dropped off during the Great Depression, hundreds continued to be filed annually through the 1960s. Homesteading ended in the lower 48 states in 1976 but continued in Alaska, where the last homesteader filed his claim in 1979.

...Among Galusha Grow's "soldiers of peace" were single women, who would eventually stake about 10% of all claims. So too those newly liberated from slavery.

"African Americans wanted what white settlers wanted--opportunity, community, land--but they were also looking for a place where there was less racial violence than they faced in the South, where they weren't going to be lynched," says Lonnie Bunch, director of the National Museum of African-American History in Washington, D.C. "Land ownership was central to the community's notions of what freedom meant, and it was the key way for them to become middle class."

Eventually dozens of all-black settlements were founded on the Great Plains. One of the first was Nicodemus, Kan., 200 miles west of Topeka. Says Angela Bates, the director of the Nicodemus Historical Society, "Out here they could become the mayor, the sheriff, shopkeepers, blacksmiths, landowners--anything."