Land Grants Quotes

A few years back Texas was a wilderness, the home of the uncivilized and wandering Comanche and other tribes of Indians, who waged a constant warfare against the Spanish settlements…. In order to restrain these savages and bring them into subjection, the government opened Texas for settlement. Foreign emigrants were invited and called to that country. American enterprise accepted the invitation and promptly responded to the call

Europeans have learned of the immense extent of our country and its limitless resources … They have also begun, or soon will begin, to learn of the Homestead law and provisions for securing to every man not only life, liberty and the freedom to pursue happiness but also the means of gaining an independent livelihood.

I am opposed to the wholesale giving away of the public lands to railroad corporations and other like institutions; at the same time, I believe that the government can encourage, by gifts, great national enterprises which are for the common weal and are so placed that they cannot properly expect local support.

The kings of Spain brought us the conquistadores and masters, whose footprints remained in the circular land grants assigned to those searching for gold in the sands of rivers, an abusive and shameful form of exploitation, traces of which can be noted from the air in many places around the country.

Poor settlers coming from England, Scotland, and other parts of Europe were granted fifty acres of land, free of charge, plus a home and a garden. Distinct from its neighbors to the north, Georgia experimented with a social order that neither exploited the lower classes nor favored the rich. Its founders deliberately sought to convert the territory into a haven for hardworking families. They aimed to do something completely unprecedented: to build a “free labor” colony.

The West, at bottom, is a form of society rather than an area. It is the term applied to the region whose social conditions result from the application of older institutions and ideas to the transforming influences of free land. By this application, a new environment is suddenly entered, freedom of opportunity is opened, the cake of custom is broken, and new activities, new lines of growth, new institutions and new ideals, are brought into existence.

All Germans and Swiss emigrating to the colonies will be awarded transportation subsidies and land, provided they are not Catholic.

Whoever shall settle any Colonie out of the limits of the Manhattes Island, shall be obliged to satisfy the Indians for the land they shall settle upon

Railroads, fostered by government loans and land grants, opened the way for settlement and poured a flood of European immigrants and restless pioneers from all sections of the Union into the government lands. The army of the United States pushed back the Indian

The old charters of Massachusetts, Virginia, and the Carolinas had given title to strips of territory extending from the Atlantic westward to the Pacific.

Under the Timber and Stone Act of 1878, which might well have been called the 'Dust and Ashes Act,' any citizen of the United States could take up one hundred and sixty acres of timber land and, by paying two dollars and a half an acre for it, obtain title.

The history of Montana has been of the government giving land grants to people that could not possibly turn it into decent farms. And that's destroying their lives. So they don't see the government as something that's out there to help them.

I believe with $200,000 I can pass our bill. I do not think we can get any legislation this session for land grants or changing line of road unless we pay more for it than it is worth.

Each Servant has then also a Right to take up fifty Acres of Land, where he can find any unpatented [unowned]: But that is no great Privilege, for any one may have as good a right for a piece of Eight

After the Republican party got into power it turned around and granted the public domain to corporations and opened it to private speculators .... in violation of the principle announced in the platform of 1852. The land grants were a mistake, to draw it mildly and we may as well all admit it now ; it was a great wrong to grant a single acre of the public domain to corporations.... Every acre of the public lands should have been held for homes for the people, under a well-guarded homestead law. That was the proper way to deal with the public domain; but instead of that it was thrown open to ruthless speculators, who have speculated in it until the poor people of this country to-day have to fight for standing room

It was only through the Government's help that anything this gargantuan in size could be accomplished, much as landing on the Moon. It was not rugged individualists who built the railroad, it was rugged corporations who formed and financed themselves as entities. It was the rugged federal government that came up with the federal loans, and the land grants, that enabled it to be built. Amid all the romance of building the railroad we tend to forget that it was one of the major industrial enterprises of its age.

I do not think we can get any legislation this session for extension of land grants unless we pay more for it than it is worth.

Free lands and the consciousness of working out their social destiny did more than turn the Westerner to material interests and devote him to a restless existence. They promoted equality among the Western settlers, and reacted as a check on the aristocratic influences of the East.

It was thought good policy to settle those lands as fast as possible, and that the granting them to men of the first consequence who were likeliest and best able to procure large bodies of people to settle on them was the most probable means of effecting the end proposed.

In the decade before the Civil War various north and south lines of railway were projected and some of these were assisted by grants of land from the Federal Government.

In 1862, Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act, a bill opening one half million square miles of territory in the western United States for settlement.