Tag: american west
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The Economics of the American Homestead Act
The Homestead Act of 1862 promised free land to settlers willing to farm it, but railroad grants, commutation clauses, and speculative purchasing ensured that much of the public domain ended up in large holdings rather than small family farms. This post traces the Act's mechanisms, its actual distributional outcomes, and the economic constraints that doomed many homesteaders.
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The Economics of the American Cattle Frontier
The open-range cattle industry of 1866-1886 was an economic response to a specific transportation cost structure. When refrigerated railcars arrived, the industry's entire geographic logic inverted — and the cattle frontier disappeared within a decade. This is how transportation revolutions actually work.
