Lincoln's other legacy. [View all]

[bluedigger]

[div class="excerpt" style="border-left: 1px solid #bfbfbf; border-top: 1px solid #bfbfbf; border-right: 1px solid #bfbfbf; border-radius: 0.3077em 0.3077em 0em 0em; box-shadow: 2px 2px 6px #bfbfbf;"]How Lincoln settled the West[div class="excerpt" style="border-left: 1px solid #bfbfbf; border-bottom: 1px solid #bfbfbf; border-right: 1px solid #bfbfbf; border-radius: 0em 0em 0.3077em 0.3077em; background-color: #f4f4f4; box-shadow: 2px 2px 6px #bfbfbf;"]WESTCLIFFE — All across the West they stand forlorn and forgotten. Many have tumbledown roofs, sagging walls, gaping doors. Yet these modest 10-by-12-foot homestead cabins represent a revolution in public-land policy, an American dream born of Thomas Jefferson’s belief that we should become a nation of farmers.

This year marks the 150th anniversary of the 1862 Homestead Act, the federal law that changed the West forever and provided a new start for urban emigrants, immigrant families and single women.

I grew up on a former homestead in southeast Colorado of 160 acres, a rectangle bisected diagonally by the Amity Ditch. I attended high school on the High Plains, the short grass prairie of songbirds, raptors, jackrabbits, grama grass, and a view as far as the eye can see. Farms and ranches across Colorado, Wyoming, Montana and New Mexico had all been homesteaded as were farms in the Dakotas and eastern Oregon and Washington.

This year the Homestead Act, passed by Congress during the Civil War, celebrates one of the great private land opportunities in world history. Only a young, brawny nation such as the United States would give away free land.

http://www.cortezjournal.com/article/20121116/COLUMNISTS23/121119931/-1/News01