How Lincoln settled the West Its been 150 years since presidents
pen brought flood of farmers 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 Washi