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Year-by-year maps of homesteading claims and patents in the American West and South and the dispossession of Native American lands.

The Homestead Act of 1862 offered Americans the opportunity to claim parcels of "public land," occupy and improve it for five years, and then receive title to it. This map visualizes over time and space the more than 2.3 million claims and 900,000 "patents" granting ownership made and issued in the half-century after passage of the act. By 1912, homesteaders had transformed more than 125 million acres—more than 5% of the total acreage of the entire United States—from public lands to private property.

During the same period, Americans and their government dispossessed Native Americans of large portions of the American West. While not doing it full justice, this map pays particular attention to the dispossession of those lands through violence and claims on Indian reservations that the federal government defined as "surplus."

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