Background+Information

The government does not usually tell Americans how they should live their lives or get involved in the lives of Americans. The one time government did get involved in people's lives was when the west was opened up for people to **settle** there.

These were the states of the west.

How did the government get involved in the west? To try and get people to move to the west, they would sell a person 160 acres of land for only ten dollars. Look below to see how big 160 acres is:

You can see how large **160 acres** is based on the size of the house in the lower left hand corner of the screen. All a person had to do to keep the 160 acres was live on it and farm the land. **Five years** after he moved onto the land, he would own the land forever.

The politicians who created this free land act decided to call it **The Homestead Act.** They believed that free land in the west could help many Americans achieve independence (being independent means to be able to live on your own without any help). People argued that giving people free land would help those who were homeless and help America become a strong farming nation.

Although politicians had good intentions, The Homestead Act fell short of its goal because **speculators** (these were people who were wanted to own lots of land in the West by buying up property) bought up lots of the land all at once. The speculators would hire lots of people to buy the land and then those people would sell the land back to the speculators. Now the speculators would have lots of land. Most average, middle-class people could not compete with speculators because they could not afford to move all of their belongings thousands of miles from their home to the West.

Also, the politicians who mostly lived in the east did not realize that 160 acres was not enough room in the west to create a really good farm. Farmers needed more land in the west to really create a good farm, so most average people who were not speculators did not do well in the West.

Politicians tried many other ways to organize the west, but many of the other acts also failed in a similar way. These unintended consequences are sometimes called **secondary consequences** because people did not expect them to happen when they originally wrote the legislation.