Purpose
Claim clubs were essentially designed to "do what politicians refused to do: Make land available to needy settlers." Their general purpose was to protect the first settlers to arrive on unclaimed lands, particularly in their rights to speculate and cultivate. With the continuous availability of frontier lands from the 1830s through the 1890s, settlers kept moving west. Each claim club established its own rules of governance and enforcement; however, these were almost always vigilante actions. Period accounts report that in some areas, claim clubs were regarded with "the same majesty of the law of the Supreme Court of the United States."
East Coast land speculators were prone to roam the recently opened Western United States and select the most desirable spots with the intent to outbid the settler and real claimant when the lands were offered for sale at the Land Office. Claim jumpers were also a problem. Generally they sought to be present at a land sale when the first claimant was not there. In many cases, when people who claimed land and then did not live on it and had not developed it with a shelter, fencing or other structures, "claim jumpers" would move in.
This was one scenario where claim clubs would enter. The absentee-owned land would be exploited directly and indirectly, or just simply seized with the title held "by Claim Club." Members might vote expensive local improvements for the land, including roads and schoolhouses, and assign the heavy costs of development as a tax burden on the land held by absentees. This became the regular policy of some claim clubs, designed to force the sale by absentee owners to actual residents, or at least to local speculators.
Claim clubs did not always protect the honest settler against the scheming speculator. Although claim club law sometimes shielded of the simple homesteader, it was also a tool and a weapon of the speculator. Claim clubs acted not only to protect a squatter's title to land he lived on and was cultivating, but also to help the same squatter defend unoccupied second and third tracts against the claim of later arrivals.
The institution of the claim club is said to have "reached perfection" in Iowa, where more than 100 such groups carefully regulated land commerce until the United States government intervened.
Read more about this topic: Claim Club
Famous quotes containing the word purpose:
“But this fully answered Johns purpose toward Betty, for as she did not understand, she highly admired him; and he concluded by again repeating that learning was a fine thing for a man but twas both useless and blameworthy for a woman either to write or read.”
—Sarah Fielding (17101768)
“Some of my friends spoke as if I was coming to the woods on purpose to freeze myself.”
—Henry David Thoreau (18171862)
“The chief want, in every State that I have been into, was a high and earnest purpose in its inhabitants. This alone draws out the great resources of Nature, and at last taxes her beyond her resources; for man naturally dies out of her.”
—Henry David Thoreau (18171862)