Preemption was a term used in the nineteenth century to refer to a settler's right to purchase

public land In all modern states, a portion of land is held by central or local governments. This is called public land, state land, or Crown land (Australia, and Canada). The system of tenure of public land, and the terminology used, varies between countrie ...

at a federally set minimum price; it was a

right of first refusal Right of first refusal (ROFR or RFR) is a contractual right that gives its holder the option to enter a business transaction with the owner of something, according to specified terms, before the owner is entitled to enter into that transaction ...

. Usually this was conferred to male heads of households who developed the property into a farm. If he was a citizen or was taking steps to become one and he and his family developed the land (buildings, fields, fences) he had the right to then buy that land for the minimum price. Land was otherwise sold through auction, typically at a price too high for these settlers. Preemption is similar to

squatter's rights Adverse possession, sometimes colloquially described as "squatter's rights", is a legal principle in the Anglo-American common law under which a person who does not have legal title to a piece of property—usually land ( real property)—may ...

and mining claims. Preemption was politically controversial, primarily among land speculators and their allies in government. In the early history of the United States, and even to some degree during the colonial era, settlers were moving into the "virgin wilderness" and building homes and farms without regard to land title. The improvements increased the value of all the nearby property. Eventually the political opposition by the speculators crumbled and the

Preemption Act of 1841 The Preemption Act of 1841, also known as the Distributive Preemption Act ( 27 Cong., Ch. 16; ), was a US federal law approved on September 4, 1841. It was designed to "appropriate the proceeds of the sales of public lands... and to grant 'pre-empt ...

was passed. The Preemption Act of 1841 was abused by speculators who now operated as money lending businesses, or were able to coerce accomplices to falsely claim they were living on land that they wanted. A common example of the latter practice was in the logging industry in the upper

Midwest The Midwestern United States, also referred to as the Midwest or the American Midwest, is one of four Census Bureau Region, census regions of the United States Census Bureau (also known as "Region 2"). It occupies the northern central part of ...

, where mill workers who lived in mill towns made a preemption claim on

timber Lumber is wood that has been processed into dimensional lumber, including beams and planks or boards, a stage in the process of wood production. Lumber is mainly used for construction framing, as well as finishing (floors, wall panels, wi ...

land that would then be harvested by the mill owners. Another avenue of fraud was the

Desert Land Act The Desert Land Act is a United States federal law which was passed by the United States Congress on March 3, 1877, to encourage and promote the economic development of the arid and semiarid public lands within certain states of the Western state ...

, which did not include the residence requirement, although the preempting claimant still needed to improve the land, primarily by providing a water source. In California, tens of thousands of acres of land were claimed via false preemptors – "dummy entrymen" – on behalf of several large land speculating companies. The Preemption Act of 1841 was pivotal, but was neither the beginning nor the end of the issue of preemption. The

Land Act of 1804 The Land Act of 1804 was U.S. legislation that refined provisions for the purchase of U.S. public land north of the Ohio River and east of the Mississippi river. At the time, the region was divided into the Indiana Territory and the State of Ohio. ...

, the

Homestead Act The Homestead Acts were several laws in the United States by which an applicant could acquire ownership of government land or the public domain, typically called a homestead. In all, more than of public land, or nearly 10 percent of th ...

, the aforementioned Desert Land Act, and other similar land acts addressed the issue of preemption.

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