Cabin rights: Difference between revisions

At an early period in the settlement of the American Frontier, pioneers asserted their claims to parts of wild lands by blazing trees around the desired boundary, and later comers customarily recognized the claims: tomahawk rights, they were called.

Tomahawk rights were a means by which settlers during early period of frontier settlements in the United States would claim title to a tract of land. The process was to deaden a few trees near the head of a spring, and mark the bark of one or more of them with the initials or name of the person who made the claim.^[1]

Tomahawk rights gave the settler no legal title unless followed by occupation or a warrant and a patent secured from the land office. But the Tomahawk rights were quite generally recognized by the early settlers, and many of them were purchased cheaply by other settlers who did not want to enter into a controversy with the claimants who made them.^[1]

Building a cabin and raising a crop, however small, of grain of any kind, led to cabin rights, which were recognized not only by custom but also by law.^[2] The laws of the colonies and states varied in their requirements of the settler. In Virginia the occupant was entitled to 400 acres (1.6 km²) of land and to a preemption right to 1,000 acres (4 km²) more adjoining, to be secured in either case by a land-office warrant, the basis of a later patent or grant from colonial or state authorities.

• Dictionary of American History by James Truslow Adams, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1940