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Of Berry Pickers, Shanty Boys, And The Jack Pine Bird: Patterns Of Settlement And Subsistence In Nineteenth Century Oscoda County, Rose Lockwood Moore

Masters Theses

The provisions of the Homestead Act of 1863 (U.S. Congress 1862a) required a settlement pattern of dispersed single families on small tracts of land, which, in turn, affected the subsistence strategies available to the homesteaders. The interaction of federal land legislation with the ecosystem of southern Oscoda County resulted in marked spatial and temporal differences between the tracts that were homesteaded as opposed to those acquired for their timber. A sample population of quarter sections was analyzed in terms of the physical and biotic environments, date of entry, and use. The analysis confirmed that the timber lands were located on …