public lands

Lands belonging to the US federal government that are not otherwise reserved for specific purposes, such as public recreation, conservation, or military use. After 1862, people were able to homestead on designated public lands. Much public land was also granted to the railway companies that opened up the American West. Today, much public land is leased by mining, lumbering, and other concerns.

Public land first came into being when seven of the thirteen states ratifying the Constitution ceded their land claims in the west to the new federal government. The 1803 Louisiana Purchase and all subsequent accessions of territory brought more land into the public domain. (The sole exception was Texas, which by its statehood compact kept its unclaimed areas as state public land.) Much of this was allotted to veterans of US wars before 1861. With the 1862 Homestead Act, public land – mapped by the US Land Office Survey – was thrown open to homesteaders. Over the years, other public land has been used to house and support land-grant institutions, or granted directly to individual states. Nowadays, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), in the Department of the Interior, is responsible for ‘total management’ of some 1.1 million sq km/420,000 sq mi of public lands, largely in the West and in Alaska. Under a similar mandate to the national forests, multiple use of these lands is encouraged.