I apologize if this sounds stupid, but when I think about the past it seems like things shouldn’t have worked the way they did, but they still did anyways.
They didn’t have computers or cloud networks to record who owned what. So, how was it all tracked? Was it possible for someone just walk out west, stake a claim on a piece of land, build a house and live there for 30 years while everyone just kind of accepted it?
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Once land was settled, there would have been a deed, just as there is now. Public records have always been a big part of what governments do, often stored at the county level.
The process of settling land as people went west got interesting, and the question of how land should be legally divvied up once the U.S. government had laid claim to it was a source of ongoing controversy. A settler certainly could try to go far west and squat on some land, but going far past the frontier meant the native inhabitants might have their own ideas about that.
In some cases, especially early on, my impression is it was basically a surge of people trying to claim what they could and hope people would respect it. Later, especially in the big Great Plains states, it was more of a “divide it into lots and sell it off, first come, first served.”
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