The Dynamic Between Property Law and Individual Settlement Violence

The doctrine of preemption is a doctrine that essentially allows settlers to stake out unsurveyed land. And upon registering a preemption, settlers would have to fulfill certain requirements such as cultivating that land and maybe building a house or some kind of structure on that land. What we see in the historical record is in fact, a lot of settler violence in order to preempt land, and that violence is then treated with impunity by the state.