Usually operating within a confined local jurisdiction, these pseudo-governmental entities sought to regulate land sales in places where there was little or no legal apparatus to deal with land-related quarrels of any size.
[2] In the twentieth century, sociologists suggested that claim clubs were a pioneer adaptation of democratic bodies on the East Coast, including town halls.
[3] Claim clubs were essentially designed to "do what politicians refused to do: make land available to needy settlers.
Period accounts report that in some areas, claim clubs were regarded with "the same majesty of the law of the Supreme Court of the United States.
This became the regular policy of some claim clubs, designed to force the sale by absentee owners to actual residents, or at least to local speculators.
[7] The institution of the claim club is said to have "reached perfection" in Iowa, where more than a hundred such groups carefully regulated land commerce until the United States government intervened.
[9] According to one report, "Such clubs sprang up 'as readily as did the sunflowers wherever the prairie sod was broken' in Illinois, Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska..."[7] Other reports corroborate the spread of claim clubs, with their presence felt in the aforementioned states, as well as New Mexico, North Dakota, Wyoming, Montana, Colorado and Washington.
The group used violent means to impose "frontier justice", including dunking in the frozen Missouri River, running off legitimate settlers, and other forms of vigilantism.
[14] The club ran Omaha until the Supreme Court ruled against their violent measures in Baker v. Morton, a hallmark in contract law cases.
The original aim of the club was "to secure the peaceful adjustment of all cases in which claims in this then un-surveyed country overlapped each other."
[15][16] The Platte Valley Claim Club was established in Fremont in August, 1856 to settle land disputes, and folded by late 1857.
[17] Fort Saint Vrain, Nebraska Territory also had a claim club in the late 1850s that was designed to keep the town from failing.