It echoed the American homestead system by offering ownership of 160 acres of land free (except for a small registration fee) to any man over 18 or any woman heading a household.
From 1871 onwards, the Government of Canada negotiated the Numbered Treaties on behalf of the Crown with the First Nations of western Canada to extinguish aboriginal title, establish reserves and establish federal obligations such as education and health care in exchange for lands to settle.
In 1876, the Act was amended to prohibit single women from claiming a homestead, except those classified as the head of a household, which effectively limited female participation to widows with dependent children; this contrasted with the United States, where single women were permitted to homestead.
[1] The Act also launched the Dominion Lands Survey, which laid the framework for the layout of the Prairie provinces that continues to this day.
This allowed most farmsteads to quickly double in size, and was especially important in the southern Palliser's Triangle area of the prairies, which was very arid.
Since it was extremely difficult to farm wheat profitably if you had to transport it over 20 miles (32 km) by wagon, this was a major discouragement.
The Hudson's Bay Company, which had once controlled the entire prairies, had kept five percent of the land as part of the terms of the surrender of its charter.
The homestead provisions of the Act, designed to encourage agricultural settlement on the prairies, had little application to the conditions in the Northwest Territories.