(5) Tree Line

The Homestead Act is a legal document, which means it’s written in legalese…quite possibly the least accessible dialect of English imaginable. (Not to mention it’s in Ye Olde Legalese, which adds at least a dozen unnecessary words per item.)

So add a ton of difficulty points for the sheer frustration of attempting to translate the text.

But once you have your decoder ring set appropriately, it’s really not that difficult to parse out the gist: homestead for five years after making a claim and/or appropriate payment and you get to keep the allotted land. Sure, there are a few provisos, but it's not so opaque once you get the general drift.

At least it was only two pages long. We’d definitely hate to see what a modern version would look like with input from the IRS.