Cabin rights — or tomahawk rights — were an informal process utilized by early white settlers of the Appalachian and Old Northwest frontiers in the mid- to late 18th century to establish priority of ownership to newly occupied land.
Tomahawk rights
To claim tomahawk rights, the claimant typically girdled several trees near the head of a spring, then blazed the bark of one or more of them with their initials or name. Tomahawk rights gave the settler no legal title unless followed by occupation or a warrant and a patent secured from the land office. But the Tomahawk rights were quite generally recognized by the early settlers, and many of them were purchased cheaply by other settlers who did not want to enter into a controversy with the claimants who made them. After 1778, in Virginia, tomahawk rights were put to the test. According to a local historian of northwest Virginia:
Virginia gave to every bona fide settler who built a log cabin and raised a crop of corn before 1778, a title to 400 acres of land and a pre-emption to 1000 acres more adjoining. These commissioners were appointed to give certificates of these “settlement rights.” The certificate with the surveyor’s plat was sent to the land office at Richmond, and in six months if no caveat was offered, the patent was issued, and the title was complete. There was previous to the settlement right a right, which was no right in law, called the “tomahawk right.” A hunter would deaden a few trees about a spring and cut his name in the bark of others, and then claim the land in after years. Some land-owners paid them voluntarily a trifle to get rid of them; others did not. The settlement-right to 400 acres was certified to and a certificate issued upon payment of ten shillings per one hundred acres. The cost of certificate was two shillings and six pence.
Cabin rights
Building a cabin and raising a crop of grain of any kind, however small, led to cabin rights, which were recognized not only by custom but also by law. The laws of the colonies and states varied in their requirements of the settler. In Virginia the occupant was entitled to of land and to a pre-emption right to more adjoining, to be secured in either case by a land-office warrant, the basis of a later patent or grant from colonial or state authorities.
