Did Homesteading Cause Dispossession of Indian Lands?

From Homesteading the Plains: Toward a New History, by Richard Edwards, Jacob K. Friefeld, and Rebecca S. Wingo (University of Nebraska Press, 2017), Kindle pp. 127-128:

Although homesteading occurred in thirty states, this chapter has focused on the process in the Great Plains, its center of gravity. As we have seen, the relationship between homesteading and dispossession [of Indian lands] differed depending on place and time.

In the Nebraska pattern, which held for eastern and central Nebraska, the federal government had largely cleared Indian land titles even before passage of the Homestead Act [in 1862], and homesteading mainly served as an equalizing corrective to other federal land policies that had grossly favored speculators and other large operators. California, Kansas, and Minnesota appear to mostly follow the Nebraska pattern, though more detailed studies would likely reveal more nuanced local patterns.

In Colorado [which quickly became a territory in the wake of the Pike's Peak Gold Rush in 1858], dispossession preceded homesteading by several decades, and homesteading simply came too late to have been a significant cause of dispossession. Montana followed the Colorado pattern, as did the northwest corner of Nebraska and seemingly New Mexico and Wyoming as well.

The Dakota pattern, by contrast, which characterized both Dakota Territory and Indian Territory, was driven by land seekers and their advocates becoming noisy and powerful advocates pressuring their federal representatives to open Indian lands to white settlement. In Dakota Territory and Indian Territory, homesteaders were not the only ones working to “restore” Indian lands, but their actions speeded up dispossession and emboldened federal leaders to open larger tracts of Indian lands for white settlement [in the wake of the Dawes Act in 1887].

This concludes our reexamination of the four stylized facts adopted by the scholarly consensus on homesteading. In analyzing the first three stylized facts, we find the consensus wrong or deeply flawed. In examining the fourth stylized fact, which links homesteading to dispossession, we arrive at a more nuanced conclusion than its simple statement allows. It is both wrong and right. Taken together, the consensus facts provide an altogether misleading interpretation of homesteading.