"Starving to Death on my Government Claim" is an American and Canadian satirical ballad. It clearly dates back to the latter part of the nineteenth century, the period of Homestead Claims. The Homestead Act of 1862 had opened large areas of the western U.S. to settlement, allowing settlers to lay claim to 160 acre sections in return for nominal payments. However, the settlers were required to live on their claims for five years before they could "prove up" and gain title to the property. Many settlers, like the one here, wound up living in impossible conditions because it was the only way to stake the claim. It was not at all rare for the homesteader to give up, sell the claim and head back east. Fowke's Canadian version "The Alberta Homesteader" is very much the same song, slightly adapted to the north country and the minor differences in Canada's homesteading laws (created when Canada took over the western part of the continent from the Hudson's Bay Company in 1871, although most migrants did not start out until the 1880s). At least three widely-known tunes have been used for this piece, "The Irish Washerwoman", "Vilikens and his Dinah" (also known as "Sweet Betsy from Pike") and "The Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane", but the largest number of collections seem to use "The Irish Washerwoman"; it may have been the original melody. It was printed in Randolph's Ozark Folksongs (1946-1950), E. Moore & C. Moore's Ballads and Folk Songs of the Southwest (1964) (as "Hurrah for Greer County"), Abernethy's Singin' Texas (1994) (as "The Greer County Bachelor"), Sandburg's The American Songbag (1927) (as "The Lane County Bachelor"), Fowke & Mills' Canada's Story in Song (as "The Alberta Homesteader"), Fowke & MacMillan's Penguin Book of Canadian Folk Songs (1973) (as "The Alberta Homesteader"), Lomax & Lomax's Folk Song USA (1947), Lomax & Lomax's American Ballads and Folk Songs (1934) (as "Greer County"), Sackett & Koch's Kansas Folklore (1961) (as "The Lane County Bachelor"), Cohen's American Folk Songs: A Regional Encyclopedia (2008) (as "The Lane County Bachelor"), Fife & Fife's Cowboy and Western Songs (1969) (as "The Lane County Bachelor"), Pound's American Ballads and Songs (1922), Coleman & Bregman's Songs of American Folks (1942) (as "The Lane County Bachelor") and Silber & Silber's Folksinger's Wordbook (1973). It is included in the Roud Folksong Index as #799. It was recorded by Bill Bender, The Happy Cowboy (78RPM) "Lane County Bachelor" (c. 1940), Cowboy Ed Crane (78RPM) "Starving to Death on a Government Claim" (1932), Benjamin Kincaid (78RPM) "The Lane County Bachelor" (1933), Burl Ives (78RPM) "Greer County Bachelor" (1949) and Pete Seeger on Frontier Ballads (1954) and American History in Ballad and Song, Vol. 1 (1960).