"I'm thinking of the early American homesteading days when a man could move in to land that had previously been occupied by Native Americans who were driven off

"I'm thinking of the early American homesteading days when a man could move in to land that had previously been occupied by Native Americans who were driven off or killed by the US Army and militias." So, you just have to go and take some land from someone else by military force and then you can 'live there for free.' Historically, this would have involved a lot of subsistence agriculture (a widespread activity across the pre-European New World region) supplemented by hunting wild animals, which consumed a good fraction of time and energy - so, not 'free' at least in terms of energy expenditure. Given the increase in human population over the 20th century, such approaches are infeasible today, since if the global transport of food produced by industrialized agriculture from zones of overproduction to zones of underproduction came to a halt, mass famine would quickly ensue.