Homesteading the Plains: Toward a New History
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Homesteading the Plains: Toward a New History
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Overview
2018 Nebraska Book Award
2018 Outstanding Academic Title, selected by Choice
Homesteading the Plains offers a bold new look at the history of homesteading, overturning what for decades has been the orthodox scholarly view. The authors begin by noting the striking disparity between the public’s perception of homesteading as a cherished part of our national narrative and most scholars’ harshly negative and dismissive treatment.
Homesteading the Plains reexamines old data and draws from newly available digitized records to reassess the current interpretation’s four principal tenets: homesteading was a minor factor in farm formation, with most Western farmers purchasing their land; most homesteaders failed to prove up their claims; the homesteading process was rife with corruption and fraud; and homesteading caused Indian land dispossession. Using data instead of anecdotes and focusing mainly on the nineteenth century, Homesteading the Plains demonstrates that the first three tenets are wrong and the fourth only partially true. In short, the public’s perception of homesteading is perhaps more accurate than the one scholars have constructed.
Homesteading the Plains provides the basis for an understanding of homesteading that is startlingly different from current scholarly orthodoxy.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781496202291 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Nebraska |
| Publication date: | 09/01/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 294 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
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CHAPTER 1
Competing Visions of Our Homesteading Past
Homesteading — free land! — in the government's vast western expanse has become a cherished part of our national story. Ordinary people, including many who had few worldly goods, moved to remote areas and staked their claims in a gamble to fashion better futures for themselves. The public reveres homesteaders as hardy and deserving recipients of federal largesse, common folks who used their opportunity to make farms for themselves, turn the United States into a food-producing colossus, and help create the vast American middle class. Popular culture celebrates homesteading as a big deal, a wise and highly democratic opening of valuable public lands to "actual settlers." Today probably 46 million adult Americans (20 percent of all American adults), and possibly as many as 93 million (40 percent), are estimated to be descended from homesteaders. Many families, often living in cities far removed from where their forebears staked their claims, retain a treasured story, a photograph, or a memory of their homesteading ancestors.
The 1862 Homestead Act, signed into law by President Abraham Lincoln, was formally "an act to secure homesteads to actual settlers on the public domain." Under it, the federal government offered settlers free public land. There was a small processing fee to pay, you had to live on your claim for five years (later reduced to three), and then you "proved up" your claim. Homesteading was open to male citizens over twenty-one, war veterans of any age, widows and single women, married women who were headsof households, and even new immigrants if they simply affirmed their intention to become citizens. After 1866, when a civil rights act established that blacks were indeed citizens, African Americans could homestead, too, as could citizens of Asian descent after an 1898 Supreme Court decision. The act permitted homesteading anywhere on "unappropriated" public lands (lands not set aside for other purposes) where such land was otherwise available for sale. The law, and later related legislation, thus opened lands in thirty states, though principally homesteading occurred in the states north of Texas and west of the Missouri River.
Daniel Freeman was the first homesteader. A physician, Civil War scout, and sometime sheriff, Freeman filed his claim to a farm site in Beatrice, Nebraska, a few minutes after the Homestead Act took effect at midnight on January 1, 1863. He likely had a little extra help from the Brownville, Nebraska, land office, which opened up in the middle of the night so he could be first. Five years later he obtained his patent. A half-century later, Isabel Proctor, a young, single teacher then living in Minnesota, received a letter from her brother in Montana: "Come out and homestead," he wrote. "The government is giving land away." Isabel moved to Rapelje, Montana, a remote community in the Stillwater County flatlands and staked her claim. Every weekday during the school year she rode her horse fifteen miles to and from town to teach her class, often riding through heavy snow and bitter cold. By residing on her land for three years with no lengthy absences, she fulfilled the residency requirement of the Homestead Act, allowing her to prove up her claim. She owned the 160 acres the rest of her long life. Freeman, Proctor, and approximately 1.6 million others successfully claimed free land under the act.
Homesteaders claiming free land and building successful lives became deeply rooted in American culture, literature, and memory — in such books as Willa Cather's O Pioneers! and O. E. Rølvaag's Giants in the Earth, in histories like Mari Sandoz's Old Jules and personal journals like Elizabeth Corey's Bachelor Bess, in Elinore Pruitt Stewart's letters to the Atlantic Monthly (later published as Letters of a Woman Homesteader and the basis for the 1979 movie Heartland starring Rip Torn and Conchita Farrell), and in Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House on the Prairie and the hit television series based on it. Presidents on both the left and the right praised it: John F. Kennedy declared the Homestead Act to be "probably the single greatest stimulus to national development ever enacted." George W. Bush proclaimed, "In America's ideal of freedom, citizens find the dignity and security of economic independence. ... This is the broader definition of liberty that motivated the Homestead Act." Barack Obama noted, "There are certain things we can only do together. ... Only a union could harness the courage of our pioneers to settle the American West, which is why [Lincoln] passed a Homestead Act giving a tract of land to anyone seeking a stake in our growing economy." The author Mari Sandoz in 1963 declared simply, "The Homestead Act was the hope of the poor man." Conservative columnist George Will in 2005 enthused, "Rarely has a social program worked so well." In 2012 the left-leaning Center for American Progress named the Homestead Act one of its "Top 10 Middle-Class Acts of Congress." Agreeing on little else, both sides concur that the Homestead Act was a huge American success.
Conservatives and liberals praise the act because each finds in it something of value — the right celebrates the fact that it created many small property holders, and the left praises it because it was so democratic, not restricting its benefits to white men of property but rather opening opportunity to nearly everyone. Although the vast majority of homesteaders were white, some were African American, famously including the "Exodusters" fleeing postbellum oppression in the South. Moreover, the act was not a theoretical curiosum: millions of settlers staked their claims and, some years later, received their patents, legal proof that they now owned the land.
Colliding with the public's positive vision of homesteading, however, is another, much darker and even dismissive view constructed and accepted by most scholars. They see the whole homesteading venture as marginal and somehow unseemly, illicit, tainted — and clearly a failure. As historian Katherine Harris wrote, among New Western History scholars there have been many differing judgments on the success or failure of various western enterprises, and scholars have even debated what the very terms "success" and "failure" might mean. But, she observed, there is one striking exception: "One western enterprise, however, stands outside the debate, thanks to an uncharacteristic unanimity of opinion. Lacking glamour and now quaintly anachronistic, homesteading, all contenders agree, was a failure."
Indeed, recent scholars have largely abandoned the study of homesteading per se and moved on. They focus instead on the broader process of how white settlement of the West intersected with Native American cultures, gender, the environment, and other topics of contemporary interest. In this broader settlement story, homesteading's role is usually conflated with settlement generally. There has been some outstanding research on a few homesteading topics, especially women's participation and ethnic settlement, but very little on homesteading in general. Scholars' lack of interest in homesteading and its near disappearance in their telling of the American narrative would have been a surprising denouement for earlier generations of public lands scholars. Even homesteading's harshest critics in earlier generations understood the lure of free land to be the central and in many ways determining element in attracting settlers to the Great Plains and parts of the interior West. America's greatest public lands scholar, Paul Gates, declared the Homestead Act "one of the most important laws which have been enacted in the history of this country." Now it is barely mentioned, virtually banished from the college textbooks. How did we arrive at the curious situation where one of the country's "most important laws," remembered with deep affection by the public, holds so little favor or even interest among today's scholars?
The sharp disconnect between the public's highly positive image of homesteading and scholars' negative and disapproving assessment is stunning. The schizophrenia of our historical memory is exquisitely but painfully illustrated in the beautiful and historically sensitive film Land of Dreams: Homesteading America, which introduces visitors to the impressive exhibits and grounds of the Homestead National Monument of America. The monument is the National Park Service's homage to homesteaders, built on the location of first homesteader Daniel Freeman's Nebraska farm. Land of Dreams includes vignettes of fourth- and fifth-generation descendants of white and black homesteaders who proudly describe the courage and persistence of their ancestors who staked their claims and made successful new lives for themselves despite the hostile and isolating prairie environment. These positive images are interspersed with interviews with Native Americans who describe, with palpable pain and sadness, how the land previously belonged to them but was stolen away, leaving them dispossessed. The viewer is left with strong feelings of admiration for homesteaders and an equally strong discomfort or even guilt for the historical injustice of the dispossession for which homesteading seemed to be the cause.
Homesteading was one way in which the federal government transferred parts of America's enormous public domain to private ownership. The U.S. government acquired nearly 1.5 billion acres in the lower forty-eight states between 1781 and 1853, through the Revolutionary War treaty, the Louisiana Purchase, the Mexican War cessions, the settlement of boundary disputes with the British over Canada, and a few other minor acquisitions. From the outset many individuals, whether landless or the mightiest land barons, mining companies, and speculators, eagerly looked on public land as a source of potential riches for themselves. But the government was also interested in moving public land into private hands for a variety of motives that shifted over time. Initially it sought to use land sales to fund the federal budget, but later it distributed land to stimulate canal and railroad growth, to occupy remote regions and thereby forestall threats from foreign powers, to populate the West in order to foster private economic development, and to create a land-owning, small-farmer middle class that would sustain a democratic society.
We can trace in broad terms the disposition of this 1.442 billion-acre public domain. The national government today continues possession of about 26 percent (380 million acres). It transferred approximately 22 percent (328 million acres) to individual states, most of which was sold, and homesteaders claimed about 19 percent (270 million, or possibly as much as 285 million, acres). The balance, roughly 32 percent (between 449 and 464 million acres) was transferred to private owners through sales, grants to railroad corporations, veterans' bonuses, agricultural college grants, and other distributions, or it was stolen, misappropriated, reserved, or otherwise caused to disappear from the public land rolls. Homesteading accounted for between a quarter and a third of the public land transferred by the federal government to private owners.
Even if the federal government had not wanted to distribute its land, it would have found it nearly impossible to avoid it — indeed, in those instances where it tried to restrict settlement, it almost uniformly failed. The first pressure it faced was the constant rush of squatters onto public land. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many people eagerly sought land in the unsettled regions of the public domain to make farms for themselves. Like the flow of illegal immigration today, squatting was pervasive, insistent, unstoppable, and enjoyed considerable public sympathy. Attempts to hold off unauthorized settlement proved futile, whether in the Military Tracts, the Black Hills, or Indian lands elsewhere. The modern eye might see nineteenth-century government land programs as similar to today's real estate projects, say, a new housing development where interested buyers show up to consider purchasing property that has been clearly defined and laid out. But squatting meant that the process occurred in reverse order: settlers moved into an unorganized region and claimed land, and the laws and surveys and titles raced to catch up.
The long history of preemption mapped this phenomenon. "Preemption" was simply a euphemism for legalizing squatters. Starting in 1830, Congress periodically passed preemption acts which, recognizing the reality on the ground, forgave intrusions by squatters and allowed them to legalize their claims. These bills in effect said that squatting was wrong, but as with medieval papal indulgences, the sin could be forgiven by payment, in this case usually $1.25 per acre. Preemptors had the first right to purchase land once it was surveyed, and since squatters typically arrived first to stake the best land, the preemption price was often a bargain. In the 1841 Preemption Act, Congress abandoned the idea that squatting was trespass and wrong and authorized (future) preemptions, but attempted to restrict them to already surveyed lands. By 1853 Congress had abandoned this restriction, too, in recognition of the fact that squatters just moved in wherever they wanted, whether or not the land had been surveyed. Many factors contributed to the momentum to legalize preemptions, but the most basic was simply the impossibility of stopping the flow of people onto the land.
A second pressure forcing the government to divest itself of its land were speculators, or less pejoratively, land investors, who were a continual presence. Squatters took action right on the land, but speculators operated everywhere, not only on the ground but in nearby cities like Omaha and Denver, in fashionable New York and Boston offices, and in the halls of Congress. The Nebraska City News in September 1867, for example, noted that "seven thousand acres of land lying west of Lincoln were entered by a gentleman from Pennsylvania" and the Kansas Farmer groused that the worst land monopolists used agricultural college scrip to gobble up vast tracts. Although it was (and is) easy to focus on the few immensely successful and therefore notorious speculators, the truth was that nearly every landowner tried to profit from rising land prices. Indeed, many players both large and small invested in land, a long-established activity that was hardly dishonorable. Aside from Henry George and the Single-Taxers, no serious effort was made to prevent people from profiting from the rising value of their land, for the simple fact that it was widely assumed to be the landowner's right, and besides, so many hoped to benefit.
Stories of speculators profiting from insider dealing, fraud, and outright theft provoked great outrage because most people distinguished between those landowners, labeled "speculators," who were only interested in profiting from the rising value of their holdings, and the quicker the better, and other landowners, "actual settlers" in the words of the Homestead Act's title, who wanted land as a long-term holding on which to build a farm and create a lifetime livelihood. The St. Paul Weekly Pioneer, observing that two whole counties had nearly been gobbled up by speculators using agricultural college scrip and military bounty warrants, thundered, "These two counties had far better have been visited by the locusts of Egypt or the grasshoppers of the Red River than by these speculators." The fact that some actual settlers did not succeed, and others changed their plans after the hard experience of trying to make a farm in hostile conditions, did not change matters. Moreover, as Gilbert Fite has noted, "Despite the fact that millions of acres fell into the hands of corporations and speculators who held them for profitable prices, there was no real lack of good land on the Minnesota, Dakota, Nebraska, and Kansas frontier in the late 1860s and early 1870s." Nineteenth-century farmers were said to be perpetually overinvested in land, betting that land prices would rise, and as historian Roy Robbins explained, "Many settlers had invested in lands on credit hoping to pay out of the increase in the value of their holdings. ... Some were able to do so but many were not." Investors who grabbed title to public land simply to profit from its rising price were widely disliked, although they had much influence in the halls of Congress and other power centers.
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Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
List of Tables
Acknowledgments
1. Competing Visions of Our Homesteading Past
2. Recalculating Homesteading’s Reach and Success
3. Evolving Views on Homesteading Fraud
4. Estimating the Extent of Fraud
5. Homesteading and Indian Land Dispossession
6. Women Proving Up Their Claims
7. Mapping Community Formation
8. Envisioning a New History of Homesteading
Appendix 1: An Annotated Review of GLO Circulars, 1862–1904
Appendix 2: Sources for Chapter 5 Graphs and Maps
Notes
Bibliography
Index