Montana has a historical vocabulary all its own, devising its own labels for people and processes of frontier settlement. I have described before how the word “pioneer” had its own meaning in the Treasure State, referring not to a doughty homesteader, but rather to a miner or cattleman who came before and held homesteaders in contempt.
Homesteaders might be labeled “pilgrims,” with the intimation they would come and go, would not be able to stick it out on the northern plains. Or, in a yet more disparaging usage, a struggling farmer might have to bear the label, “honyocker.”
A scholar writing in American Speech in 1958, discussing pejorative terms applied to farmers, observes, “Most common of these terms is honyocker, still a fighting word in the western Dakotas.” Although I can say with good certainty that the word emerged not in the Dakotas but in Montana.
And when? In the heyday of homesteading settlement in eastern Montana, I should think, which was the early years of the twentieth century. Sure enough, I ran an Ngram online to discern when the term began to be used in publications, and it was in 1909. “Honyocker” — the etymological genesis of which I still cannot vouch for — had some literary currency from 1909 to about 1918, then largely disappeared for a while.
In keeping with these circumstances, I find this notice in the Miles City Weekly Star, 23 June 1909: “The honyockers are coming in bunches and there is hardly a road in this part of the country that hasn’t been closed up with their wire fences.”
About the same time a sheep raiser from South Dakota declared, “I think the Woolies will be all right until the Honyocker and the Doukhober [Doukhobers were a group of communal farmers from Russia] crowds me off the range, and I think this state of affairs is not far distant.”
Somebody had to talk back on behalf of the honyockers, and their poetic champion, I discovered just last week, was Harrison E. Banks, a homesteader from Lavina, Montana. He wrote a ballad: “A Drylander’s Lullaby,” thirty-nine stanzas, first published in the Lavina Independent, 14 July 1922. In August it got statewide circulation with republication in the Montana Farmer-Stockman. The ballad begins:
We took up a homestead out on the plains
Where someone told us, “It never rains”
But we had faith we’d earn our bread
For we had visions of wealth ahead
You can guess how this came out. The Banks ballad recounts the trials of hail, grasshoppers, drouth, forty-below temperatures, and poor prices.
Our stock was gone, we’d raised no wheat
And mighty little we had to eat
Our eggs and butter we took to town
But the grocer said, “The price is down”
Not included in the ballad are Banks’s financial misadventures as recorded in local newspapers — delinquent taxes, court actions to force payment of debts. However, I am happy to note, according to the land patent index of the Bureau of Land Management, Banks proved up on his quarter section — the NE¼ of T8N R23W of the Montana Meridian — in 1914. As he says in his ballad, “Your Uncle Samuel has lost his bet / We’ve stayed five years and we ain’t starved yet.”
A successful representative of a disparaged class, Banks envisions the day his grandchildren will ride in a limousine and sing, “Here’s to Grand-dad, doggone his hide — He stuck!” They should have put that on his gravestone. “He stuck.”
