I’ve been arguing, along with Richard Edwards and his new book, Great Plains Homesteaders, that we should rethink our history with the Homestead Act on the Great Plains. You can do some of this for yourself, of course. If you have a homesteading ancestor, then you can order up the land patent file from the National Archives and learn the gritty details of proving up. You can scroll through the digitized pages of your local and regional newspapers and watch the notices of final proof blink in across the landscape like farmyard lights at prairie dusk.
I’m really thinking, though, with Edwards, about how we think about these things, what they mean to us as the heirs of this land and this history. In his conclusion, “The Homesteader's Legacy,” Edwards walks us through the process. Sure, he says, the onset of technological progress and the erosion of international markets have degraded the numbers and status of family farms in the region, “But in its heyday,” Edwards declares, “homesteading was a powerful force.” As for the legacies of that force, he observes, “Many family farms today — whatever their scale or technological sophistication — “trace their origins to their ancestor’s homesteads.”
“Homesteading’s most visible legacy,” we read, “was the physical transformation of the land.” Some of this we today regret, however, “Few in American society challenged the plow-up, and most cheered. . . . few saw the grassland as something worth saving.” By this process, “the homesteaders transformed the Great Plains into a food producing colossus.” Also a surplus-producing colossus, we might add, putting too many of us out of business.
So far it sounds like a wash, but now, unexpectedly, Jacobs shifts the calculus — to the social and, I dare say, national benefits of the Homestead Act. First, it “generated local communities that were deeply committed to democratic customs.” Homesteaders swore affidavits for one another at the land office, fought prairie fires, built schools and school boards, comported themselves as “small property owners [who were] much more egalitarian than our modern culture is.”
Sure, they had their community conflicts, even homicidal ones — Edwards tells the story of a young neighbor of his ancestors in Mountrail County who courted a girl from the Finnish settlement and got himself thrown into a well for his trouble. A story I intend to look into — but not to gainsay how more positively, as Edwards says, “Homesteading fostered a distinctive way of thinking about and behaving in the world. . . . It fostered a belief in how an upstanding person ought to behave in the world. It encouraged character traits — call them virtues, for lack of a better word — that people of the region admired in others and strived to achieve in themselves.” Resolution, steadfastness, modesty, optimism, a spirit of adventure — “This constellation of virtues is how they wanted to be.” Aspirational virtues, we would say today.
“This is the legacy the homesteaders bequeathed us,” Edwards says. “So if, as at present in our national society, it celebrates wealth and celebrity and being a winner (and belittling others), people will scramble to achieve those attributes. The homesteading generation celebrated a different set of personal virtues, ones centered on personal responsibility, honesty, and modesty. . . . This is the legacy the homesteaders bequeathed us.”
My own immersion in historical documentation confirms Jacobs’s assessment as to these virtues. If we scan the prairies and do not see them today, then that’s on us, not the homesteaders.
