If we’re going to live in this level land we call the Great Plains — and I expect to do so until I die — then there are some fundamentals we need to come to terms with. Like the Homestead Act, signed by Abraham Lincoln on 20 May 1862. Unless we are Indigenous, we should think about what it means to be the heirs of a landed, settler society. Fortunately, we have Richard Edwards and his book, Great Plains Homesteaders, to help us out.
This is the new, slender volume in the University of Nebraska Press series, Discover the Great Plains. Edwards, the author, headed up the team of Nebraska scholars who conducted a deep data dive into the dynamics of the Homestead Act and published the results as Homesteading the Great Plains: Toward a New History in 2017. That leaves Edwards free in the current work to tell stories and pose interpretations — “What does this mean?” (which you’ll get if you’re Lutheran, or not).
Why do we need a new history of homesteading? Because we have been telling stories about it that don’t serve us well. Perhaps, I suggest timidly, we plains folk have been a little too vainglorious about our homesteading forebears. (No, I don’t think that’s really Grover Cleveland’s signature on the family patent you have framed, but it’s nice to have, anyway.)
And the historians, on the other hand, we have told a pretty gloomy story. As I learned it in college, the Homestead Act was a disaster. It was an ill-advised political scheme in the first place, lots of people cheated, more of them failed, it didn’t really establish family farming by actual settlers the way it was supposed to, and it destroyed the prairie environment to boot.
Whereas, Edwards — and he has the data — points out that the majority of claimants proved up. “They succeeded,” Edwards says, “through some combination of smarter choices, harder work, more self-denial, and better luck.”
Moreover, he insists, “They created a stable middle-class society of small property owners. . . . And they left a lasting mark on American culture.” Which is to say, short term and long term, the Homestead Act was a win — for the settler society, and for the country.
Then, too, the new work on homesteading brings forward some elemental definitions and findings for us to reflect on and carry forward. For instance, the charting (which I mean literally, with a nifty graph of homestead entries over time) of the two great eras of homesteading on the plains. First, from 1868 to the early 1890s, investing Kansas, Nebraska, and eastern Dakota Territory. Then, once the economic depression of the 1890s had passed, the second, larger era of homesteading, sprawling across the higher and drier plains of Colorado, Montana, and North Dakota, with Montana as the epicenter. There were large generational differences between the two eras.
Another important observation: the essential contributions of women to the success of homesteading. Single woman homesteaders perhaps have been given their due — indeed, they were folk-heroes in their own time — but the married women, the partners of male claimants, Edwards is the historian who truly sees them. “Homesteading families were much more likely to be successful when the wife and husband formed a mutually supportive and complementary team,” he concludes.
I’ll say more about this new history of homesteading, but for now I’ll just observe that Great Plains Homesteaders is a little book that would tuck into a Christmas stocking nicely.
