In his nifty new history of the Homestead Act, Richard Edwards says the “three perils” of homesteading on the Great Plains were grasshoppers, prairie fires, and childbirth — and good on him for recognizing the third of these as the most perilous of all. Earlier historians of homesteading were so focused on masculine aspects of their subject, they neglected the obvious.
Edwards goes on to outline numerous other difficulties of settlement at the grassroots, pointing out that whereas we think of land as the crucial criterion for successful settlement, water was just as essential. Finding a dependable supply of good water “seemed a never-ending task,” Edwards says, which “created a mentality of water scarcity.”
“Living water,” that is, a running stream that persisted through the summer, was a fair solution, but not a common one. Across the middle of North Dakota, many relied on sloughs (or “prairie lakes,” as we prefer to call them today), but if you’ve ever waded a slough in late summer and come down with a case of the prairie itch, then you know why a slough was an unsatisfactory source for potable water. Edwards concludes, “Homesteaders found the best answer was having a well.”
Which was not a simple solution, however, because in the nineteenth century, most all household wells were hand-dug, either by the settler himself or by a professional (and I use the term “professional” loosely). Actually, it took more than one person to do the job.
One man worked in the hole, perhaps six feet in diameter, tight space, dim light, getting dimmer as he went deeper. There he filled a bucket with earth, which his partner on the surface drew up with a rope and emptied, then returned to the digger down below. The walls were curbed with stone in the process, and not uncommonly the bucket going up or down knocked a stone loose to fall on the poor digger.
The digger descended into the earth and was drawn back up with the bucket, which meant there had to be a windlass mounted up top. Riding the bucket up or down was fraught with peril, but worse was the threat of “foul air,” as they said — “coal gas” or “the damps” — methane, carbon dioxide, nitrogen, or hydrogen sulfide, all gasses heavier than air, and thus liable to accumulate down below and overcome the well digger.
Probably the most famous accident to befall a well-digging homesteader was the one suffered by Jules Sandoz, as recounted by his daughter Mari in her biography of Old Jules. Jules was down in the hole filling the bucket and had two Swedes helping him up above. Their pranks were bad enough, but worse, they let Jules down with a frayed rope. It snapped, he plummeted, and the result was two broken ankles.
They hauled the tough old locator from his Nebraska claim to Fort Robinson, there to be treated by none other than the famous physician Walter Reed. Dr. Reed proposed to amputate; Jules, always ready to resort to firepower, threatened to shoot him if he tried. Against all apparent odds, he recovered.
Just this past Sunday a Lutheran sermon reminded me how many biblical narratives and dialogs are centered on hand-dug wells. There are great examples in Greece dating from the seventh century BC. Ancient Roman engineers carried well-digging technology into North Africa and Britain. Hand-dug wells thus were fixtures from colonial times in America — and, as we shall see, on North Dakota homesteads in the nineteenth century.
