Things were pretty raw out on Duck Creek, northeast of Hettinger in Adams County, in 1907, but the Milwaukee Railroad had arrived. Soon, over in Lemmon, on the South Dakota line, there was a flourishing newspaper, the State-line Herald. By which we know that “the boys” on Duck Creek, as the editor said, were singing some stanzas about their life as homesteaders.
Don’t ask me my name, an old bachelor I am
And I bet all the same I’ve an elegant plan
You’ll find me out west on the Duck Creek plain
Starving to death on a government claim
Their stanzas sounded a lot like those penned by George Ryckman, near Westfield, across the river in Emmons County, in 1894. His chorus went,
Hurrah for Emmons County, the land of the free
The home of the grasshopper, the bedbug and flea
I sing loud its praises, I sing loud its fame
While starving to death on a government claim
Ryckman’s ballad was published in the Emmons County Record on 21 September 1894. By my paper trail, though, the ballad goes back further, through multiple states, and ultimately to Lane County, Kansas, in about 1886, where they sang about the “Lane County Bachelor.”
For there was a symbiotic relationship between the writers of ballads and the editors of newspapers on the homesteading frontier. The newspapers paid their bills by publishing homesteading notices, which were necessary for homesteaders to prove up their claims. Because they needed copy to fill out their columns, the editors published the ballads scrawled out and brought in by their local citizens.
Consequently, I have quite a collection of homesteading ballads, hundreds of texts. Recently, at a conference in Sioux Falls devoted to the history of homesteading, I presented a catalog of eight homesteading ballads well documented and worthy of remembrance — a canon, you might call it, in literary terms. I’ll share it with you now.
“Little Old Sod Shanty on the Claim,” anthem of the plains, the homesteader’s favorite
“The Stern Old Bachelor,” a comic song about a man alone on a homestead claim
“The Kinkaider’s Song,” a ballad from the Nebraska sandhills, the only one in the canon written by a woman
“The Homesteader’s Lament,” a.k.a. “The Lane County Bachelor”
“The Homesteader’s Farewell,” a lament by the same guy who wrote “Stern Old Bachelor”
“After the Strip Is Open,” a song about the land rush in Oklahoma in 1893
“Beulah Land,” a.k.a. “Dakota Land” and “Kansas Land” and many other local variants
And of course, “Home on the Range,” sung throughout the Great Plains, and actually a popular music context song for high school boys in North Dakota in the 1930s
These are all folk songs, our songs. We hold them in common, as people of the plains.
