It says something about me as a historian that I am preoccupied with the origins of things. I mean, I seldom just launch into an abstract investigation into something in the past from which I am disconnected. I begin with a thing here and now, and then get curious about the question, Where did this come from? How did this thing come to be? A thing like, what kind of people we are here in Dakota Territory. How did it happen? Often the ready answer to such a question lies in what theorists like to call “sensitive dependence on initial conditions.” What were the circumstances of life like for the settler society on the northern plains? Likely those initial conditions set a certain course.
Recently I was asked to hold forth on the subject of homesteading for a gathering at the Welk Homestead, in Emmons County. Standing, of course, on a homestead, that of Ludwig Welk, proved up in 1902. Looking forward to the appearance, I reflected on what I had learned in college more than a half-century ago about the Homestead Act.
Which was, all the scholars said, a big mistake. The Homestead Act, they argued, was a failure: homesteaders had a miserable time on the plains, and most of them failed. Where they succeeded, the effect was to displace Indigenous peoples from their homelands and to destroy the native prairie. Besides that, there was a lot of fraud involved, and so the moral legacy of homesteading was shaky all around.
Over the past few years, however, a scholar named Richard Edwards and a team of researchers from the University of Nebraska, using the deep documentary resources now available digitally, have overturned the negative appraisal of homesteading with two books, Homesteading the Plains and Great Plains Homesteaders. Edwards declares homesteading, overall, a success, and the source for a catalog of aspirational virtues in prairie society: modesty, honesty, optimism, and a spirit of adventure, among others.
Two states, Nebraska and North Dakota, led all others in the percentage of land homesteaded: 45%. Since most homesteaders also acquired additional lands by preemption or timber claim, this means most of North Dakota was held by homesteaders, and homesteaders dominated its culture.
While I’m slinging academic jargon, though, I’m going to throw in another term, of recent origin: intersectionality. As William C. Sherman has informed us with his exhaustive studies, the vast majority of those folk taking up land were immigrants—North Dakota led all states in percentage of foreign-born population. Intersectionality, as an idea, invites us to consider that the combination of two or more identifiable factors may create something bigger than, or distinct in character from, any one of them. So consider this intersection: homesteader + immigrant.
What we got was the peculiar attitude of the northern plains (at least until recently) that the historian Catherine McNicol Stock has labeled “producerism.” Producerism is not the same as “practical” or “populist” or anything else. It is our thing. It is the respect and regard in which we hold real work and productive labor. It does not disparage intellectual or scientific endeavor. Producerism, though, insists such pursuits should accomplish something, like teaching or healing. And if you work with your hands, more power to you.
A century ago Willa Cather already feared this immigrant homesteader ideal was dead or dying. But not here, not in this radio space, nor will I admit the possibility it is gone. It may, however, be lying fallow.
