Tom Isern

Let me tell you about a visit I made to the Library of Congress the first week of January. Specifically, to the library’s American Folklife Center. I was following the trail of a prairie balladeer named Myra Hull.

The Friday evening of the 24th of April, 2020, you remember that spring when we descended into the COVID time of troubles, enabled by Dr. Kelly, I lit up a live streaming camera and commenced chatting and singing my way through the first episode of the Willow Creek Folk School. This wild hair grew from my checkered history as a folky in the 1970s and was, in retrospect, a response to the looming isolation of the pandemic.

We’re expecting our second great grandchild in the spring, but I am done with proposing names. The name I put forward for great grandson #1 was Badger; suffice it to say, that is not his given name. Except when he’s at our house, he’s still known as The Badger.

Although water witching, or dowsing — the location of underground water resources by use of a willow wand or some other sort of divining rod — was common in the settler society of the northern plains, the practice had its contemptuous critics.

It was the business of the United States Geological Survey, in the progressive era of the early twentieth century, to provide authoritative answers to public questions. Science reigned in those days, or so the scientists thought.

In July of 1885 a settler named John Blaskey was 22 feet down in a well he was excavating on his farm near Conway, Walsh County. He was filling buckets with dirt, and his wife was at the surface drawing them up with a windlass.

Early American colonists, like the ancient Hebrews and Romans, knew all about hand-dug wells and their dangers. When settlement reached the Great Plains, the need for and peril from hand-dug wells was all the more acute.

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.

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.

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.