This month, I’ve been reading Homesteading the Plains: Toward a New History, by Richard Edwards, Jacob K. Friefeld, and Rebecca S. Wingo. I was able to finish it this week. The book was published in 2017 by the University of Nebraska Press. It is about the administration of the Homestead Act of 1862, which figures largely in the Little House books, especially the last four. The Homestead Act provided one hundred and sixty acres of land free from the Federal Government to anyone who would pay a small filing fee, build a house on the land, raise crops, and live there for five years.
The book begins with a fascinating paradox. In the popular imagination, the Homestead Act was an incredible success, providing ordinary people with access to free land and economic opportunity. In general, the works of authors such as Willa Cather, Elinore Pruitt Stewart, and Laura Ingalls Wilder depict its impact positively. (Stewart’s work was turned into the movie Heartland in 1979.) More recently, the Act has been praised by figures from both sides of the political spectrum; the book includes quotes from Barack Obama and George Will. (2-3) At the same time, academic historians normally see the Homestead Act as a failure. Scholars believe that 1) most homesteaders failed to prove up on their claims, 2) homesteading was full of fraud and corruption, and 3) homesteading caused Native American land dispossession. (13)
Which understanding of homesteading is correct?
The three authors of Homesteading the Plains attempt to answer this question, using several approaches. First, they examine the numbers in government reports used by previous history scholars to make their claims about the failure of the Homestead Act. Second, they investigate the way that the General Land Office enforced the provisions of the act. Third, and perhaps most importantly, they take advantage of the digitization of large numbers of homestead records and their free availability to researchers. Their team created a database of records for a study area of ten townships in two counties in Nebraska (five in each): Custer County in central part of the state and Dawes County in the northwest. A careful analysis of all of these sources enables them to consider the claims of scholars in detail.
By the end of the book, the authors recommend that scholars should revise their previous understanding of homesteading on pretty much all fronts:
– A majority of homesteaders did succeed in proving up and obtaining title to their land – by their estimate, between 56% and 69% of homesteaders between 1862 and 1880, and 55% of those between 1881 and 1900. (40)
– Scholars’ ideas about the frequency of fraud have been unduly influenced by anecdotes told by General Land Office administrators. Fraud was actually less than ten percent of claims – perhaps as low as 3.2%, no higher than 8.5%. (87) (Strikingly, the authors note that recent studies suggest that the incidence of fraud in the Medicare program averages about 8.3%.)
– In many states, homesteading was not part of the story of Native American land dispossession, because Indian land claims had been extinguished before large-scale homesteading began there. However, the authors admit that homesteading was deeply implicated in the western parts of North and South Dakota and the entire state of Oklahoma.
The authors also encourage scholars and those who write history textbooks to recognize the importance of the Homestead Act to the settlement of the west, to take note of what homesteading meant for women (both single women and widows), and to understand that homesteading always involved community building, not just individual effort.
I’ve been thinking about that 55% figure for success for homesteaders after 1881 and before 1900, because I’ve been working on the chapter in my book about Laura and Almanzo’s early years of marriage. Laura’s father, Charles Ingalls, was able to prove up on his homestead in 1886. However, Charles and his family moved to their house on Third Street in De Smet in 1887 and never again lived on the homestead. They sold their land outside of town in 1892. Almanzo Wilder also was able to prove up on his homestead, but debt, diphtheria, fire, and dry weather forced Laura and Almanzo off the farm and into town in 1890. How this happened is discussed in The First Four Years, the adult novel Laura wrote sometime in the 1930s but was not published until 1971, after she and her daughter Rose had passed away. Certainly, 55% is a majority of homesteaders, but it’s not an overwhelming majority. And those who did succeed in getting title to the land did not always stay on the farm.
The Homestead Act actually also comes in for a bit of abuse in the Little House books. The descriptions of how the Act works in the books set in Dakota Territory (especially By the Shores of Silver Lake, Little Town on the Prairie, and These Happy Golden Years) is not always positive. Pa’s description of homesteading as a “bet” against the Federal Government and the necessity of Mrs. McKee’s living on the homestead when her husband must work in town to support the family are two examples. This makes me wonder if Laura and Rose had ever read descriptions of some of the reports from the General Land Office during the late 1800s and early 1900s, or even whether they were aware of the work of Fred Shannon, a historian during the 1930s and 1940s who wrote a number of the negative descriptions of homesteading that have been quoted by subsequent authors. This is akin to the wonderings of those who write about Wilder concerning how much exposure Laura and Rose had to the ideas of historian Frederick Jackson Turner and his frontier thesis.
These are individual stories and concerns however. As far as the book goes, I think that Edwards, Friefeld, and Wingo do a superb job of supporting their claims. I hope that other researchers can make use of the digitized homesteading records in ways to continue to help us understand the experience of farmers on the plains during the late 1800s, both individually and in the aggregate.
As always, thanks for following along.
(Page numbers are taken from Richard Edwards, Jacob K. Friefeld, and Rebecca S. Wingo, Homesteading the Plains: Toward a New History [Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 2017].)
Links:
My blog entry for The First Four Years
The Faith of Laura Ingalls Wilder 