by H. W. Brands
Such bogus claims could be challenged, as Howard Ruede discovered. His agent led him and some potential partners to a pair of tracts not far from Osborne. “These two claims—one of 160 and one of 80 acres—would have to be contested before we could get hold of them,” Ruede wrote home. “And it would cost us about $50.… As none of us could afford that, those claims will lie open awhile yet.” The next day Ruede and his friends found available tracts farther from town. “My claim is the S.W. ¼ of section 4; Levin is next west, and Jim west of Levin, all on the same section line.… The land is of the intermediate grade, neither bluff nor bottom land, and is covered for the most part with buffalo grass, which Mr. S.”—the agent—“says is a sure sign of its being good. This buffalo grass does not get more than 3 inches long, and about the middle of August turns into hay—cures on the ground, and if you pull up a bunch, you are sure to find green grass close to the roots.” Ruede and the other two returned to Osborne and the next day filed their claims with the federal land agent there. Lacking the money to purchase the land by preemption, they applied for homestead status. “We must live on it five years. The first two years we live ‘off and on’—that is, we must sleep on it once in a while and make some improvements on it within 6 months, or it will be forfeited. It is to be our home, but we can hire out by the day or month as we like.”11
Had Ruede been a farmer, he would have begun plowing his quarter section at once. But like many other homesteaders he was a town boy and saw his land claim more as an investment—or even a speculation—than as a commitment to the farmer’s life. He would “prove up” his claim (complete the requirements for a clear deed) and sell to a genuine son of the soil. Meanwhile he would find work where he could and make the minimal improvements on his property, starting with a house.
For the cash-strapped, the cheapest accommodation was a dugout. “We found a spot … where a patch of wild sunflowers had killed the grass,” Ruede recorded. “Here we began to dig, and by noon had made some progress. We laid off the ground 10 × 14 feet, and we’ll have to dig it about 6 feet deep.” Ruede and Jim, his neighbor and coworker on the project, broke for dinner before resuming their labors. “We went back to the hole and in about two hours had dug about half of it to the depth of two feet.” A spring shower compelled the diggers to quit, which was fine with them, as their hands were blistered and their backs sore. “Talk about hard work, will you? … The ground is packed just as hard as could be, and it is no fun to pick and shovel it.” But already Ruede felt the pride of ownership. “My dugout is at the head of the prettiest draw on my claim, and if the clouds clear off we will have it finished by the middle of next week.”
The pace of digging quickened when Levin joined them. The packed soil didn’t loosen the deeper they got, but neither did it turn to anything harder. “We have not found a single stone as big as a marble yet,” Ruede declared as they approached the five-foot mark. Late on the fourth day, a Saturday, the hole was completed, and after a break for Sunday—which happened to be Easter, celebrated in the German style—they started on the superstructure. Levin and Jim walked to Osborne for some lumber, which they paid for with a few days’ work at the sawmill there. Ruede paid cash—$1.50—for a burr-oak ridgepole. More rain delayed construction further, but by the following Friday the hole in the prairie was beginning to look like a house, or what passed for a house in western Kansas. “We finished off the gable ends of the dugout and got the boards on the rafters, ready for the straw.” Over the straw went sod, cut in 12 by 18 by 2½ inch bricks. “Covered the whole roof with a layer of sod, and then threw dirt on it, and the ‘house’ was finished.” The three moved directly in, and the next day Ruede wrote, “We begin to feel right at home.”12
FOR THREE MEN to share quarters (in this instance pending excavation and construction of dugouts for Levin and Jim) wasn’t unusual on the Plains. Men greatly outnumbered women among the homesteaders, as they did among frontier folk generally. The aphorist wasn’t wrong who declared that “plains travel and frontier life are peculiarly severe upon women and oxen.” Yet if life on the Middle Border—as the Plains were often called—was hard on women, it could be rewarding as well. The Homestead Act drew no distinction between men and women, making it easier for women to acquire property in their own names in the West than in other parts of the country. Women, moreover, gained value from allowing underage husbands to acquire homesteads. The 1862 act required claimants to be twenty-one unless they were “the head of a family.” Howard Ruede learned of a nineteen-year-old who coveted a particular quarter section. For several months the young man kept other claimants away with the assertion that he was holding it for his brother-in-law, who was coming from Iowa. But as more people arrived in that county, his ruse wore thin. He was tempted to lie about his age and file a preemption claim. But should his lie become known, his claim would be revoked and he would lose the improvements he made to the property. He had a female friend, however, the daughter of a neighbor, who agreed to a scam to help him resolve his dilemma. “He saddled his pony and went over to Mary Ann’s home to confer with her,” Ruede explained. “She looked favorably on the project and consented to become his bride.… He continued his journey to the county seat and got a license to wed. Next morning he was over at Mary Ann’s bright and early. She was busy with the week’s washing, but took her hands out of the suds, dried them, and went with Tommy to the nearest justice of the peace, by whom they were made man and wife.… Mary Ann returned to her wash tubs and Tommy hiked for Kirwin where the land office was located. The officials were not overinquisitive and Tommy got his homestead papers.”13
More frequently the women followed the men to the Plains, often at months’ or years’ remove. Husbands left wives and children with in-laws farther east while they broke the sod, built the dugouts, and otherwise smoothed the roughest edges of frontier life. Eventually the wives and little ones followed. Unattached men returned east after claiming and partly improving their quarter section, hopeful that landownership made them appealing to unattached women. Winter was courtship season; when the snows and cold precluded outdoor work, a young man’s fancy turned to love. More than a few dugout doors rattled in the icy wind, secured by a wire and a notice to claim jumpers: “Gone to get a wife.”14
The strangeness of their new surroundings caused many women to despair. One young mother held her emotions in check only to break down when her young son, seeing nothing familiar or pleasing from horizon to horizon, fell to the dirt floor and cried, “Mama, will we always have to live here?” Her heart sank further when, upon being told that they would indeed live there, the boy wailed, “And will we have to die here, too?”15
The prairie hid dangers of a sort those from the East didn’t know. Children—and adults—could be lost in blizzards only several feet from the doors of their houses. Rattlesnakes coiled in the tall grass. Indians remained a threat till the late 1870s. Distance itself became an enemy when business in town took the man of a house away for days at a time, leaving his wife and children to look out for the drifters that inhabit every frontier. Distance also magnified the ordinary trials of nineteenth-century life. Many women bore babies unattended by anyone except their husbands; complications could quickly become dire. The isolation of Plains life bred depression, which could be lethal to the depressed and, in extreme cases, to other members of the family.
HOWARD RUEDE HOPED to marry, but for the present the women he wanted to bring west were his mother and sister. His father would accompany them, and the family would be reunited. But he knew he couldn’t ask the women to live in a dugout. “I don’t want them to come till I get a decent house for them to live in, and that can be done in a couple of years,” he explained. Meanwhile he scrimped on every expense imaginable. “I’ll get Hoot to cut my hair; the barber here charges 25 cents, and that is a big sum for me now.” His clothes wore out and weren’t replaced. “Underclothes I don’t wear.… Socks there are none.” In summer he dispensed with shoes. Necessities in t
he East became luxuries on the Plains. “I never know what time it is when I get out of bed, because clocks are like angels’ visits—few and far between.… Most people out here don’t drink real coffee because it is too expensive. Green coffee berries sell at anywhere from 40 to 60 cents a pound.” (By comparison, Ruede reckoned that his whole house, including lumber, a door and hinges, and a window, cost less than ten dollars to build.) “So rye coffee is used a great deal—parched brown or black according to whether the users like a strong or mild drink.… When rye is not used, wheat is sometimes used for coffee but is considered inferior.”16
Hardships came in other forms. “The people who live in sod houses, and, in fact, all who live under a dirt roof, are pestered with swarms of bed bugs.… You don’t have to keep a dog in order to have plenty of fleas, for they are natives, too, and do their best to drive out the intruding settlers. Just have a dirt floor and you have fleas, sure. They seem to spring from the dust of the earth.” Fleas were the primary reason settlers got out of their dugouts and sod houses as soon as they could afford wooden ones. “People who have board floors are not bothered so much with these fleas.” Smaller creatures caused the “Kansas itch”—“which attacks nearly everybody within a short time after arrival here.… There is only one way in which a sufferer can get relief: scratching. And that aggravates the itching and sometimes produces raw sore spots.”
There were compensations. Itching aside, Ruede had never been healthier. He attributed his well-being to the massive doses of fresh air. “If I catch cold one day, the wind takes it away the next. I can stand more wet feet here than at home”—Pennsylvania—“and can sleep in an awful drafty room without taking cold.” He ate well (except for the coffee). Much of his first season he devoted to acquiring capital to develop his claim, which was to say he hired himself out to neighbors; they paid cash and typically furnished bed and board. “For breakfast I ate about ½ lb. steak, a plateful of fried potatoes, 5 fried eggs, two rounds of bread, a slice of cake and two ginger cakes, and washed it all down with two cups of coffee.” The food got better as the work grew heavier. “When you work for somebody in the harvest field, you may count on getting No. 1 board. They set a first-rate table then.” Of one day in particular he wrote, “Had a staving good supper: fried rabbits”—flushed and killed in the process of the harvest—“bread and butter, onions, radishes, pie, and coffee ad libitum.” Work continued after supper, but “when we got to the house we found Horace was making ice cream. After putting away the team and feeding them, I went back and had about a pint of the luxury.”17
IN MARCH 1878 Ruede tallied his accounts for the previous month. He had been in Kansas a year and had spent most of that time hiring himself by the day and week to neighbors (meaning persons who lived within a fifty-mile radius of his homestead) who needed work done (nearly everyone) and who could pay cash for the labor (a much smaller group). He earned about five dollars a week, plus food and lodging. By the beginning of 1878 he had accumulated some hundred dollars, but he soon spent it all. “Total expenses for February were $105.01, divided as follows: oxen, yoke and chain, $61.25; wagon, $30; household goods and tools, $4.50; provisions, $4.30; oil”—to keep down the fleas—“30 cents; sundries, $4.41.”18
During the first few years, most small Plains farms weren’t expected to yield a profit. Homesteaders plowed money into the soil even as they turned the prairie sod. The money arrived in the homesteaders’ pockets; it went to purchase provisions and the labor of the likes of Howard Ruede. In time, though, the new land had to return the favor: to produce sufficient profit to sustain those homesteaders who intended to make the Middle Border their home and to attract the second wave of immigrants who would buy out the speculators.
Profits, however, proved elusive. The farmers could control certain of their revenue and costs—by working long hours and weeks, by forgoing new shoes (or, as with Ruede, shoes at all), by subsisting in dugouts longer than they had intended. But they had no control over such central elements of the production process as the weather. Plains weather was notoriously fickle—or it would have been notorious had the homesteaders possessed any substantial knowledge of it. The remarkable fact was that whole tiers of the Middle Border were settled on the basis of wishful thinking about the climate of the region. Boosters so often told themselves that rain followed the plow that they came to believe it. But no one had any idea whether it was true, for rainfall records were either nonexistent or so short as to make extrapolation meaningless.
John Wesley Powell was sure it wasn’t true. And he was equally certain that most of the American West would never yield agricultural profits, at least not by any honest accounting scheme. Powell’s death-defying descent of the Colorado had made him a national celebrity, the Civil War hero who extended into peacetime his exploits on behalf of the American people. He didn’t hurt his cause by befriending reporters, by recounting the adventure in evocative present-tense prose (“We are now ready to start on our way down the Great Unknown”), and by cultivating friendships in Washington. Congress funded further expeditions, which Powell parlayed into control of the scientific agenda for the public domain in the West.
At the top of Powell’s agenda was disabusing the American people of the notion that settlement habits and patterns developed in the East might be readily translated to the West. In the same season when Howard Ruede was tallying his cash flow, Powell prepared a report on what he provocatively labeled the “Arid Region” of the United States. “The eastern portion of the United States is supplied with abundant rainfall for agricultural purposes, receiving the necessary amount from the evaporation of the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico,” Powell wrote. “But westward the amount of aqueous precipitation diminishes in a general way until at last a region is reached where the climate is so arid that agriculture is not successful without irrigation. This Arid Region begins about midway in the Great Plains and extends across the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Ocean.”19
Powell took twenty inches of rain or its equivalent as the minimum to support unirrigated agriculture. The twenty-inch isohyet—the line connecting locations with the threshold amount of rainfall—ran roughly along the 100th meridian; from there to the Pacific, with the exception of the high mountains (which were unsuited to farming for other reasons) and a strip along the coast, the West was a great desert. Nor was the twenty-inch isohyet any guarantee of agricultural success. Rain along that line often fell irregularly. “Many droughts will occur; many seasons in a long series will be fruitless; and it may be doubted whether, on the whole, agriculture will prove remunerative.” East of the isohyet was a band Powell called the “Subhumid Region.” Much of the region of the Plains settled to date lay in this region. Though the rainfall averaged as much as twenty-eight inches, Powell warned that even here agriculture was risky. “In the western portion disastrous droughts will be frequent; in the eastern portion infrequent.”
Powell adopted the dispassionate tone of the scientist, but his purpose was explicitly political. He aimed to burst the bubbles of speculation that were populating the Plains with innocents whose fortunes would be lost and lives ruined by the land dealers, hucksters, railroad agents, and civic boosters who preached that rain followed the plow and other such nonsense. Beyond revealing the hucksters for what they were, Powell hoped to lay the foundation for the settlement of such portions of the West as could sustain populations over the long term.
Powell’s West was divided into three parts. The “irrigable lands” were a small portion of the whole West, located on or near streams that could be dammed to focus the rainfall and snowmelt of an entire desert watershed upon a few fields, which could thereby thrive. The “timber lands” were the wooded mountain slopes and mesas. These lands could not be farmed but might be reserved for the production of lumber and firewood. The “pasturage lands” constituted the largest part of the West. Covered with native grass, these tracts could not sustain cultivation but, if carefully managed, might support livestock
.
The key to developing the Arid Region was wise public stewardship. Land laws that had evolved in the wet East must be modified. The grid system of rectangular surveys, for example, made no sense where stream courses, rather than township and section lines, determined patterns of husbandry. “If the lands are surveyed in regular tracts as square miles or townships, all the water sufficient for a number of pasturage farms may fall entirely within one division.… For this reason divisional surveys should conform to the topography.” The quarter section—the 160 acres hallowed in American tradition as the sustenance of the yeoman and his family—was similarly unsuited to the West. In those few places that could be irrigated, a quarter section was too large. A single family couldn’t do all the work an irrigated farm required. Moreover, quarter section allotments were wasteful in the irrigated zones, which could support a denser population than the quarters allowed. In the region that ought to be reserved to pasturage, quarter sections were too small. “Pasturage farms, to be of any practicable value, must be of at least 2,560 acres, and in many districts they must be much larger.”
