Tag Archives: homesteaders

Winter on the Plains

Homesteaders in North Dakota

Though its topography varied from region to region, the area known as the western Plains could be counted on to have a harsh environment. Summer temperatures often reached 100 degrees, and winter temperatures well into the double-digits below zero. Without many trees to stop or break the wind, heavy snows could be blinding and treacherous. South Dakota, one of the Plains states and home to the Canton Asylum for Insane Indians, experienced difficult weather that brought out its inhabitants’ resourcefulness and courage.

The Lakota and Dakota Sioux, native peoples who had lived on the Plains for centuries, were nomadic. During the winter they lived in buffalo-hide tents (tipis) and ate the food supplies they had gathered and preserved earlier. These supplies could be enormous. An account of General Alfred Sully’s 1863 retaliation against the Dakota for an uprising in 1862 says that his troops burned 500,000 pounds of “jerked buffalo meat, food gathered for the Indians’ long winter” over a two-day period. The melted fat “ran down the valley like a stream,” according to one observer.

This abundance contrasts sorrowfully with the rations most native peoples received once they were forced onto reservations. By the 1880s, game was scarce and the buffalo nearly gone. Iron Teeth, a 92-year-old Cheyenne woman, described her monthly rations: a quart of green coffee, a quart of sugar, a few pounds of flour, and some baking powder. In 1883, winter storms left some of the northern tribes in Montana near starvation. When a government wagon finally got through, it delivered only a load of bacon contaminated by maggots.

Annuity Payment at La Pointe, Wisconsin, 1870, courtesy of Wisconsin Historical Society

Waiting for Rations, circa 1905, courtesy Wannamker Collection, Mathers Museum Indiana University

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The Other Half

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Sod Home near Meadow, SD, Library of Congress American Memory Project

In contrast to the Gilded Age mansions of the Vanderbilts and Rockefellers (see last post), most American families lived in considerably humbler abodes during the late nineteenth century. Families striving to create a new life in western lands often lived primitively, creating a first home out of whatever materials came to hand. Because trees were scarce, sod homes were common in the prairie states. It was far more important to build by a stream or within the shelter of a hill than to strive for a certain architectural style or type of building material.

Sod homes were difficult to build, but they were cheap and a definite step up from the dugouts that many families stayed in when they first settled. Dugouts were merely holes in the side of a hill which families quickly excavated in order to get out of their tents and covered wagons. Many times, they built their sod home in front of the original dugout and kept using the dugout as a room. Sod homes could be cozy and warm, and because they were built of dirt, fireproof. However, snakes, mice, and insects could find their way in, and often did. Dirt was a constant problem, and earth sometimes dropped in chunks from the ceiling or trickled down in a muddy drizzle during rainy weather. The roof itself might collapse during heavy rains, while underfoot, the floor turned to mud. Women could be constantly exasperated by the drawbacks of sod homes, and many wished for the relative comforts they had left behind in the East.

Prairie Home in Dupree, SD, courtesy Special Collections and University Archives, Wichita State University

Early Homes for Settlers in SD, courtesy Special Collections and University Archives, Wichita State University

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The Next Push Westward

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Pioneers near Gates, Custer County, NE, 1886, courtesy Library of Congress

Pioneers near Gates, Custer County, NE, 1886, courtesy Library of Congress

Efforts by the government to distribute land at a price wasn’t as successful as it had hoped. (See last post) However, the government’s efforts to let people settle land and then pay for it were opposed by people in the East, who thought a huge number of workers would leave. Southerners were afraid that a large number of people in western territories would lead to the creation of free states , since they assumed most small farmers would oppose slavery.

After the South seceded, the government passed the Homestead Act in 1862. The law allowed a homesteader to file an application for a 160-acre plot of surveyed land, farm and improve it for five years, and then file for a deed of ownership. There were certain requirements within this framework that unscrupulous people tried to make a profit from (like whether the 12 X 14 house they had to build could be in inches, since the law didn’t specify).

What kept fraud down was the fact that free or not, land in the western territories was hard to conquer. My next post will describe some of the difficulties settlers faced.

Homesteaders at Strool, SD, 1909, courtesy Library of Congress

Homesteaders at Strool, SD, 1909, courtesy Library of Congress

Homesteaders in Custer County, NE, 1887, courtesy Library of Congress

Homesteaders in Custer County, NE, 1887, courtesy Library of Congress

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