Revisiting an Origin Story: On "Homesteading the Plains"

Richard Edwards, Jacob K. Friefeld, and Rebecca S. Wingo | Homesteading the Plains: Toward a New History | University of Nebraska Press | 2017 | 253 Pages

The 1862 Homestead Act, for millions of Americans, is a defining element of this country’s origin story. Endless acres of land were made available essentially for the taking by determined European immigrants who had the time and the pluck to “prove up” their claims, the first step to becoming land-owning agrarian citizens. Millions of Americans today proudly claim that they descended from those early homesteaders.

Many scholars, however, hold a different view. They argue that homesteading was of minor importance in the creation of individual farms; far more farmers simply bought their land. For these scholars, too few homesteaders successfully proved up their claims, and the process itself was deeply corrupt. What’s more, homesteading caused the country’s native inhabitants to lose the land that had been theirs for generations.

In Homesteading the Plains: Toward a New History, authors Richard Edwards, Jacob K. Friefeld, and Rebecca S. Wingo set out to determine which of these two views is most correct. And they waste no time in telling readers what they found: “[O]ur research tends to support the more favorable public understanding over the critical assessment of earlier scholars and the neglect and misstatements of many contemporary historians,” they write on Page 23. Later on, they state their conclusion even more directly, calling “the consensus wrong or deeply flawed.” The rest of the book is their explanation of how they came to that view, and it makes for a fascinating and provocative examination.

Scholarly conclusion by scholarly conclusion, the authors detail the limited data available to (and the misleading conclusions drawn by) previous historians. Fred Shannon, whom the authors call “one of the most prominent historians of homesteading,” is portrayed as one of the biggest offenders. In 1936, Shannon had examined the Homestead Act and, as an article in 1968 put it, “found little of value.” But Edwards, Friefeld, and Wingo find Shannon’s estimates of new farms resulting from the act—the basic yardstick by which the Homestead Act was measured—to quite low. Building on Shannon’s  early research, the scholars who followed him—including Benjamin Hibbard and Paul Gates in the mid-twentieth century, and contemporary historians Robert V. Hine, John Mack Faragher, and Alan Brinkley—tended to use his estimates, and his misleading numbers became the foundation for many subsequent studies that suggested homesteading had had little impact on new farm creation.

The authors cut later scholars some slack, suggesting that homestead records were difficult and costly to access and that the data available, usually from the General Land Office’s annual reports, was of poor quality. But the materials available to researchers today, more relevant and more easily accessed—including recently digitized homesteading records and newly developed databases—lead to dramatically different conclusions. In the twenty-nine homesteading states, Edwards, Friefeld, and Wingo found that nearly a third of new farms likely developed from homesteads. Even more significantly, the authors found that nearly two-thirds of new farms started out as homestead claims in the sixteen states west of the Missouri River and Minnesota. “The bottom line,” the authors state, “is that between 1863 and 1900 homesteading accounted for approximately two out of three new farms created and one-third of the new farmland in the West.”

In short, for the authors of Homesteading the Plains, homesteading was perhaps the most significant factor in the creation of new farms in the West, just like all those descendants have thought all along. On the question of how many homesteaders successfully proved up their claims, the authors, having reanalyzed earlier data and added to it, found a “nearly complete reversal” of what scholars have long thought: Most homesteaders—between 55 and 63 percent before 1900—managed to obtain title to their land. 

Similarly, the authors found relatively little evidence to support the argument that fraud and corruption played a part in the homesteading process. The results of their study suggest instead that more than 90 percent—possibly nearly as much as 97 percent—of the homestead patents on claims filed in the nineteenth century were valid and that “community policing” (neighbors watching neighbors) was an effective deterrent. The authors seem proud to proclaim that the “exaggerated” claims of Shannon and others of the opposite “appear to have no basis in fact.”

When it comes to the fourth claim—that homesteading led to the dispossession of native inhabitants’ land—the new book also finds it to be not entirely true. But this refutation seems to turn entirely on time and place, and the authors admit the issue is “more complex” and their conclusion is “more nuanced”: If Indian land in a particular place was taken before 1862, homesteading played no part in dispossession; if, in another place, it was taken after 1862, homesteading was one of the culprits. In Nebraska, for example, the government had taken roughly 30 million of the 49 million acres away from Nebraska tribes before homesteading began, meaning it played a minor role in dispossession. In places like Nebraska, homesteading was simply one factor in the distribution of lands already available, meaning already taken from native tribes. In the Dakota Territory, which became the states of North and South Dakota in 1889, and Indian Territory, which became part of the state of Oklahoma in 1907, things were very different. In those territories, the authors found, homesteading played “a central role” in the dispossession of the Indians. The authors found that other states, again depending on the timing of the dispossession, generally followed either the Nebraska or Dakota pattern.

In the final portion of the book, the authors examine two additional aspects of homesteading that deserve further study: the role of women in homesteading and homesteading’s role in the creation of communities. As in the previous five chapters, the authors reexamine the available data to reveal new patterns.

The Homestead Act, by offering its provisions to any single person over the age of twenty-one, made no distinction between men and women. Yet early scholars—as well as the public—usually viewed women only as wives, there to help their homesteading husbands but not really homesteaders themselves. The authors found that not only were single women homesteaders but that nearly an equal number of widows participated after the deaths of their husbands.

In addition, homesteaders, whether men or women, were rarely solo practitioners, the authors argue. It sometimes took a village to create a farm, and homesteaders soon found themselves parts of growing communities. 

In the end, it is the authors’ subtitle that sums up this important reexamination: “Toward a New History.” The authors forcefully argue that the “old statistics, old studies, and old anecdotes” no longer apply and that this significant part of our nation’s origin is worthy of new research. Homesteading the Plains helps to lay the foundation for such research.

This review is part of our series on Midwestern history, a collection of reviews on texts of historical significance in the region. Writers interested in contributing to this series are encouraged to contact its editor, Jacob Bruggeman.