Sod houses were common in the Midwest as settlers moved west. There was no lumber to gather and no stones with which to build. These mud homes were vulnerable to weather and vermin, making life incredibly hard for the newly arrived homesteaders.
Farmers also faced the ever-present threat of debt and farm foreclosure by the banks. While land was essentially free under the Homestead Act, all other farm necessities cost money and were initially difficult to obtain in the newly settled parts of the country where market economies did not yet fully reach.
Horses, livestock, wagons, wells, fencing, seed, and fertilizer were all critical to survival, but often hard to come by as the population initially remained sparsely settled across vast tracts of land. Railroads charged notoriously high rates for farm equipment and livestock, making it difficult to procure goods or make a profit on anything sent back east.
Banks also charged high interest rates, and, in a cycle that replayed itself year after year, farmers would borrow from the bank with the intention of repaying their debt after the harvest. As the number of farmers moving westward increased, the market price of their produce steadily declined, even as the value of the actual land increased.
Each year, hard-working farmers produced ever-larger crops, flooding the markets and subsequently driving prices down even further. Although some understood the economics of supply and demand, none could overtly control such forces.
Eventually, the arrival of a more extensive railroad network aided farmers, mostly by bringing much-needed supplies such as lumber for construction and new farm machinery. Similar advancements in hay mowers, manure spreaders, and threshing machines greatly improved farm production for those who could afford them. Farmers in Minnesota, North Dakota, and South Dakota hired migrant farmers to grow wheat on farms in excess of twenty thousand acres each.
These large farms were succeeding by the end of the century, but small family farms continued to suffer. The frustration of small farmers grew, ultimately leading to a revolt of sorts, discussed in a later chapter. Although the West was numerically a male-dominated society, homesteading in particular encouraged the presence of women, families, and a domestic lifestyle, even if such a life was not an easy one. Women faced all the physical hardships that men encountered in terms of weather, illness, and danger, with the added complication of childbirth.
Often, there was no doctor or midwife providing assistance, and many women died from treatable complications, as did their newborns. While some women could find employment in the newly settled towns as teachers, cooks, or seamstresses, they originally did not enjoy many rights. They could not sell property, sue for divorce, serve on juries, or vote. And for the vast majority of women, their work was not in towns for money, but on the farm.
As late as , a typical farm wife could expect to devote nine hours per day to chores such as cleaning, sewing, laundering, and preparing food. Two additional hours per day were spent cleaning the barn and chicken coop, milking the cows, caring for the chickens, and tending the family garden. It is a weary, monotonous round of cooking and washing and mending and as a result the insane asylum is a third filled with wives of farmers. Despite this grim image, the challenges of farm life eventually empowered women to break through some legal and social barriers.
Many lived more equitably as partners with their husbands than did their eastern counterparts, helping each other through both hard times and good. If widowed, a wife typically took over responsibility for the farm, a level of management that was very rare back east, where the farm would fall to a son or other male relation. Pioneer women made important decisions and were considered by their husbands to be more equal partners in the success of the homestead, due to the necessity that all members had to work hard and contribute to the farming enterprise for it to succeed.
Some women seemed to be well suited to the challenges that frontier life presented them. Nevertheless, all that is expected of us is to do the best we can, and that we shall certainly endeavor to do. Even if we do freeze and starve in the way of duty, it will not be a dishonorable death. Although homestead farming was the primary goal of most western settlers in the latter half of the nineteenth century, a small minority sought to make their fortunes quickly through other means.
In addition, ranchers capitalized on newly available railroad lines to move longhorn steers that populated southern and western Texas. This meat was highly sought after in eastern markets, and the demand created not only wealthy ranchers but an era of cowboys and cattle drives that in many ways defines how we think of the West today.
Although neither miners nor ranchers intended to remain permanently in the West, many individuals from both groups ultimately stayed and settled there, sometimes due to the success of their gamble, and other times due to their abject failure. The allure of gold has long sent people on wild chases; in the American West, the possibility of quick riches was no different.
The search for gold represented an opportunity far different from the slow plod that homesteading farmers faced. In what became typical, a sudden disorderly rush of prospectors descended upon a new discovery site, followed by the arrival of those who hoped to benefit from the strike by preying off the newly rich.
This latter group of camp followers included saloonkeepers, prostitutes, store owners, and criminals, who all arrived in droves. If the strike was significant in size, a town of some magnitude might establish itself, and some semblance of law and order might replace the vigilante justice that typically grew in the small and short-lived mining outposts.
To varying degrees, the original California Gold Rush repeated itself throughout Colorado and Nevada for the next two decades. In , Henry T. Comstock, a Canadian-born fur trapper, began gold mining in Nevada with other prospectors but then quickly found a blue-colored vein that proved to be the first significant silver discovery in the United States. Subsequent mining in Arizona and Montana yielded copper, and, while it lacked the glamour of gold, these deposits created huge wealth for those who exploited them, particularly with the advent of copper wiring for the delivery of electricity and telegraph communication.
By the s and s, however, individual efforts to locate precious metals were less successful. Apparently, "sodbuster" was a derogatory term used by the upper classes to refer to the people who worked the earth, like farmers. It was a term that came to prominence during the Dust Bowl of the s, and it seems that is when this pattern was first given the "sodbuster" name. Most farmers cut sod from the area where they planned to build their house. Doing so provided a flat surface on which to build and helped protect the house from prairie fires.
Removing the grass from the area also helped keep insects, snakes, and vermin from burrowing into the house. The incentive to move and settled on western territory was open to all U. Montana, followed by North Dakota, Colorado and Nebraska had the most successful claims. What was a common result of conflict between homesteaders and American Indians in the s? American Indians were forced to move elsewhere. Under the Homestead Act, a homesteader was required to improve a parcel of land by: building a house and bettering the land.
Although European immigrants and East Coast migrants were drawn to the idea of homesteading, many homesteaders were settlers who moved from nearby territories to get cheaper land. They were at an advantage, as they were able to claim the best land before East Coast migrants arrived and had farming experience. Homesteaders would begin their claim by building a small cabin. A small garden was created for the residents to grow food. Settlers then set about clearing land to grow crops, which might include grasses, clovers, timothy, root crops such as potatoes, hops, apples, wheat, and strawberries.
The homesteaders required fuel to burn in large quantities. They needed to heat their houses against the cold Plains nights and freezing winters. They also needed fuel for their ovens. The lack of trees on the Plains meant that wood was not available to them in enough quantities. Sodbuster violations are un-authorized practices on highly erodible lands that converted native vegetation such as rangeland or woodland, to crop production after Dec.
The life of a homesteader was unpredictable and challenging. Winters were long and cold. Blizzards were so strong that they could trap livestock and homesteaders under the snow. During the long winter of , horses and cattle died when their breaths froze over the ends of their noses, making it impossible for them to breathe.
Building a home and establishing a farm was a challenge for even the most experienced farmers, but the free land, abundant wildlife, and richness of the soil made the challenge hard to resist. Choosing the right location for a homestead was very important. Newly arrived settlers, known as "sod busters," looked for land which featured a stream or creek and small rolling hills which served as windbreaks.
Easy access to planned railroad lines was also an asset because it made it easier to ship goods and livestock to market. Once the land was selected, the homesteader went to the Land Office to make sure that the property was not already taken and to file a claim.
One of the requirements for fulfilling the claim was building a "home" to live in within six months. Choosing the right site for a house was nearly as important as choosing the right claim.
Building next to a small hill provided some protection from the constant wind. Being near a stream meant easy access to water. But building too close also made flooding a very real danger. Without trees or stone to build with, homesteaders had to rely on the only available building material — prairie sod, jokingly called "Nebraska marble. Building a sod house was a lot of work and often took many weeks, especially if the settler's nearest neighbors were too far away or unable to help.
Because tents or the top of a covered wagon provided little comfort or shelter from the prairie's wild weather, many settlers began by building dugouts. Dugouts were small, dark spaces dug into the side of a hill that could be made quickly and were much warmer and drier than tents. Many people built a sod house right in front of the dugout and then used the dugout as another room. Cutting sod was a very difficult task. Motorized tractors weren't commonly available to farmers until the s.
Farmers in the s used mules, oxen or horses, and special plows equipped with curved steel blades to cut through the tough roots of the sod. The roots were so tough that as the plow cut through the sod a loud tearing sound was created.
Farmers soon learned that they should only cut as much sod as they planned to use in one day. Sod quickly dried, cracked, and crumbled if not used immediately. Most farmers cut sod from the area where they planned to build their house.
Doing so provided a flat surface on which to build and helped protect the house from prairie fires. Removing the grass from the area also helped keep insects, snakes, and vermin from burrowing into the house. Most homesteaders cut bricks that were 18 inches wide by 24 inches long and weighed around 50 pounds each.
Approximately bricks were required to build a 16 x 20 foot house. Freshly cut sod bricks were laid root-side up in order for the roots to continue to grow into the brick above it.
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