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The Homesteaders

II - Probems and 'Solutions'

 

  

 

Source A

Three motherless children and a caved in soddy – Nebraska homesteader George Barnes and family pose for a photo in 1887. The night before it had rained so hard that the roof of his sod house had collapsed.  His wife had died the previous year leaving him to care alone for his three young children.  We do not know anything more about Barnes other than that he died in 1910 in South Dakota.

  

Going Deeper

The following links will help you widen your knowledge:

BBC Bitesize

Good notes - from savemyexams

Good mindmap - from getrevising

 

African American Homesteaders

 

Sources - the first homesteaders

Lucy Warner's Diary, 1870-71

Bigelow in the Distance has stories of life on the Plains

 

The Spillman Creek Massacre - how useful is Source B?

 

AQA-recommended Source

The Diary of Abbie Bright, 1870-71

 

YouTube

Plains farming - Mr Cloke

Ranchers versus Homesteaders - Mr Cloke

The Johnson County War 1892 - Mr Cloke

    

  

Problems and Solutions [SOLID CONTACTS]

This topic is well-dealt-with by your textbooks, and by the websites in the 'Going Deeper' section (including the Bitesize page I wrote for the BBC in 2005, which is still going strong).  So I will just give you a quick aide-memoire of problems... click on the u orange arrows to reveal the solutions.

 

PROBLEMS FACING FAMILIES

  • Social isolation 
    • •  Occasional trips into town to buy supplies / local hoedowns / visits to neighbours
  • Outlaws  & bushwackers
    • •  Local judges and sheriffs, posses and vigilante groups
  • Lack of wood  for fuel or to build houses
    • •  Sod houses / Cattle and buffalo dung ‘chips’
  • Indigenous Renegades
    • •  US Army reprisals
  • Disease
    • •  A coat of whitewash to kill the fleas and bedbugs / ‘Soap’ made from boiling fat with potash

   

PROBLEMS FACING FARMERS

  • Colorado beetle and grasshoppers
    • •  Crop-dusting after 1920s
  • Outset costs: $800+
    • •  Borrowing, often at huge interest / a second job
  • Not enough land: 160 acres was not enough to support a family
    • •  Timber and Culture Act (1873) / Desert Land Act (1877)
  • The hard ‘sod’ broke wooden ploughs
    • •  John Deere steel ‘sodbuster’ ploughs
  • Arid conditions, with hot summers (80°C) and fires
    • •  Wind pumps & artesian water / Turkey Red wheat / ‘Dry farming’
  • Cattlemen and ‘crazy quilt’
    • •  fighting back – e.g. the Johnson County War.
  • Toil – esp. when on your own
    • •  Itinerant labourers and teams at ploughing, planting, harvest
  • Scarcity of wood for Fencing
    • •  After 1874, barbed wire.

   

   

Source B

The two women saw the Indians approaching across the prairie. Mrs Kine plunged into the creek, at a point where she was hidden by some brush overhanging the bank, and held her baby high to keep it from drowning. But Mrs Alderdice, paralyzed with fear, collapsed in a faint, surrounded by her four quaking children. The Cheyennes shot the three oldest boys, killing two of them. They then galloped off with Mrs Alderdice and her youngest child. The baby cried so lustily that the Indians became enraged, choked it to death and left the body beside the trail.

A source, taken from Huston Horn, The Pioneers (1974) quoted a 1998 textbook – for a discussion of its utility, read this article.

   

 

Did You Know

Figures suggest that in the 1860s white Americans killed three times as many Indigenous people as were killed by them, and that that rose to twenty times more in the 1870s. The West was so huge that a fair guess would be that the homicide rate among settlers as a result of Indigenous attacks was just 4% of the homicide rate of modern-day Wales.

 

 

Consider:

1.  Did Barnes (Source A) 'make a go' of his homestead?

2.  Do a Google image search for:

homesteaders 19th century photos

Studying the photographs only (you cannot trust the images drawn by artists) make a list of the different things you notice, linking them where possible to the homesteaders' problems and solutions.  Discuss what they have revealed about 'the life of a Wild West Homesteader'.  Were they all as badly-off as George Barnes?

3.  Using all the information available to you – including the Sources in the 'Going Deeper' section – research and explain TWO problems faced by each of the following: Homesteader families; Homesteader farmers; Homesteader women.

4.  How useful to an historian is Source B?  After you have had a think, read this article on the Spillman Creek Massacre.

   

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