Historiography of the Homesteaders

The Homesteaders

III - The Historiography of the Homesteaders

Summary for GCSE

Many people believe the Homestead Act of 1862 played a huge role in settling the American West, helping poor families build farms on free land. It is often described as a story of brave pioneers who worked hard to create productive farms and unite the country. Popular histories, textbooks and even Presidents have praised the homesteaders as heroes, and some historians say the Act created a stronger national identity and culture.

Even at the time, however, the Act had critics who accused it of environmental damage and fraud – that speculators took advantage of loopholes, buying land cheaply through dishonest means. In 1891, the government had to make changes to stop cheating and protect forests.

By the 1930s, the Homestead Act’s reputation had collapsed with the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl. In absolute terms, numbers of Homesteaders per annum were never a ‘rush’. Historians argued that most of the best land didn’t go to small farmers but to the railroads, leaving the worst plots for homesteaders. Homesteading had hidden costs, many Homesteaders gave up before proving up, and those who stayed often sold it quickly. Plus the land was not empty – it had been stolen from the Indigenous Nations.

The latest research, however, offers evidence that most homesteaders survived and succeeded in getting title to their land, that fraud wasn’t as widespread as previously claimed, and that Homesteading accounted for two-thirds of new farms created. Except in ‘Indian territory’, the land had been stolen from the Indigenous Nations before the Homestead Act. Homesteaders – especially Homesteader women – did not just survive; they were important in creating the communities of the West.

Woes of the Western Agriculturalist (1887).

THE HOMESTEADER REPUTATION

If you ask most people – and certainly if you ask you ask GCSE students – how the West was won, they will answer saying the Homestead Act.

“To throw open all the lands of the Republic free of charge, and bid each citizen to help himself, will open a new era” wrote Horace Greeley in 1862. And this belief in what Paul Gates called the “halo of political and economic significance which has greatly magnified the importance to be attributed to it”, continues in popular history books and textbooks to the present day:

“The Homestead Act, which became law on May 20, 1862, was responsible for helping settle much of the American West”,

declares the US National Archives website.

Jason Porterfield writes (2004):

“Many historians view the Homestead Act as a shining success that strengthened the country and provided a great opportunity for many Americans. Because of the act, millions of acres of prairie became prosperous farms. People who had never tried farming found themselves digging wells, building homes, and harvesting crops. The plains were integrated into the fabric of the country, and the territories became states within a few decades. The dream of one great nation extending across the continent came true.”

and Hannah Anderson adds (2011):

“More than 93 million homesteader descendants are estimated to be alive today.

Land that is still farmed today on the Great Plains produces vast amounts of our nation's food. The Homestead Act helped create multiple roads, railroads, and towns across the West. The Homestead Act has also been credited with escalating immigration, as the news of free land reached foreign countries.

The Homestead Act affected US culture. Pioneers had to be resourceful to produce their own necessities. Small local governments encouraged democracy. Expansion fostered nationalism because as people moved from place to place, they began to identify less with specific regions and more as a national identity. Art, entertainment and literature evolved with Western influence.”

The Homestead Act was hailed as the expression of American ‘rugged individualism’ at its finest – as an article in a ‘teen-friendly’ magazine updating teachers’ knowledge (1997) comments:

“Pioneer families stood shoulder to shoulder to settle the harsh land, with women fighting fires, fear, and locusts right beside men.”

– a myth perpetuated by novels, films and TV series like ‘Little House on the Prairie’. Indeed, the more historians uncovered the true horror of the conditions that the early Homesteaders encountered, the greater the regard for their heroism and initiative. Textbooks list the ‘problems’ faced by the early Homesteaders, and posit against them ‘solutions’ clustered around individual endurance and resourcefulness, and innovations in farming methods and technology.

And underlying all this was the unstated principle that Homesteading exemplified American capitalism – taking something that had no value, and working on it to create valuable, productive land. In 1962 President John F Kennedy, marking the centenary of the Homestead Act, declared it: “the single greatest stimulus to national development ever enacted”. President George Bush declared it the exemplification of America’s ideal of freedom.

A REPUTATION TARNISHED

Even at the time, the Homestead Act had its opponents. There was a debate about whether the Act lost, or saved, money for the government. Conservationists were horrified at the loss of habitat, especially of woodlands. And government officials decried the degree of fraud that accompanied the Act.

In 1885, the head of the General Land Office, William AJ Sparks, declared that:

“the public domain was being made the prey of unscrupulous speculation and the worst forms of land monopoly through systematic frauds carried on under the public land laws.”

Speculators, it was said, were taking advantage of the ‘commutation clause’ in the Homestead Act, which allowed any homesteader not wishing to wait five years to be granted a homestead patent for $1.25 an acre after six months’ residence. ‘Jobbers’ employed people to spend six months on some favoured spot, then bought the land at $1.25 an acre, often far below its actual worth. Big ranches would make all their employees file claims and then hand over the rights to the land to the ranch owner.

It was claimed that children were picked up and held over the number 21 marked in chalk, so that when the government land agent asked them if they were over 21 (a condition of the Homestead Act), they could reply yes. ‘Houses’ of cardboard boxes, 12 by 14 inches, were placed on the land, and oaths were taken that a ‘good board house’ 12 by 14 (everyone assuming feet) had been erected – another requirement of the Homestead Act.

In 1891 these accusations came to a climax and the Land Revision Act provided for the setting aside of forest reserves, and added significant anti-fraud clauses into the existing legislation. Your textbooks didn’t tell you that, did they?

An illustration of 'A House Twelve by Fourteen' in Beyond the Mississippi (1867) by the journalist Albert Richardson. Richardson alleged he had seen government Land Agents conned by this and a number of similar deceptions.

A REPUTATION LOST

In the 1930s, the whole house of cards collapsed in the Great Depression. Farmers went bankrupt across the mid-West. All those agricultural ‘solutions’ turned out to be inappropriate farming which caused a ‘dust bowl’ which buried houses and stripped the topsoil.

In 1936, therefore, two respected historians wrote articles damning the Homesteader Act as a damaging failure:

The first, Paul Gates, exposed the various ways in which the Homestead Act, far from passing free land to millions of small farmers, had been manipulated to hand over cheap land to speculators … mainly by granting much larger tracts of lands to the railroads, States and Agricultural Colleges to sell. Moreover, he claimed, the land thus allocated was the more valuable land … leaving the worst land to the unsuspecting Homesteaders who arrived after the good, well-watered farmland had already been taken. Of some 500 million acres dispersed by the General Land Office between 1862 and 1904, the National Archives website tells us, only 80 million acres went to homesteaders.

The other, Fred Shannon, challenged the idea that the Homestead Act created farms, reporting that before 1890 only a third of those who had staked a claim ever completed the process, and that by June 30, 1890, only 372,659 homestead entries had been completed, granting 48 million acres – equal only to 3½% of the territory west of the Mississippi. What is more, he argued, many of those who lasted out the five years and proved their claims immediately sold the land and moved on.

Over the years that followed, and particularly in the 1980s and ‘90s, the ‘New Western Historians’ basically rubbished both the Act and its supposed legacy.

The Act was NOT “the hope of the poor man” as one author had enthused in 1963. The Homesteaders had to pay set-up costs, and then have enough money to live through the “starving times” while they worked up the land to produce a cash crop; many simply went further and further into debt until they had to give up. Far from impoverished immigrants, most of the successful homesteaders turn out to have been middle-class, and part of a group.
Neither was the land free. The Homesteaders were given a bare plot of land, but there were requirements to meet in terms of improvements, timber etc. – a process called ‘dissipation’ by economists, because these hidden costs frittered away the profit – and for which the homesteader paid with years of backbreaking labour … often only to have to leave everything to someone else to reap the benefit. The historian Richard Stroup labelled homesteading: “Buying Misery” (1988).
Neither was the land ‘not valuable’. It was incredibly valuable even in an ‘unimproved’ state for its furs, timber, minerals (e.g. gold), and its untapped fertility; and – of course – it was incalculably valuable to the Indigenous people whose lives depended wholly upon it.
There was no ‘rush’ to the Plains. Just 15,000 claims were filed in 1866; 40,000 in 1871; with a maximum of 99,000 in 1910. These are not big numbers – in 2024, on her Eras tour, Taylor Swift played three back-to-back shows at Melbourne Cricket Ground on (16-18 Feb) each attended by 96,000 people for a three-day total of 288,000 concertgoers. Four million claims over the 123 years of the Homestead Act is not very many per annum, especially when you realise that three quarters of the claims were made after 1900 under amended legislation.
And most of all the land was never ‘empty’; Indigenous Nations had inhabited the land on which the Homesteaders encroached and filed a claim to make it ‘theirs’.

Douglas Allen (1991) suggested that the whole thing was a government con trick. Vast tracts of land were being stolen from the Indigenous tribes, which would have cost the government a fortune in soldiers to defend; what could be better, then, than to persuade large numbers of homesteaders to “rush” to prevent the Indigenous Nations stealing it back?

Matthew Downhour (2019) is even more cynical, seeing a giveaway of free land as “a view endorsed by right-leaning libertarians to justify the relative lack of a social safety net in the United States” – a ploy to bolster “America’s myth of the undeserving poor” (who had had their chance).

TOWARDS A NEW HISTORY

And that was fairly much the state of the historiography until recently – a popular myth of heroes taming the plains, against an academic model of colonialism, land-theft, fraud, speculation, exploitation, environmental disaster and corporate profiteering.

In 2017, however, Edwards, Friefeld and Wingo published Homesteading the Plains – Towards A New History, which fairly much stands the academic version on its head.

The negative academic interpretation of Homesteading, they argued, was based on four contentions – which they labelled ‘stylized facts’ – that:

Homesteading was a minor factor in farm formation.
Most homesteaders failed to prove up their claims.
The process was full of fraud and corruption.
Homesteading dispossessed the Indigenous tribes.

The authors argued that “old statistics, old studies, and old anecdotes” no longer apply. Drawing on sources unavailable to earlier scholars, they found:

Homesteading accounted for two-thirds of new farms created west of Missouri 1863-1900.
Most homesteaders – 55-63% before 1900 – survived to obtain title to their land. A lot of this argument rests on your definition of the word ‘failure’; if a woman proves up, but then moves into town to run a store, whilst renting her farm to a tenant, is that ‘failure’, or a success?
Beyond a few high-profile cases and anecdotes, there is NO evidence of widespread fraud – particularly no evidence of houses 12”x14” or children held ‘over #21’. “Community policing” (i.e. outraged neighbours) ensured that 90-97% of claims were valid.
Except in ‘Indian Territory’ (i.e. North & South Dakota and Oklahoma), most ‘Indian land’ had already been taken before 1862, therefore the Homestead Act cannot be blamed for dispossessing them.

In addition, they found that single women and widows played a much greater role in opening up the West than had been thought before, and that the homesteaders did much more than just create isolated farms … that 19th Century homesteading was about community-building.