Monthly Archives: June 2023

From Homesteading the Plains: Toward a New History, by Richard Edwards, Jacob K. Friefeld, and Rebecca S. Wingo (University of Nebraska Press, 2017), Kindle pp. 33, 37-40:

We can make a more direct and useful calculation using acres as follows. In 1860 farmland in the seventeen-state West was 17,839,000 acres and in 1900 was 249,222,000 acres; therefore, the growth in farmland was 231,383,000 acres; with 76,480,436 acres homesteaded (counting proved-up and in-process), the percent of farmland gained via the Homestead Act was 33.1 percent, hardly the “small role” Cochrane asserted.

In sum, correcting Shannon’s analysis shows that his estimate of “less than a sixth” of the new farms originating from homesteads is badly misleading. In the twenty-nine homesteading states, we found that 32.6 percent of new farms probably developed from homesteads. But more relevantly, in the seventeen-state West, we calculated that 63.9 percent of new farms created originated in homestead claims, contrary to Shannon’s assertions and those of the many historians who repeated them. And we found that 33.1 percent of new farmland in the West derived from homestead claims, making the ratio of purchased to homesteaded land about two to one, not the “three or four times” Hine asserted. The bottom line 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.

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A more troubling question is why Shannon’s numerically wrong calculations and misleading statistical presentation have lingered for so long and found such ready acceptance among today’s scholars. The reasons scholars uncritically accepted his results are fundamentally unknowable, but the pattern is consistent with the hypothesis that having accepted that homesteading was somehow a sham, these scholars quickly welcomed any supporting evidence without checking it. It is long past time when such “evidence” should shape our understanding of homesteading.

Correcting the Historical Record

We can collect the findings from above to present a more accurate picture of homesteading in the period 1863–1900 in the West. First, we find that homesteading’s role in creating farms varied substantially among the seventeen states, as shown in figure 2.2. States where homesteading was very important in farm formation are Colorado (86.6 percent), Idaho (84.6 percent), South Dakota (80.3 percent), and Washington (96.7 percent). In some states, those with the highest density of homesteads, the number of homesteads patented actually exceeded the number of new farms created and still surviving by 1900—for example, Montana (109.6 percent), North Dakota (113.3 percent), Oregon (114.5 percent), and Wyoming (109.6 percent).

Although initially puzzling, this pattern (exceeding 100 percent) is quite understandable in areas where farms were undergoing the long-term process of farm consolidation. Imagine a section of land, one square mile, where there were no farms in 1860; in the next decade, four homesteaders each file 160-acre claims and prove up. In 1870 there would be four farms, all derived from homesteads, so we would say 100 percent of the farms in this section started as homesteads. Then, over the next thirty years, three of the four homesteaders sold out to the fourth. By 1900, our square mile would have four times (400 percent) the number of homesteads filed as functioning farms. As the example shows, how many homesteads resulted in functioning farms is highly time-dependent in a context of consolidation: the longer the period, the higher the ratio of original homesteads to functioning farms. For the West as a whole, that is, the sixteen states west of the Missouri River plus Minnesota, homesteading likely contributed up to 63.9 percent of the new farms created.

These findings are broadly consistent with Gilbert Fite’s conclusion: the charge that not many settlers actually obtained free land “is definitely not true if applied to the Minnesota-Dakota-Nebraska-Kansas frontier in the late 1860s and 1870s. . . . [Between 1863 and 1880] 86,169 farmers in Minnesota, Dakota, Nebraska, and Kansas obtained patents [and another] 50,673 who had filed entries before June 30, 1880, gained their title [later]. Thus between 1863 and 1880, 136,842 of the 242,000 new farms were settled as homesteads. . . . This was about 56.5 percent of the total farms created. . . . About two-thirds of the farms in Minnesota were originally established by homesteaders.”

Homesteading was also important but less so in the proportion of land newly converted to farming in the West. As shown in figure 2.3, the states with the highest proportions are Idaho (65.4 percent), Washington (54.4 percent), North Dakota (50.3 percent), and Oregon (44.7 percent). Overall in the seventeen-state West, homesteading accounted for 33.1 percent of farmland added. Since homesteads accounted for a much larger percentage of farms than homesteaded acres did of new farm acres, the obvious implication is that homesteaded farms were on average smaller than farms obtained through purchase or other methods. This result would be expected, given that homesteads were capped at 160 acres (except under the Kinkaid and Enlarged Homestead Acts), whereas farms created via purchase, military warrants, agricultural college scrip, or other methods were not. This result again demonstrates why one cannot draw conclusions about the number of homesteaders vs. other farmers based on acreage unless one also knows the average size of each group’s farms.

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What picture of homesteading, then, emerges from the more soundly grounded statistics reviewed above? Considering the West during the period 1863–1900, and remembering our earlier caution about the approximate nature of the data, both of the stylized facts we began the chapter with have been shown to be incorrect. The first assertion, that homesteading was a minor factor in farm making and most farmers purchased their land, might be replaced, based on the data in figure 2.2, with this finding:

Homesteading was a major factor in farm making in the West; before 1900 it was responsible for nearly two out of every three new farms and almost a third of the new land brought into farming.

The second stylized fact, that most homesteaders failed to prove up their claims, is refuted by a corrected reanalysis of Donaldson’s data for the period 1863–80 and by the Historical Statistics evidence for 1881–1900; instead, it might be replaced with:

Most homesteaders—between 55 percent to 63 percent before 1900—succeeded in obtaining title to their land during the first phase of homesteading.

This is a nearly complete reversal of what scholars for more than a half century have accepted as the received wisdom on homesteading and have been teaching their students.

From Homesteading the Plains: Toward a New History, by Richard Edwards, Jacob K. Friefeld, and Rebecca S. Wingo (University of Nebraska Press, 2017), Kindle pp. 12-15:

Scholars have described homesteading as deeply flawed or unimportant or both; what’s the basis for their being so critical and dismissive? Their negative view is based on several shared understandings about homesteading—some scholars would call these characterizations “received wisdom,” lawyers would call them “stipulations,” and social scientists would term them “stylized facts.” They are what everyone “knows” to be true or agrees to treat as true, a simplified presentation of a perhaps more complicated train of empirical findings that adequately serves most purposes. Stylized facts operate as the preamble or premise, not the targets, of analysis. As we document in detail in succeeding chapters, scholars have adopted four findings about homesteading as stylized facts:

• Homesteading was a minor factor in farm formation; most farmers purchased their land.
• Most homesteaders failed to prove up their claims.
• The homesteading process was rife with corruption and fraud.
• Homesteading caused Indian land dispossession.

If these four assertions are true, it is easy to see why scholars would have a censorious view of homesteading and treat it as a minor factor in settlement.

The first stylized fact is that while homesteading has received a lot of popular attention, it was unimportant in creating actual farms; the historical reality, it is said, is less dramatic or romantic, and it is that most farmers simply bought their land. For example, mid-twentieth-century historian Fred Shannon declared that “less than a sixth of the new homes [i.e., farms] and a little over a sixth of the acreage [was] on land that came as a gift from the government. Eighty-four out of each hundred new farms had to be achieved either by subdivision of older holdings or by purchase.” In 2000 historians Robert V. Hine and John Mack Faragher asserted, “Most western settlers, it turns out, were not homesteaders.” The last generation or two of scholars have used the presumed unimportance of homesteading as reason enough to ignore it, increasingly treating it as a kind of ephemera of the period, like the Grange or utopian communities—once considered important but now receding in more sober retrospection. Why spend time and attention on a minor land program?

Scholars have moved on to other western topics and issues, and we can see their abandonment of homesteading in their college textbooks. Every scholarly discipline tends to express its “consensus” views in its textbooks—authors want instructors to adopt their books, and they know that to gain acceptance, their books must in general reflect the profession’s prevailing views (hence the often-lamented “lack of originality” in textbooks). Indeed, the common style is to omit source citations (except credits for reprinting copyrighted material) because, it is assumed, all the discipline’s practitioners “know” this information. When we examine college textbooks of American history, we find that homesteading has largely been written out of them, and in at least one case, it has been completely forgotten. Another way to see current historians’ marginal interest in homesteading is the absence of research articles on homesteading; we searched article titles in the leading American history journal, aptly called the Journal of American History, from 1965 through 2015, using JSTOR; JAH published no articles on homesteading during that fifty-year span. Homesteading, with its stylized facts, is no longer open to debate nor is it an appealing subject of research. One result of this abandonment is that virtually no one has worked to reconfirm or challenge the assertions and findings of the great mid-twentieth-century public land scholars like Benjamin Hibbard, Fred Shannon, Paul Gates, and Gilbert Fite, so when today’s scholars cite homesteading-related statistics in support of the first stylized fact, they almost always have to rely on decades-old compilations or calculations.

The second stylized fact, that most settlers who tried homesteading failed at it, is also deeply entrenched in the scholarly literature. Fred Shannon, the most forceful proponent of this point, defined “failure” as an entryman who failed to prove up and receive his or her patent—that is, someone who abandoned his or her claim. He then provided a statistical analysis as proof, and a long line of scholars adopted his work as authoritative. His writings remain the most frequently cited authority on this topic. Echoing (though not citing) Shannon, historian Alan Brinkley in 2012 declared, “The Homestead Act rested on a number of misperceptions. . . . Although [many] homesteaders stayed on Homestead Act claims long enough to gain title to their land, a much larger number abandoned the region before the end of the necessary five years.”

The third stylized fact, that homesteading was shot through with corruption and fraud, is the oldest point of consensus to be entrenched in the homesteading literature. In the 1880s public lands reformer Thomas Donaldson and GLO Commissioner William Sparks campaigned vigorously—so vigorously that Sparks was fired by President Cleveland—against land frauds. Historians then picked up the theme, and a long line of twentieth-century scholars complained about fraud, including Hibbard, Shannon, Roy Robbins, and Gates. Present-day scholars tend to situate homesteading in the rowdy, expansionist, proudly self-aggrandizing, and corrupt post–Civil War era, where financiers manipulated markets, trusts and industrial combines monopolized markets, congressmen offered themselves for sale, and the government granted to railroad companies immense tracts of public land with virtually no oversight. They found their notion of fraud-infested homesteading fit seamlessly into the same narrative, and they expected to find the same evils perverting it as had led to the theft of other public lands and assets. So historian Louis Warren, perhaps thinking he was expressing nothing controversial, simply noted, “After 1862, the federal government deeded 285 million acres to homesteaders. Half their claims were fraudulent, backed by false identities, fake improvements, or worse.”