Category Archives: nationalism

by | 13 June 2023 · 11:05 am

Homesteader Community Building

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. 199-202:

4. Community policing of homestead claims was an effective mechanism to deter fraud. Homesteading scholars focused on what they assumed must have been paltry enforcement by overworked land office clerks and the miniscule force of GLO field investigators. In these conditions, they concluded, homestead claims must have been shot through with fraud; indeed, this conclusion buttressed the larger narrative to which they had already committed.

But it turns out that the Homestead Act also created a local network of watchful eyes. Mapping community relationships in the study area shows the emergence of keystone individuals in homesteading communities who helped create a local-community policing structure when no other existed. Neighbors, extended family members, would-be settlers in nearby towns, and others knew the ground, may have wanted it for themselves or their children, and didn’t want it stolen by swindlers and cheats. Just as in farming country today, where neighbors, family members, and others watch closely when ground in their vicinity becomes available due to the owner’s death or bankruptcy, so too it was in the homesteading regions. Indeed, [William G.] Comstock’s and [Bartlett] Richards’s attempted fraud came to disaster precisely because there were too many countervailing watchful eyes. What might have seemed anonymous and beyond scrutiny and hence ripe for fraud when viewed from Washington or New York or New Haven, or even from central Nebraska in the Comstock-Richards case, was in fact far more closely policed than expected.

…

6. The Homestead Act was not only a “single women’s law”; widows also participated at a high rate. In our study area, nearly as many widows filed initial entry claims as single women. But what greatly increased widows’ solitary participation—their unintended solitary participation—in homesteading was the deaths of their husbands. Women homesteaders succeeded by forming reciprocal socioeconomic relationships through employment and witness testimony between themselves and males in the wider community; they also created networks with other women that were crucial to their success. Our analysis highlights the need for scholars to further enrich this field.

7. Homesteading was not a solitary activity; it was a process of Americans from different backgrounds and regions mixing together to settle and form communities. They depended deeply on each other for survival and success. In our communities, keystone individuals emerged to provide economic, social, and political leadership in their neighborhoods. Immigrants from northwestern Europe tended to stake claims alongside native-born citizens, entering the social order of their new land. Central European immigrants, by contrast, more frequently created their own communities with their own leadership, thereby reproducing cultural landscapes more reminiscent of their homelands.

Settlement patterns and cultural differences thus separated communities of homesteaders. Different languages, religions, civic customs, community expectations, and patterns of family life all served to create distinctions. As Eric Foner noted, “In the late nineteenth century the most multicultural state in the Union was North Dakota,” but modern scholars have tended retrospectively to recategorize these varied peoples simply as “white,” thereby washing away their diversity. And while the walls between them were never as impermeable as those of race, these groups often required decades to overcome their differences and for diverse communities to become integrated. Even today we are left with certain communities that continue to proudly reflect their ethnic heritage in significant ways.

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by | 11 June 2023 · 5:59 am

How Indian Territory Became Oklahoma

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. 123-127:

In ongoing research we have been able to find comparable data for six other states. California, Kansas, and Minnesota appear to follow the Nebraska pattern; in southwestern Minnesota, the U.S.-Dakota War in 1862, with its tragic aftermath of the Mankato hangings, extinguished Indian land titles before the Homestead law became effective. New Mexico and Wyoming follow the Colorado pattern. Thus of the eleven states analyzed (counting North and South Dakota), in eight of them homesteading appears to have played little role in dispossession.

By contrast Indian Territory (Oklahoma) generally followed the Dakota pattern. Its particular history as the depository for Indian tribes from elsewhere, including the Five Civilized Tribes, imparted peculiar circumstances to the dispossession process, but clearly would-be homesteaders played a central role in dispossession.

The original inhabitants of what became Indian Territory were the Osage, Plains Apache, and to some extent the Comanche. Early in the nineteenth century their land titles were effectively extinguished to make way for other Indians, that is, to create Indian Territory (fig. 5.15). This original dispossession was unrelated to homesteading and predated it by several decades. There was, however, a second dispossession in Indian Territory that occurred when homesteaders and other whites desired the land of the resettled Indians.

…

As Rennard Strickland observed, “Oklahoma Indian tribes in a real sense were still sovereign—‘domestic dependent nations,’ in the words of Chief Justice John Marshall. Until that fateful year [1889], although subject to many federal regulations, Indians owned all the land that was to become Oklahoma. Whites within their domain were there on Indian sufferance or were government or military officials. Illegal intruders were subject to expulsion.”

Between 1870 and 1890 the population of Texas nearly tripled and the population of Kansas nearly quadrupled, and the land lying between them became increasingly alluring to whites. Cattle drives north through Indian Territory brought whites into the region. Railroads, land agents, and others, including Elias Boudinot, member of a distinguished Cherokee family, agitated for opening unoccupied Indian Territory lands. C. C. Carpenter, a “Boomer” (homesteader) leader, assembled a group of farmers in 1879 on the Kansas border with the intention of settling in the so-called Unassigned Lands in the middle of the territory (fig. 5.15); only the stationing of federal troops in nearby Kansas towns prevented the threatened invasion. Other expeditions of settlers organized and entered the territory with varying success. Meanwhile advocates for opening parts of Indian Territory organized a national publicity campaign to change federal policy, and it soon had success. By 1885 President Chester A. Arthur had declared in favor of opening Indian lands, and on March 23, 1889, President Benjamin Harrison, during his third week in office, issued a proclamation authorizing eligible persons to enter identified lands for the purpose of making homestead claims.

…

In a relatively brief span from late 1889 to roughly 1906, these by-then-well-established resident tribes were given allotments or otherwise moved to small reservations and their “surplus” lands opened to white settlement (fig. 5.16). The most common method of opening Indian Territory lands was by “runs”: homesteaders were excluded from the opened tracts until a specific date and time, at which point the settlers literally raced to their desired plots, with the first to arrive winning the claim [hence “Sooners“]. Figure 5.17 shows the great increase in homesteaded acreage that was unleashed by the second dispossession, represented (approximately) in the figure by the dashed line.

Would-be homesteaders had repeatedly organized illegal and provocative white intrusions onto Indian lands and lobbied Congress and the national executive to extinguish Indian land titles. They succeeded.

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by | 10 June 2023 · 5:14 am

Did Homesteading Cause Dispossession of Indian Lands?

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. 127-128:

Although homesteading occurred in thirty states, this chapter has focused on the process in the Great Plains, its center of gravity. As we have seen, the relationship between homesteading and dispossession [of Indian lands] differed depending on place and time.

In the Nebraska pattern, which held for eastern and central Nebraska, the federal government had largely cleared Indian land titles even before passage of the Homestead Act [in 1862], and homesteading mainly served as an equalizing corrective to other federal land policies that had grossly favored speculators and other large operators. California, Kansas, and Minnesota appear to mostly follow the Nebraska pattern, though more detailed studies would likely reveal more nuanced local patterns.

In Colorado [which quickly became a territory in the wake of the Pike’s Peak Gold Rush in 1858], dispossession preceded homesteading by several decades, and homesteading simply came too late to have been a significant cause of dispossession. Montana followed the Colorado pattern, as did the northwest corner of Nebraska and seemingly New Mexico and Wyoming as well.

The Dakota pattern, by contrast, which characterized both Dakota Territory and Indian Territory, was driven by land seekers and their advocates becoming noisy and powerful advocates pressuring their federal representatives to open Indian lands to white settlement. In Dakota Territory and Indian Territory, homesteaders were not the only ones working to “restore” Indian lands, but their actions speeded up dispossession and emboldened federal leaders to open larger tracts of Indian lands for white settlement [in the wake of the Dawes Act in 1887].

This concludes our reexamination of the four stylized facts adopted by the scholarly consensus on homesteading. In analyzing the first three stylized facts, we find the consensus wrong or deeply flawed. In examining the fourth stylized fact, which links homesteading to dispossession, we arrive at a more nuanced conclusion than its simple statement allows. It is both wrong and right. Taken together, the consensus facts provide an altogether misleading interpretation of homesteading.

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by | 7 June 2023 · 5:33 am

Nebraska Homesteader Demographics

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. 71-72:

Custer County homesteaders in our townships ranged from 25 to 83 years of age, with 55.6 percent filing their final claims between the ages of 25 and 39. There were 292 men and 32 women who filed claims. A majority, 253 of the 324, or 78.1 percent, had been U.S. citizens before making their claim. Of these 253 citizens, 85, or 33.6 percent, migrated to Custer County from Iowa and other parts of Nebraska with the rest coming from the other states. Of the 71 noncitizens, 38, or 53.5 percent, came from central European areas of Austria, Bohemia, Poland, and Moravia.

In our five Dawes County townships, farther west than Custer County, the 297 successful homesteaders found flat grasslands cut by erosion and geological curiosities and bordered on the north by the pine ridge. A mosaic of mixed grasses covered a blend of sand, clay, and silt earth. These soils, along with the county’s 18 to 20 inches of rain per year and long periods of drought, made farming even more difficult than in Custer County, though it clearly did not stop homesteaders—domestic and foreign—from trying.

Homesteaders settled the area between 1887 and 1908, and 80.8 percent came during the 1890s alone. Their ages ranged from 21 to 87, with 54.5 percent of them proving up when they were between the ages of 25 and 39. There were 265 men and 32 women, the same number of women as in Custer County. Of the 297 homesteaders, 238, or 80.2 percent, were citizens; the remaining 59, or 19.8 percent, were noncitizens. Citizen claimants in Dawes County came predominantly from states stretching from the interior to the east coast, including 168, or 70.6 percent, of the 238 coming from Illinois, Iowa, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin; and 33, or 55.9 percent, of the 59 immigrant claimants came from Germany and England.

Homesteaders in both counties faced environmental disasters that complicated their progress. Grasshoppers plagued the state between 1874 and 1877. Hot winds scorched the crops. Drought hit the region for a hard twelve years between 1884 and 1895 and again between 1906 and 1913. The ten-year reprieve lured more settlers into the region; 197 individuals homesteaded in the study area between 1895 and 1904, demonstrating the enduring hope and short-term memory of those who dreamed of owning their own land.

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by | 4 June 2023 · 4:26 pm

Better Statistics on Homesteading

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.

…

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.

…

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.

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by | 3 June 2023 · 9:23 am

Recent Historiography of Homesteading

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.”

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by | 1 June 2023 · 2:55 am

WW2 Internees in North Dakota

One of the books we bought in Lincoln, Nebraska, during our road trip up the Missouri River and back was Nebraska POW Camps, by Melissa Amateis Marsh (History Press, 2014). I blogged a passage from the Kindle edition in November 2018. The author lists North Dakota as among the few states without POW camps during World War II (along with Montana, Nevada, Rhode Island, and Vermont). However, Fort Lincoln in North Dakota did house internees who were designated “enemy aliens” but not enemy soldiers: including sailors from enemy nations, along with selected U.S. residents of German or Japanese ancestry. The Densho Encyclopedia online provides details.

There were two separate populations of Japanese American internees as well as German crews of ships seized in U.S. ports and resident German enemy alien internees. The very first prisoners at Fort Lincoln were 220 German seamen who arrived on May 31, 1941. The U.S. had detained crews from German ships docked in the U.S. since after the German attack on Poland in 1939, most of them at Ellis Island. More German seamen arrived after this initial group, and on December 20, 110 German enemy aliens arrived, most from the West Coast, bringing the population of Fort Lincoln to 410.

The first group of Japanese American internees consisted of over 1,100 Issei who arrived at Fort Lincoln in two groups in February of 1942: 415 from the West Coast arrived on February 9 and 715 more on February 26. Most of these men were immigrant community leaders—Buddhist priests, Japanese language school teachers, newspaper editors, and heads of Japanese immigrant economic or cultural organizations—who were arrested after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor but before the mass roundup of all Japanese Americans on the West Coast. Most came via short-term detention stations such as Tuna Canyon, Griffith Park, or San Pedro. Enemy Alien Hearing Boards convened at Ft. Lincoln in February for the German internees, most of whom were released or paroled afterwards. Hearings for the Japanese internees were marred by conflict between Korean immigrant translators and internees and resulted in three Issei requiring medical attention. Complaints to the Spanish consul resulted in an internal investigation by the INS that found that Issei had been unjustly abused and resulted in the dismissal of two interpreters and the suspension of three INS inspectors. Issei whom the boards “released” were allowed to rejoin their families at “assembly centers” or War Relocation Authority camps in the summer and fall of 1942; those ordered interned were transferred to army-run internment camps such as Lordsburg . By October 1942, nearly all of the Japanese and German internees had moved on, leaving just three hundred or so German seamen. As part of the general movement of enemy aliens from army run camps back to INS run camps in order to make room for the growing numbers of POWs, over 1,000 German enemy aliens moved to Ft. Lincoln starting in March 1943, joining the remaining German seamen and pushing the camp’s population to over 1,500.

The second group of Japanese Americans at Ft. Lincoln arrived in early 1945 and were mostly young Nisei and Kibei who had been incarcerated at Tule Lake. This younger group were among the 5,400 at Tule Lake who, under duress, renounced their U.S. citizenship, enabling the Department of Justice to intern them in DOJ camps as “enemy aliens” and to deport them. Reasons for renouncing varied, ranging from anger and protest against the country that imprisoned them, to fear of being forcibly relocated again without a job or housing or community support while the war with Japan raged on. While an initial group identified as leaders of community resistance in Tule Lake were sent to Santa Fe, there was not enough room there to accommodate all. With the numbers of German enemy alien internees and German seamen down to about 700, less than half of the peak, there was room at Fort Lincoln. As a result, about 650 were transferred from Tule Lake on February 10, arriving at Ft. Lincoln on February 14. One hundred more renunciants were transferred from Tule Lake to Ft. Lincoln in July 1945. The U.S. prepared to deport two-thirds of this group in November and December 1945; however, many had changed their minds about renouncing and going to Japan. With the aid of lawyer Wayne Collins, most were able to avoid deportation and to eventually recover their U.S. citizenship. The last of the German internees were sent to Ellis Island in February 1946. The last to leave were 200 of the Tule Lake group, who left on March 6 for Santa Fe. In total, 3,850 internees passed through Ft. Lincoln.

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by | 30 May 2023 · 9:11 am

How the U.S. Disposed of 1.4B Acres

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. 6-7:

Homesteading was one way in which the federal government transferred parts of America’s enormous public domain to private ownership. The U.S. government acquired nearly 1.5 billion acres in the lower forty-eight states between 1781 and 1853, through the Revolutionary War treaty, the Louisiana Purchase, the Mexican War cessions, the settlement of boundary disputes with the British over Canada, and a few other minor acquisitions. From the outset many individuals, whether landless or the mightiest land barons, mining companies, and speculators, eagerly looked on public land as a source of potential riches for themselves. But the government was also interested in moving public land into private hands for a variety of motives that shifted over time. Initially it sought to use land sales to fund the federal budget, but later it distributed land to stimulate canal and railroad growth, to occupy remote regions and thereby forestall threats from foreign powers, to populate the West in order to foster private economic development, and to create a land-owning, small-farmer middle class that would sustain a democratic society.

We can trace in broad terms the disposition of this 1.442 billion-acre public domain. The national government today continues possession of about 26 percent (380 million acres). It transferred approximately 22 percent (328 million acres) to individual states, most of which was sold, and homesteaders claimed about 19 percent (270 million, or possibly as much as 285 million, acres). The balance, roughly 32 percent (between 449 and 464 million acres) was transferred to private owners through sales, grants to railroad corporations, veterans’ bonuses, agricultural college grants, and other distributions, or it was stolen, misappropriated, reserved, or otherwise caused to disappear from the public land rolls. Homesteading accounted for between a quarter and a third of the public land transferred by the federal government to private owners.

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by | 12 May 2023 · 6:17 am

How They Handled European Settlers

From Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America, by Pekka Hämäläinen (Liveright, 2022), Kindle pp. 261-263:

After several generations of interactions with Europeans, variously violent and peaceful, the Six Nations knew how to manage anxious, land-hungry settlers. In 1742, at a large summit in the statehouse in Philadelphia, the Onondaga sachem Canassatego addressed the Lenapes as junior allies, relegating the English to a secondary role. “Cousins: Let this Belt of Wampum serve to Chastise You,” he reprimanded the Lenapes in sharply gendered language. “We conquered You, we made Women of you, you know you are Women, and can no more sell Land.” Canassatego ordered them to “remove immediately” from ancestral Iroquois lands. The settlers were mere spectators of the Six Nations’ power politics. The next year, another summit was held to defuse the mounting tensions between Pennsylvania and the neighboring Indians. The Six Nations envoy Zillawoolie focused on the Catawbas, promising to “persuade and charge them to be of good Behavior everywhere”—something Pennsylvania’s timid settlers dared not try. The Iroquois also demanded a right to travel through Virginia as they pleased, and they reasserted their dominance over the Delaware and Ohio Valleys.

Had they been present in Philadelphia, the Catawbas would have denounced the Six Nations’ presumption. The Great Trading Path between the Chesapeake Bay and the Piedmont continued to channel English trading parties to Catawba towns, keeping them prosperous and powerful. As ancient residents of the Piedmont, the Catawbas thought they could simply stay put and wait for goods to flow into their towns. In exchange for their precious deerskins and furs, they received guns, powder, lead, metal tools, cloth, blankets, luxuries, and rum. Certain of the strength of their position, they were aloof to the point of becoming arrogant and outright offensive. When the talks resumed in Philadelphia in the summer of 1744, the Catawbas sent a cutting message informing the Iroquois that they “were but Women; that they [themselves] were men and double men for they had two P——s [penises]; that they could make Women of Us, and would be always at War with us.”

In an era when pushing the colonists back into the sea was no longer a possibility, the Catawbas kept the settlers in a state of uncertainty: Europeans feared that the Indians might launch a war any day. The colonists’ nervousness about the Catawbas set that Indigenous group apart from the Iroquois and their artful diplomacy, and from the Shawnees and the strategic mobility they used to keep the settlers at a distance. The Catawbas knew that eventually they would have to adapt to new circumstances, compromise, and enter into negotiations with the Europeans, but they would hold on to their independence as long as they possibly could. They were determined to preserve Indigenous sovereignty in the face of unprecedented odds and to rebalance Indigenous power on the continent.

Other nations east of the Appalachians adopted a more counterintuitive approach. They relied on accommodation and compromises that required a new mindset: Indians should embrace the colonists—at arm’s length—to survive colonialism. When colonial frontiers inched toward them, they would meet the settlers on the borderlands between the two parties. This strategy demanded numbers, political gravitas, and delicate diplomacy. The Muscogee, Cherokee, and Chickasaw leaders in the Appalachian foothills and Trans-Appalachian West pursued this strategy. Tucked between French and English realms, these three Native nations were already fluent in colonial methods when the English began to push their farms and settlements uphill. The Indians left the Europeans alone, playing Louisiana, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, and Pennsylvania off against each other and extracting gifts, weapons, and manufactured goods from all. The Indians were careful not to attach themselves to any single colony. The settlers thought that the Indigenous confederacies—most notably the Six Nations—had divided into pro-French and pro-English factions, but those divisions were more circumstantial than fixed. Operating in a different geopolitical landscape west of the Appalachians, the twenty-thousand-strong Choctaws divided into “Eastern,” “Western,” and “Sixtown” villages to engage with various colonies more flexibly.

By European standards, the Muscogees, Cherokees, Chickasaws, and Choctaws were dangerously decentralized and their leaders hopelessly weak, but therein lay the genius of their political systems. Most of their leaders commanded small groups, which threw the settlers off-balance: there was no single person for the Europeans to co-opt—just a multitude of seemingly ineffectual potentates who were useless to the settlers’ aims. But those leaders knew how to manage European newcomers.

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Filed under Britain, economics, France, migration, military, nationalism, North America

by | 10 May 2023 · 6:16 am

Japanese Military Buddhist Chaplains

During one phase of his missionary career in Japan, my father worked with the pastor of Hiroshima Baptist Church, who had once been a Japanese military chaplain in Manchuria, a tidbit my father never revealed to me until much later in his life. It seemed highly unlikely that the pastor was a Christian at that time, and I had not been aware that Imperial Japan had Buddhist chaplains, but it certainly did, according to Brian Victoria in “The Emperor’s New Clothes: The Buddhist Military Chaplaincy in Imperial Japan and Contemporary America,” Journal of the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies 2016(11):155-200. Here’s the abstract.

In twentieth century Japan, Buddhist military chaplains were present on the battlefield from as early as the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5 and lasting up through the end of World War II. The focus of this article is less on the history of these chaplains than the manner in which they interpreted the Buddha Dharma so as to allow them and their sectarian sponsors to play this role. This is followed by a more detailed examination of the recent emergence of a Buddhist chaplaincy within the U.S. military, asking whether there are any similarities, especially doctrinally, between the military chaplaincy in the two nations.

The purpose of this examination is to identify issues related to those elements of Buddhist doctrine and practice that make the existence of a Buddhist chaplaincy both possible and, at the same time, problematic. Equally important, it reveals one facet or dimension of the manner in which institutional Buddhism has served the political and military interests of those countries in which it is present, and still does so.

The origins of the Buddhist chaplaincy in Japan go back to medieval times (pp. 160, 162):

As for actual Buddhist chaplains, one of the earliest progenitors of such figures is to be found in Japan. Japan is of particular significance because, as this article reveals, it was the Buddhist faith of Japanese-Americans that was primarily responsible for the creation of a Buddhist chaplaincy in the US military.

Japan’s Buddhist chaplains can be traced back to at least the fourteenth century. It was in 1333 that warriors loyal to Emperor Go-Daigo (1288-1339), whose political power had been usurped, revolted against the warrior-led government holding sway in Kamakura. As a result, itinerant Buddhist chaplains belonging to the Pure Land sect (J. Jōdo-shū) were assigned to warriors in the field in order to ensure that their patrons recited the name of Amida Buddha at least ten times at the time of death. In so doing, it was believed, the warrior’s rebirth in the Pure Land was assured.

As historian Sybil Thornton* notes, the activities of these chaplains quickly expanded beyond a purely religious function and they ended up burning, burying and praying for the dead, as well as caring for the sick and wounded. When their warrior patrons were not engaged in battle, the chaplains amused them with poetry and assumed a role close to that of a personal servant. Given that these chaplains appear to have been beholden to their patrons for food, clothing, and shelter, this latter role is hardly surprising.

* Sybil Thornton, “Buddhist Chaplains in the Field of Battle” in Buddhism in Practice, ed. Donald S. Lopez Jr. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995)

…

Given this historical background, it is not surprising that, in the modern era, Buddhist chaplains accompanied troops to the battlefield as early as the first Sino-Japanese war of 1894-5. The job was not only to give ‘morale-building’ talks to the soldiers, but also to conduct funerals for those who fell in battle, as well as notify relatives of the deceased in Japan itself. Even in times of peace, the need for chaplains was recognized, with the Nishi (West) Honganji branch of the True Pure Land Sect (Jōdo Shinshū), for example, dispatching forty-six priests to over forty military bases throughout Japan as early as 1902.

In the same year, Nishi Honganji produced a booklet entitled Bushidō as part of a series called “Lectures on Spirit” (Seishin Kōwa). The connection between the two events is clear in that Ōtani Kōen (1850-1903), an aristocrat and the branch’s administrative head, who both dispatched the military chaplains and contributed a forward to the booklet. Kōen explained that the booklet’s purpose was “to clarify the purpose of military evangelization.”

This little 豆知識 mame chishiki ‘bean of knowledge’ sprouted from the observation of a friend that the gravestones of early Korean immigrants to Hawai‘i seem rarely to show any religious insignia. The gravestones of Japanese immigrants, by contrast, often contain posthumous Buddhist names as well as occasional insignia that suggest what sect of Buddhism they adhered to. From what I can tell from online photos, South Korean military graves also contain no religious insignia, while some North Korean military graves contain red stars. However, the Korean Navy now has chaplains, presumably Buddhist as well as Christian.

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Filed under China, Japan, Korea, military, nationalism, religion, war