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.

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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.