The Difficult Life Of The Pioneer Farmer

ASU HST 200 (Historical Themes) Westward Expansion, 1840-1900 The Difficult Life Of The Pioneer Farmer The great bulk of the hundreds of thousands of people who relocated westward were homesteaders. Similar to the Ingalls family from the novel and television series Little House on the Prairie (see the inset below), these pioneers were looking for opportunity and land. Often referred to as "sodbusters," these Midwesterner men and women had a challenging existence as pioneers. They established themselves across what are now the states of Wisconsin, Minnesota, Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakotas in the Midwest. The settlers struggled to make ends meet because of the harsh weather and surroundings. Would-be settlers had assumed that the "great desert" had disappeared after a few unusually wet years, but the area's generally low rainfall and severe temperatures made agricultural production challenging. It was necessary to irrigate, but many farmers found it too costly and difficult to locate water and to develop suitable systems. The Newlands Reclamation Act of 1902 was the last mechanism in place to reserve money from the sale of public lands for the construction of dams needed for later irrigation projects. Before then, the majority of farmers in the Great Plains relied on dry farming methods to cultivate maize, wheat, and sorghum; many of them carried on with this practice into the following decades. A few farmers also started using windmill technology to extract water, but few could afford the additional costs associated with drilling and building windmills. Due to a lack of available lumber, the initial homes constructed by western settlers were usually composed of mud and sod with thatch roofs. When rain did come, it caused frequent issues for these sod cottages because mud would get into the food and rodents would scurry over the bedding, especially lice (Figure 17.8). The fields were left dry by weather patterns that also produced blizzards, tornadoes, droughts, and swarms of insects. There were frequent reports of locust swarms, and the crop-eating insects may occasionally cover six to twelve inches of land. Farmers also faced the constant threat of debt and bank foreclosure of their farms. One often cited Kansas newspaper reported on a locust swarm in 1878 during which the insects devoured "everything green, stripping the foliage off the bark and from the tender twigs of the fruit trees, destroying every plant that is good for food or pleasant to the eye, that man has planted." The Homestead Act made land almost free, but in the newly populated areas of the nation where market economies had not yet completely developed, all other agricultural essentials were expensive and first hard to come by. Although essential for life, horses, cattle, carts, wells, fences, seed, and fertilizer were sometimes hard to come by since the population was first dispersed over large areas of land. It was challenging to get products or turn a profit on anything transported back east because of the infamously high prices that railroads charged for cattle and farming equipment. In a loop that repeated itself year after year, farmers would borrow money from banks at exorbitant interest rates, intending to pay back the loan after the harvest. The market price of their crops progressively decreased as more farmers moved west, despite a rise in the land's intrinsic value. Hardworking farmers produced ever-larger crops every year, overwhelming the marketplace and further lowering prices in the process. Some knew the basics of supply and demand economics, but none had the explicit power to manipulate such dynamics. Farmers eventually benefited from the establishment of a larger railroad network, mostly because it brought much-needed supplies like modern farm machinery and lumber for building. Although a steel-faced plow was first introduced by John Deere in 1838, it was James Oliver's modifications to the tool in the late 1860s that revolutionized homesteading. His innovative, less costly "chilled plow" was more suited to handle damage from rocks that were just below the surface and sliced through the shallow grass roots of the Midwestern landscape. For those who could afford them, similar innovations in threshing machines, manure spreaders, and hay mowers significantly increased agricultural productivity. Greater commercial farms, sometimes referred to as "bonanza farms," started to emerge where capital expenditure started to play a big role. Migrant farmers were employed by farmers in North Dakota, South Dakota, and Minnesota to cultivate wheat on their more than 20,000 acres of land. By century's end, these big farms were doing well, while tiny family farms were still having trouble. Despite the land being almost free, starting a farm required over $1000 in supplies. As a result, many would-be landowners who were drawn to the West by the promise of inexpensive land ended up being migrant farmers who worked other people's land in exchange for a pay. Small farmers' dissatisfaction increased and eventually resulted in a form of uprising that is covered in a later chapter.