American Crossroads: Teaching History on the Great Plains

Homesteaders, The Frontier, and Hopscotching Across America

Written by Christopher W. Czajka

owboys riding off into the sunset. Indians in war paint. Raw-boned men in fringed leggings

accompanied by sallow-faced women in faded calico dresses and slat sunbonnets. Wagons

rocking slowly west under crisply starched canvas covers. Prim, thin-lipped schoolmarms and

grizzled, wild-eyed prospectors. There is perhaps no more overly romanticized and

misunderstood time in history than the settling of the American frontier. In today's popular

consciousness, the frontier exists in some hazy period of the nineteenth century, populated

with larger-than-life stereotypes and events.

In reality, the "frontier" existed for much of the United States' history. From the time the first

European settlers reached the North American continent, there have been individuals and

groups living on the "frontier," the edge of the "wilderness" just beyond the grasp of what

they considered to be "civilization." For the Pilgrims, fleeing religious persecution in England,

the frontier was the Massachusetts coastline in the 1620s. For Daniel Boone, the frontier was

Kentucky in the 1770s.

For the residents of Skunk City, a wild boomtown later known as Chicago, the frontier was

Illinois in the 1840s. For pioneer author Laura Ingalls Wilder, the frontier was South Dakota in

the 1880s. The U.S. has had many frontiers with many pioneers, each existing in its own

unique place, time, and circumstances.

Homesteading was a way of life created, in effect, by the U.S. government. The Homestead

Act, passed by Congress on May 20, 1862, declared that any citizen of the United States could

claim 160 acres of surveyed government land. After payment of a nominal filing fee,

homesteaders were to "improve" their land by living on it, building a dwelling, and planting

crops. If the settlers fulfilled these requirements, and remained on their homestead for a

period of five years, the land became their property. Via the Homestead Act, vast amounts of

the public domain -- 270 million acres, or 10% of the continental United States -- were

opened up to private citizens.

The Act's minimal and seemingly lenient requirements proved insurmountable for many

would-be homesteaders. Many homesteaders took claims with little or no farming experience,

and growing crops in the harsh conditions of the West was a difficult task for even the most

seasoned farmers. Many homesteads in the arid plains were too small to yield a profitable

crop, and the cost of irrigation far exceeded the value of the land. Over the 124-year history

of the Act, more than 2 million individuals filed claims. Of these, only 783,000 -- less than half

-- ultimately obtained the deeds for their homesteads.

Despite the odds, thousands of settlers from all walks of life -- including single women,

recently freed slaves, and newly arrived immigrants -- went to the frontier to meet the

challenge of "proving up" their claims and keeping their "free" land. A popular camp song of

the 1870s cheered,

"Come along, come along, don't be alarmed;

Uncle Sam is rich enough to give us all a farm!"

Montana was a popular destination for many settlers. Prior to

the early 1870s, Montana had gone through a series of cycles of

boom and bust. Following its exploration by Lewis and Clark in

1805-06, the area was exploited by fur trappers in the 1810s and 1820s. In the 1860s, gold

was discovered, and one early miner wrote enthusiastically that the vein of gold was so rich

that "you could pull up a sagebrush and shake a dollar's worth of dust from its roots." As the

availability of mining claims and mining yields dwindled, and as other areas of the West

became populated, more and more settlers looked toward the unclaimed homesteads in the

Montana Territory as a means by which to make their fortunes.

Montana's homesteads were claimed by a wide variety of

individuals for a wide variety of reasons. For many, Montana

promised an easier, more prosperous life than in the "settled"

parts of the country. Montana pioneer Marie Tintinger Nevin

recalled:

"Several letters came from my brothers, telling what a

wonderful climate Montana had, and how the livestock grazed

on the range the year around. That sounded good to us back

in the cold northern part of Iowa, where we had to hover

around the stove to keep from freezing and where the

blizzards were so bad they had to have lines stretched from

houses to barns, to find their way from house to barn and

back during a Northerner."

Even for those who were already in the West, Montana held

possibilities. Bartley Curtis, who came to the Territory as a

child in the 1880s, reported that in South

Dakota,

"Somehow or other the things that they could grow well out there just

wasn't doing any good. There was just this bald, bare prairie. So my

father decided he would migrate, that he would up and get out of that

country."

For others, the decision to head to Montana was more haphazard. I.D.

O'Donnell, who was living in Chicago, was out of a job and looking for a

new place to settle:

"I had about $30.00 in my possession, and I had bought a train ticket. At

the time, there was a rush toward the homestead land of South Dakota.

We studied maps trying to decide where to go where we could earn a

living. Miles City [Montana] was then the head of the rails for the Northern Pacific Railroad. I

turned to my friend and I said, 'Let's go to the end.'"

Aside from native-born Americans, immigrants from Scandinavia, Germany, Poland,

Yugoslavia, France, Italy, Spain, and Ireland flooded into the Territory. Herman Untermohle, a

German immigrant, arrived in Montana in 1888 after a chance meeting in New York:

"My father ran a carriage factory in Hildesheim, Germany. At 27 years of age my mother sent

me to New York, to learn something of carriage making in the United States. I arrived in

October of 1887. I remained for the winter, observing and working in the Brewster Carriage

Factory, and having a good time. That winter, I met a couple named Medley, who had a ranch

near Big Timber, Montana, who told me about hunting and many interesting things of the

West. In March, I decided to take a trip West to visit them."

Once Untermohle made it to Montana, he stayed for the next thirty years.

ne of the few similarities amongst the homesteaders was

that most had moved and settled -- often many times --

before their arrival in Montana. Settlers "hopscotched" their

way around the country, dropping anchor and then moving

on (or moving backward) as their fortunes rose and fell. For

example, Jennie C. Forsythe, a Michigan native, headed east

from California to settle in Livingston, Montana, in 1881.

The same was true for Pamelia Dillin Fergus. A native of

upstate New York, she spent her teenage and early adult years living in no less than three

different locales across Illinois and Minnesota. In the fall of 1863, after a three-year

separation, her husband summoned her to rejoin him -- and bring their four children -- for a

new life in Montana Territory. It was time for another move. There were preparations to be

made, supplies to be bought, and wagons to be loaded. For many settlers, "getting started"

was the hardest part of their legendary journeys.

But that's another story ...

Source:

www.pbs.org/wnet/frontierhouse/frontierlife/essay1.html