Summary

One challenge the Homesteaders faced was the journey west. Early settlers suffered from exhaustion, hunger, and disease as they traveled in wagons. But after the 1860s, railroads made travel faster, safer, and cheaper.

Another issue was securing land. Speculators often cheated settlers by selling them imaginary towns. However, the Homestead Act of 1862 allowed settlers to claim 160 acres of land, and railroads sold additional land cheaply.

Once there, settlers needed to build homes. Without trees, many built sod houses, which were quick to construct but full of fleas and leaked during rain.

Women faced a huge workload. Sod houses were hard to maintain, and the lack of sanitation caused illnesses like diphtheria. They made their own soap and candles, cooked on open fires, and lacked basic supplies. Despite this, they heroically endured the harsh conditions.

Homesteaders also struggled with isolation. Without doctors, women gave birth alone and returned to work quickly. There was little community life, and families waited through harsh winters for spring. They formed mutual aid groups with close neighbours, read and sewed.

Farming presented many difficulties. The prairie soil was tough to plough, and machinery was expensive. They shared a John Deere steel plough, and hired travelling gangs of workers who ‘followed’ planting and harvest. Droughts were common, but wells, wind pumps, and ‘dry’ crops like "Turkey Red" wheat helped overcome the lack of water. Fencing was solved by the invention of barbed wire. However, pests like grasshoppers remained a problem, often destroying crops.

Lawlessness also plagued the settlers – notably vigilante cattlemen – until the territory became a state and courts and marshals gradually restored order.

What Problems Confronted The Homesteaders and How Were They Overcome?

The first problem facing the Homesteaders was how to get to the West. Many of the Mormons had perished, "weary and footsore", pulling their possessions in handcarts (1857-8), and settlers in their 'Prairie schooners' (covered wagons) faced drought, hunger, Indians and disease. After the 1860s, however, the Railroads solved this problem; they provided settlers with a cheap, safe and speedy journey to the West,

The second problem facing settlers was how to get some land. Settlers had no legal claim to the land if they moved in before the 'Public Domain' land had been surveyed and sold. In the early days also settlers were cheated by speculators who bought up large areas of land and sold imaginary towns such as 'New Babylon' at high prices. The settlers' problems, however, disappeared after the 1860s. The government sold some land at $1 an acre, and, after the Homesteaders Act of 1862, allowed settlers to claim 160 acres of free land if they lived and worked on it for five years. Most of all, the government paid the Railroad Companies for their work by giving them millions of acres of land near the track. The Railroads sold it at $3 an acre. To encourage settlers, they also offered "extraordinary inducements" such as ten years credit, no tax for six years, schools and churches. They even provided temporary accommodation in their 'hotels' until the settlers found their own home. By the 1870s most of the problems of setting up a farm had been largely overcome by the government and the Railroads.

When they arrived, the Homesteaders' third problem was to provide themselves with a house. Only settlers in eastern Kansas and Nebraska could build log cabins - other settlers were faced with treeless grasslands. So they built 'sod houses' and in the meantime "we lived out of doors and my mother did her cooking on an open fire". These houses were cheap and quickly built, but they had fleas and bedbugs "by the million", and when it rained "I would wake up with water running through my hair". The settlers had no other choice but to make do with their 'soddy homes'. A "good thick coat of whitewash" got rid of the bedbugs; and "a layer of fine clay" stopped the worst of the leaks. But it was impossible to disinfect the floor. In addition, "the open dug well, the outdoor toilet . . . the lack of ventilation and crowded quarters" meant that "germs were here, there, everywhere and anywhere" and the death rate, especially by diphtheria, was high. Despite a "no spitting fad" which came in, the Homesteaders could do little to overcome this, until they moved to modern houses in later life.

The women faced the fourth problem of housework on their primitive farms. Mothers had to collect 'buffalo chips' for fuel, re-stoke the stove three times each mealtime, three times a day, and make their own candles and soap. Often housewives had only a couple of buckets, a set of crockery and one cracked china cup. There was no water to wash, no baker or shops and little food (flour "parched, with coffee beans"). The housewife would catch a travelling shoe-maker or a tinker to solder the pans, but, again, it was a case of endure rather than overcome. "I have often wondered how my mother stood it with such a family of children . . . Often she would sit up late at night darning our socks and mending our ragged pants".

A fifth problem was isolation. Wives had to give birth without a doctor or midwife and be back at their housework two days later. There was no community life - "no singing schools, spelling school, debating clubs or church gatherings. Neighbourly calls are infrequent because of the long distances which separate the farmhouses". In the winter even the schools closed and families had nothing to do but "house themselves and long for spring". Again it was riot a case of 'overcome' but of adapting to circumstances and making the most of a trip to the nearest town, where the women talked of the harvest and the men smoked corncob pipes and talked politics.

Farming the land was the sixth problem. First the 'sodbusters' had to 'break' the thick prairie soil. Most farmers could not afford a plough or team and had to pay a neighbour whilst they earned enough cash to buy food and equipment. But the new machines such as McCormick's reaper (1831) and the steam-powered threshers and binders were too expensive. The farmers sowed by hand, harvested with a sickle and threshed with a flail - but could not find enough labourers, or produce enough to feed even themselves. This problem was overcome after 1880 when prices fell and seasonal thresher teams were formed who travelled from farm to farm following the harvest. Each farmer could hire them for a few days quite cheaply.

The seventh problem was drought. Rainfall was only 38cm a year and the hot summer winds evaporated up to 100cm! Unlike the Mormons the Plains-settlers could not co¬operate to develop an irrigation system and wells not only needed up to 150 metre shafts (very difficult to find with only a divining rod), but even then did not supply enough water to irrigate the farm all summer. In 1859-60 and in the 1860s there were terrible droughts, followed by prairie fires. New inventions and developments overcame this problem. The well driller and windpump allowed artesian wells. New methods of 'dry farming' (growing 'Turkey Red' (hard winter) wheat from the Crimea instead of maize, ploughing and covering with a fine layer of dust to prevent evaporation after every rainfall) were introduced. Finally the government realised that 160 acres was not enough to support a family and introduced the Timber and Culture Act 1873, which allowed farmers to claim another 160 free acres if they grew half an acre of trees. By 1890, the problems of drought had been largely overcome.

An eighth problem was fencing. Lack of timber and the expense of hedging made it difficult for farmers to keep cattle off their crops and this led to trouble with the cattlemen. Barbed Wire (patented by Joseph Glidden in 1874) solved this.

A ninth problem was insect pests, such as Colorado Beetles and grasshoppers. The grasshopper plagues of the 1870s, stripped the cornstalks "naked as beanpoles", as the grasshoppers gnawed fruit to the core, ate a garden truck and sent pregnant women insane

"Hurrah for Greer County, the land of the free,

The land of the bedbug, grasshopper and flea"

wrote one settler who claimed he was "starving to death" and vowed to "travel back east". The settlers tried to cut the ears before they came, or to beat them down, but came back "weary and dispirited". State governments had to raise relief funds, or they would have starved. Really, the settlers never solved this problem until modern insecticides were invented.

The tenth problem the settlers faced was attack by bushwackers and renegades, limited danger from Indigenous warriors on raiding parties, and bands of vigilante cattlemen who executed summary 'justice' for 'rustling'. In 1892 the conflict between the Homesteaders and cattlemen developed into a the full-scale 'Johnson County War', with courts and government apparently helpless to stop it. Only when the territory became a state did the law courts and marshals establish order - until that time the only way for the settlers to overcome this problem was to go out in force from Buffalo, and so frighten the cattlemen that they paid their own expenses to be kept in jail!