Great Plains (9 page)

Tens of thousands of other German-speaking people came to the Great Plains to farm. This was partly because Americans encouraged them to. According to many nineteenth-century speechmakers, the settling of the West was just another chapter in the triumphal march of the indomitable Anglo-Saxon race. Germans were right for the job. The railroads, with tracks crossing hundreds of miles of empty prairie, had perhaps the most to gain from settlement. Railroad executives agreed with the popular notion that Germans made the best farmers in the world. All the Western roads sent promoters to Europe to convince people to emigrate. (Most Western states did, too.) The Burlington Railroad thought so highly of Germans, and so little of French and Italians, that it printed advertising brochures in the first language and did not bother with the other two. Promoters were always watching for political changes that might produce refugees; in 1871 the Burlington directed a special pamphlet at the people of Alsace–Lorraine, suggesting the state of Nebraska as the perfect place to escape their oppressors.

All the promoters were at some pains to explain that land in the American West was free. Which it was, more or less. The Homestead Act of 1862 said that on surveyed but unclaimed public land any citizen or intended citizen could claim a quarter section—160 acres—and own it outright after living on it and improving it for a period of five years. The homesteader needed a small filing fee, and a much larger amount of cash to survive until the farm got going. Of course, most of the land available for homesteading was far from the railroad lines, because the government had given the railroads large grants of land along their rights-of-way to finance construction. And because the railroads often followed river valleys, not many homestead acres lay in well-watered bottomlands.

The idea behind the Homestead Act was that a nation of small, independent farmers would make the best foundation for democracy. It was an idea as old as the United States. In the years just before the Civil War, politicians from the North wanted to fill the West with farmers on 160-acre homesteads to stop the spread of slavery. The Homestead Act finally passed during the war, when the South could no longer object. Unfortunately, the 160-acre homestead, as well as the larger ones provided for in later legislation, turned out to be wrong for the Great Plains. To expect a person to make a living on a little square of this vast region where animals and Indians used to travel hundreds of miles looking for food, where clouds slide all over before the winds, where you have to import many necessities—it was like expecting a fisherman to survive on just a little square of ocean.

The central plains were where the first railroads crossed, so they were the first to be settled. The northern plains between the Missouri River and the Canadian border had no railroad until 1889, and people were still filing first-time homestead claims in northern Montana through the 1920s. Homesteading the plains might not have been possible at all without the invention of barbed wire for fencing, and of a windmill which reduced its blade surface in high winds to keep from blowing apart. As ingenious as either of these was a public-relations device which some scientists, college professors, U.S. Geological Survey officials, and railroad promoters came up with. This device was the meteorological theory that “rain follows the plow.” According to this theory, cultivation of the soil, human activity, steam from railroad engines—all the developments that accompany settlement—produced increased rainfall. The Santa Fe Railroad went so far as to identify the “rainline,” the front edge of this advancing rainfall, which supposedly moved at a rate of about eighteen miles a year, staying just ahead of the new settlements.

Another theory favored by the railroads and their experts taught that deep cultivation of the soil conserved moisture, so the homesteaders broke up virgin sod undisturbed since the last Ice Age and plowed furrows twelve and eighteen inches deep. As it turned out, rain did not follow the plow any more than it followed anything else. Some farmers made enough money to buy more land and survive drought years and stay in business. Many thousands of homesteaders ended up owning farms on the Great Plains. But an even larger number went broke, lost their crops to grasshoppers, saw their fields dry up and blow away, went into debt, went crazy with loneliness, sold out, left, and never came back. Homesteads in particularly unpromising parts of the plains often saw dozens and dozens of would-be owners over the years before the message finally got through. Farmers and ranchers are still going out of business on the plains today.

The early homesteaders used dried buffalo droppings for fuel, carted buffalo bones to the railroads for cash, and cleaned the buffalo off the plains so thoroughly that today a buffalo bone is a rare find. Abandoned farmhouses, on the other hand, are everywhere. From Canada to Texas, they are a constant of the landscape. Sometimes when I would drive by one in the middle of blank prairie, I would make myself stop and take a look. About five miles from Winifred, Montana, I climbed a barbed-wire gate with a “No Hunting” sign on it and walked up to a cabin made of eight-inch cottonwood logs. It had two intact stone chimneys, green shingles, a boarded-up door, window frames with no windows. My heart sped up; as I got close enough to see how tight the hand-hewn carpentry was, I felt more and more like a trespasser. I stuck my head through the window, and instantly several swallows dive-bombed out past me. I hit the dirt and lay there panting. Finally I stepped through the window. The hardwood floor was spotted with droppings, but still in fine shape. Someone had laid it as tight as the floor of a gym. I could see the blue sky through a small hole in the roof. The walls were plastered, and in the front room the white wallpaper had a red geometric pattern in a faded Art Deco design.

Whenever you see an abandoned house, you wonder. Usually, I was too shy to stop the car and go closer. The way a man in Texas looked at me when he drove up the driveway of an abandoned house as I was peering through the window and writing in my notebook (“busted air conditioner / empty Field Trial high-protein dog food bags / electric-fence transformer / pair of white water skis in corner”) gave me an idea of the way the ghosts in these houses might look at me if they existed and could take shape for a moment. Behind the wheel of his pickup truck, the man was one big question mark: Why in the world did I want to nose around the house where (as it turned out) he had grown up? We talked for a few minutes, and the mild, complete puzzlement never left his face. As my van pulled out of the driveway, it slunk.

Most of the abandoned farms—the driveways lined with double rows of cottonwoods sometimes leading to nothing, the spavined barns, bladeless windmills, crumpled stock tanks, tree-sheltered homeplaces with the home missing, fallen-down corrals, splintered stock chutes, rusting farm machinery—I saw from the road, at sixty miles an hour. A friend of mine in Montana who had grown up on the plains loaned me a centennial history of his county,
The Wonder of Williams: A History of Williams County, North Dakota.
(Williams happens to be the county that includes the Fort Union site, and much of the Yellowstone-Missouri confluence area.) This book, published by the Williams County Historical Society, has a chapter on every township in the county, with a list of the families who live there. Many chapters end with a section titled “Others Who Were Here.” Sometimes in the evenings in a motel room, after a day of passing abandoned farms, I would read from “Others Who Were Here”:

ELLA SPAWN
proved up on her homestead in fourteen months and then sold it. Her parents owned a cafe in Williston. She married Rush Blankenship.

THORSTIEN ODDEN
homesteaded 80 acres in Section 33. A single man who came from Norway, he loved to play his Hardanger violin. He refused to help with the threshing because he thought the fork handle would stiffen his fingers …

GULLICK GULLIKSON
came from Numesdal, Norway, about 1910. He homesteaded in Barr Butte, stayed for a short time, then went back to Norway where he operated a trucking business.

CHARLEY BURKE
was a coal miner. He was smothered in Billy Kirk's mine when a prairie fire ignited the straw at the entry to the mine. All efforts to save him failed. His faithful dog was with him and also smothered.

WILLYS IRVING
was the town boxer …

E. J. BURNS
came from Missouri and homesteaded. He was an attorney and wrote poetry. A poem he wrote during World War I was entitled “Wave Flag, Wave.” He wrote many others.

MARTIN LARSON
homesteaded, then moved to Washington. He was said to have money but lived like a hermit.

OLE OLSON HALLING
homesteaded in Section 1. When he left the homestead he rode his pony to Coopers-town. He died there …

C. D. HELMS
homesteaded in 1904 or '05. They lived here until 1925. There is no record of what happened to the family.

ANDREW EDWARDSON BOLI
homesteaded in 1909. He lived on the homestead only a short time, then went back east.

GILBERT FUNKHOUSER
came from Virginia in 1907. He was never married and passed away in 1921.

MARTIN ROSSING
homesteaded in Bonetraill in 1909 but he stayed there only a couple years. He used to play the violin.

JIM KENNEDY
, who homesteaded, was a veteran of the Spanish-American War. He later moved to Toledo, Ohio.

BEECHER LEACH
came to North Dakota with his parents in 1906 from Missouri. He remained unmarried his entire life …

STELLA SWAB
homesteaded in East Fork sometime before 1914. She married a druggist and later they moved to Red Lodge, Montana …

CONRAD WESTKEMPER
—His son became a priest. Reports are they went to Florida.

ENOC SAMUELSON
—Sold out and went to Minot to work on the railroad.

JULIUS SMITH
—Sold his land to Oliver Haugen and went back to Sweden.

ROBERT A. SMITH
—A negro who worked out for others digging rocks. He is remembered by some for his fried bread doughs, called ‘Bob Smiths'…

HENRY BOGSTI
—Had $10 and a saddle horse when he came here. He sold out, went to Wildrose, and worked in an elevator. His son was killed in a flax bin.

JOHN SONNENS
—Conrad Westkemper got his homestead. Some remember how Mrs. Sonnens shocked all the grain, topping each shock with two bundles.

HANS BREKTO
—Came from Wisconsin. Remembered by having no damper in his stove pipe …

OLOUS P. LINDSTEDT
—Olous and his son, Albert, came to this area from Hillsboro or Caledonia. One day Olous rode a mule over to Ed Haugen's and when Marie asked him to have dinner with them, he said, “You don't have to ask me twice.”

HENRY AND SARAH WINDEL
both homesteaded. Sarah must have been a sister or wife of Henry. His land belonged to her for many years.

OLIVER FEDGE
was a bachelor. He left by 1916.

HANSENA OLSON
was single when she homesteaded. Somebody came along and married her and she ended up in Canada.

OLE HEEN
(no relation to Lars) was called “Goliath.” He choked to death on meat in a cafe in Ray some years ago …

EMIL PERSON
was tall and lean. He had so many pictures of women on the walls of his claim shack they overlapped …

A. B. SMITH
, known as “Saleratus,” lived quietly to himself and always carried a pistol. Why? Nobody knew. He got his name from his menu: Saleratus bread, boiled potatoes, bacon, and bacon grease for butter and gravy.

PETER KARLSRUD
put in the minimum time to prove up his claim. He was a grain buyer and bought grain for some years in Scobey, Montana.

MARTHA FORGAARD
, an excellent dressmaker, later moved to Canada.

OLE INGLADSON
died in the flu epidemic in 1918.

VICTOR BERQUIST
, a bachelor, came in 1905. One evening in the spring of 1923, after visiting a neighbor's home, he walked away and disappeared. His homestead shack showed no signs of his having prepared to leave. Everything was left exactly the way it had been. A group of neighbors searched for him, but no sign of him was ever found.

Sometimes an abandoned house has enough minor fame that it is mentioned on a historical marker near it on the highway. Just before a bridge on U.S. Highway 83 north of Wellington, Texas, I pulled over to read this marker:

THE RED RIVER PLUNGE OF BONNIE AND CLYDE

On June 10, 1933, Mr. and Mrs. Sam Pritchard and family saw from their home on the bluff (west) the plunge of an auto into Red River. Rescuing the victims, unrecognized as Bonnie Parker and Clyde and Buck Barrow, they sent for help. Upon their arrival, the local sheriff and police chief were disarmed by Bonnie Parker. Buck Barrow shot Pritchard's daughter while crippling the family car to halt pursuit. Kidnapping the officers, the gangsters fled. Bonnie and Clyde were fated to meet death in 1934. In this quiet region, the escape is now legend.

In the town of Lutie, a few miles up the road, I found out that the house was not “on the bluff (west),” but on a little rise just above the marker. I went back and pulled into the weedy drive. The house, long abandoned, still had walls and a roof. I crossed the back stoop, a slab of concrete with small dog footprints in it. The kitchen floor was floral print linoleum now cracked like old oil paint, covered with wrecked-house mast of junk plaster, broken crockery, a rusted Mohawk canned-ham can. Long strips of ceiling lath sheared down into the rooms. The kitchen wallpaper was a design of flowers and leaves in vases; in the living room, the wallpaper had red and white blossoms, light-green leaves with dark-brown stems, a silver background. Even the pantry had flowered wallpaper. I imagined this place on a summer night, with June bugs against the window screens, lamplight, a man reading the paper, a woman doing the dishes, music on the radio; then—Bonnie and Clyde.