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Sodbusters on the Plains
| 1 |
Unlike
mining, farm settlement often followed predictable patterns, taking
population from states east of the frontier line and moving gradually westward.
Crossing the Mississippi, farmers settled first in South Dakota, Minnesota, western
Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, and Texas. The movement slumped during the depression
of the 1870s, but then a new wave of optimism carried thousands more west. Several
years of above-average rainfall convinced farmers that the Dakotas, western Nebraska
and Kansas, and eastern Colorado were the "rain belt of the Plains." Between
1870 and 1900 the population on the Plains tripled.
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| 2 |
Farming there presented
new problems. There was little surface water, and wells ranged between
fifty and five hundred feet deep. Well drillers charged up to
$2 a foot. Taking advantage of the steady Plains winds, windmills brought the
water to the surface, but they too were expensive, and until 1900 many farmers
could not afford them. Lumber for homes and fences was also scarce. Some settlers
imported it from distant Wisconsin, but a single homestead of 160 acres cost
$1000 to fence, an amount few could pay. |
| 3 |
Unable to afford
wood, farmers often started out in dreary sod houses. Cut into three-foot
sections, the thick prairie sod was laid like brick, with space
left for two windows and a door. Since glass was scarce, cloth hung over the
windows; a blanket was hung from the ceiling to make two rooms. Sod houses
were small, provided little light and air, and were impossible to keep
clean. When
it rained, water seeped through the roof. Yet a sod house cost only $2.78 to
build. |
| 4 |
Outside, the Plains
environment sorely tested the men and women who moved there. Neighbors
were distant; the land stretched on as far as the eye could
see. Always
the wind blew. "As long as I live I'll never see such a lonely country," a
woman said of the Texas Plains. A Nebraska woman said: "These unbounded
prairies have such an air of desolation--and the stillness is very oppressive." |
| 5 |
In the winters savage
storms swept the open grasslands. Ice caked on the cattle
until their heads were too heavy to hold up. Summertime temperatures stayed near
110 degrees for weeks at a time. Fearsome rainstorms, building in the summer's
heat, beat down the young corn and wheat. The summers also brought grasshoppers,
arriving without warning, flying in clouds so huge they shut out the sun. The
grasshoppers ate everything in sight: crops, clothing, mosquito netting, tree
bark, even plow handles. In the summer of 1874 they devastated the whole Plains
from Texas to the Dakotas, eating everything "but the mortgage," as
one farmer said. (Divine, Robert A., et al., America: Past and Present, 2nd ed.
Glenview, IL: Scott, Foresman, 1987, 508-509) |
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