Friefeld, and Wingo 2017 ). More recent study, especially that coming from a team of scholars associated with the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska, reassesses the question, concluding that success rates were reasonably good. They argue, too, that matters of motive and context are important in reassessment, and they continue to pursue more detailed and localized studies that promise to rehabilitate homesteading in historical memory (Edwards 2017).
Debate about the merits of the Homestead Act does not detract from the more consequential elements of Euro-American agricultural settlement: the transformation of the land, the reestablishment of agricultural production, and the foundation of an agricultural society on the prairies. There were instances and localities, such as the Red River Valley of the North, where the expected mode of family-farm settlement was displaced by another mode entirely. Exploiting the lands granted by the US government to the Northern Pacific Railway, investors established bonanza farms of 5000 acres and more specializing in raising spring wheat (Drache 1964; Murray 1967). Such farms lasted little more than a decade. Industrialized wheat farming on such a scale was quite feasible, but, in the longer term, it gave way for two reasons: the drainage issues of the Red River Valley, which made spring seeding difficult, and thus dependence on spring wheat risky; and the desire of investors to sell their lands at profit to arriving family farmers. Thus Hiram M. Drache, the historian well known for his classic history of bonanza farming, The Day of the Bonanza, should also be remembered for its companion work, The Challenge of the Prairie (Drache 1970), which details the experiences of family farmers in the same general region.
What the historians of the Red River Valley and those of the larger Great Plains had in common with one another, as well as with the pioneers whom they chronicled, was a Turnerian sense of progress and, eventually, triumph. Everett Dick, with his “social history” of the “sod-house frontier,” provides little information on the sod house as a matter of material culture; rather it is to him a foil, a temporary recourse of settlers gaining their foothold on the way to the establishment of a full-blown farm society with families, schools, barn dances, flour mills—a fully articulated rural society, including progressive notions of social equality and grassroots democracy (Dick 1937). In a subsequent work Dick fills in technical details—we do learn how to build a sod house, fence a claim, fight a prairie fire—but all this is deployed toward “conquering” the “Great American Desert” (Dick 1975).
Gilbert C. Fite, a farm boy from South Dakota (he grew up on his mother’s homestead), was a child of the triumphal society profiled by Dick—but he had a clear-eyed retrospective view of his roots. Despite writing for the “Histories of the American Frontier” series, the very name of which connotes Turnerian progress, Fite methodically unpacks the process of settlement. Under the heading of “Destitution on the Frontier,” he writes, “Farming has always been a risky, uncertain, and sometimes heart-breaking business, but pioneer settlers on the upper Midwest and central prairie frontier were confronted with an unusual series of hardships” (Fite 1966). Nineteenth-century farmers persisted, or not, but in a sense prevailed, “for out of their experiences came a more accurate and realistic view of the region’s true nature and a recognition of the type of agriculture that could succeed there.” Thus the region’s most evenhanded settlement historian trims expectations.
Included in the catalog of lessons learned were fundamental adjustments attuned to environment. As recounted by the great historian of winter wheat culture on the central plains (Malin 1944), pioneer farmers had to mount a steep learning curve, balancing feed grains and cash grains, laying aside soft white wheats, and embracing hard red winter wheats of Russian derivation. A similar process of adjustment on the northern plains led to cultivation of hard red spring wheats ultimately also of Russian origin, but it was in the north there emerged the other fundamental adjustment, that of tillage. Dry farming—a term that comprised not just farming without irrigation, but also a complex of tillage practices intended to make the most of meager rainfall in a semiarid land—required first a realistic reckoning of the land. Deep plowing, fallowing, and maintenance of a dust mulch through frequent use of spike or disc harrows were intended to husband moisture and raise a crop every other year where moisture would not sustain one every year (Hargreaves 1957). No chronicler of agricultural settlement synthesizes the hopes, failures, triumphs, and adjustments of nineteenth-century pioneers better than Craig Miner, the historian of western Kansas (Miner 1986). Learning to navigate agriculture “as a commercial enterprise and at the same time as a way of life,” Miner says farmers learned “the dynamics of total human experience.” Miner thus is a more poetic echo of Fite.
The traditional historical conception of the frontier as a nineteenth-century affair resulted in a long-standing neglect by scholars of continuing agricultural settlement in the twentieth century, a shortcoming best remedied by the historian of West River South Dakota, Paula M. Nelson (Nelson 1986). Her account of agricultural settlement west of the Missouri River, with its initial efflorescence followed by disillusionment, resonates with (and even directly quotes) the traditional ballad of prairie settlers, “Dakota Land” (also known as “Kansas Land,” “Nebraska Land,” and other variants), alternating stanzas lauding a “land of corn and wheat” with stanzas damning a “land of drouth and heat.”
Thus from the settlement experience the denizens of the plains (and their historians) carry a historical mixed memory. They took up the land with high hopes of fulfilling the grand promises of land promoters (Blodgett 1988). Those promises never quite went away; as David M. Wrobel has shown, they formed a residual base for memory and identity (Wrobel 2002). They survived in tension with experiences of severe historical trauma—deadly prairies fires, destructive plagues of Rocky Mountain locusts (Atkins 1984; Lockwood 2004; Courtwright 2011). Such layered experiences, combined with day-to-day learning and adjustment, brought them to the page on which historians such as Fite, Miner, and Nelson have situated them.
The commodity cultures of the Great Plains, many and diverse, generally have not attracted historical attention matching that of the cattle culture. The cotton industry so important to the southern plains is a relatively recent relocation. At the other end of the plains, an oral history of the sugar beet industry in the Red River Valley of the North (Shoptaugh 1997) shows the rich potential for work focused on a commodity and its producers. The only commodity culture to receive sustained attention, however, is that of wheat, beginning with the masterly work of Malin (Malin 1944). Winter Wheat in the Golden Belt of Kansas is the keystone of a massive and sustained inquiry by this irascible scholar into the emergence of communities of production, work which, although clearly derivative from the sort of environmental determinism broadly sketched by Webb, reckons with complexity in admirable fashion. Malin, first, grounds his work in place—the vernacular region of the central plains known as the Golden Belt for its grain production. Second, he makes its “point of approach” the “community or neighborhood,” thus recognizing that in the nineteenth century, agricultural development and dissemination was a neighborly process. At the same time, the work has international reach; in particular, Malin assembles the threads by which German–Russian Mennonites established the culture of hard red winter wheats from Russia on the plains (Moon 2020). His attention to this crucial introduction also exemplifies his critical posture, for Malin challenges Mennonite folk mythology as to Turkey wheat even while validating its importance. Throughout, Malin’s work is granular, inductive, piecing together amazing amounts of data. Perhaps most important, Malin portrays his farmers as learning communities with agency, people on the land assessing circumstances, making decisions, taking actions—shifting their crops and varieties, inventing technologies to solve problems, all the while talking among themselves about what they are doing.
The next exemplary historian of wheat culture, Craig Miner, takes up the same tools and applies them more artfully (Miner 1986, 1998, 2006). Region—western Kansas—is the focus of this work, from which wheat culture emerges as the agricultural mainstay. Although a business historian in no way antagonistic to big capital, Miner remains a man from Ness City who, like Malin, takes the neighbors seriously. Whereas some scholars may decline to inquire too closely as to the thoughts and daily doings of farmers producing what is quintessentially a cash crop, Miner dwells with them, absorbing the grasshopper
