I was reading the recent issue of Annals of Wyoming, the journal of the state historical society, and there was an article that somebody had written on cultural geography and Heart Mountain, Wyoming. Heart Mountain is the location outside of Cody Wyoming, where, during World War Two, there was an Internment Camp for Japanese Americans.
The article was on the relationship of Heart Mountain to the minds of various groups of people, and I wasn't wholly impressed. Like some academics, the author was overly impressed with the fact that locals put images of Heart Mountain on signs or name things after it. Well, so what? If you have a business you have to name it something, and a prominent local landscape feature is one of the more obvious choices. After all, you are unlikely to name a veterinary clinic in Cody something like "The Giant Florida Swamp Vet Clinic." I did find it interesting that the mountain was somewhat less mentioned by internees than you'd suspect, and that regional Indians didn't seem to mention it at all in their lore.
Anyhow, one of the things the author keeps bringing up again and again is that it featured in the photographs taken by post World War Two homesteaders. The article suffers from the author's apparent view that everyone knows that there were post wWII homesteaders in the area, even though the Homestead Acts were repealed in in the early 1930s.
Does anyone know the story of post WWII homesteading? I know that some lands were opened back up for returning veterans, sort of an agricultural GI Bill, but that's all I know.
2 comments:
I always thought that you had to go to Alaska to get a homestead after about the '30's.
There was some sort of New Deal relocation plan to move struggling farmers to the Kenai Peninsula to create a farming community in Alaska starting right before WWII.
I wonder if the homesteaders talked about in the article were an isolated case in which they were homesteading the land that made up the former internment camp?
Or, it isn't a case of redefining the definition of "homesteader" to mean someone that buys some land, starts growing some of their food, and then calls themselves a homesteader which seems to be pretty common today?
Actually the expiration of the various homesteading acts is a little misunderstood. You couldn't enter and file a claim under any of the original acts after about 1933 or so, but you could still prove up prior filed claims, which was still going on into the 1930s.
There was some sort of limited Homestead Act after World War Two, but I don't know anything about it, and I don't know what lands were open to it. Some of the land around Riverton Wyoming was opened up that way, where there were some new irrigation projects. From what little I know of this program, it wasn't all that popular, unlike homesteading following World War One, which saw a serviceman spike.
And, these homesteads were production units, not "homesteads" as that term has been popularized in some places today. I know what your referring to, but no, these were traditional homesteads.
I'd like to know more about how widespread this was, but it seems to be a pretty obscure topic.
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