Homesteading then and . . .not now.

 Recently, this was posted on Today In Wyoming's History: May 20:

1862  Congress passed the Homestead Act.

As surprising as it is now to think of it, the Homestead Act remained in force until 1932 in the lower 48.  The last patents were taken out under the various acts in the 1950s, although entries could still be made in Alaska up until some date in the 1950s.  Homesteading remained quite active in the 1919 to 1932 period, as there were efforts to encourage veterans to homestead following World War One, and there was a lot of desperate homesteading in the 1929 to 1932 time frame.  A Wyoming Supreme Court decisions on a land contest from that period actually noted that no decision could be reached, as homesteading was carving up the contested lands so fast that the decision would be obsolete by the time it was rendered.  The repeal of the act in 1932 was followed by  the failure of many of the late smaller homesteads, and a reversal of the trend.  The Federal Government reacquired many of the late homesteads by default, and actually purchased a large number of them in the Thunder Basin region of Wyoming, as it was so clear that they would fail in the droughts of the 30s.

Following up a bit, it's interesting to note that there were more homesteads taken out under the various Homestead Acts in the 20th Century than there were in 19th.  The 1914 to 1919 period saw a huge boom in homesteading.

One of the most interesting things about the act was said to me by the grandson of Russian immigrants who had homesteaded outside of Cheyenne, WY, that simply being that "it was a good deal for poor people".  I suppose that is true.

How many folks here know of a homesteading ancestor in their family?

Homesteading, both the legal process by which people filed on the Federal Domain and "proved up" their claim, and the more general process of farmers of average means, at best, acquiring real property for farms and ranches is an indelible part of the American story. This is often thought to be particularly part of the history of the American West, but its actually part of the entire story of North America, no matter where people are or their ancestors are.  While there was no Federal Domain in the east, homesteading of a different type certainly was common in the East for the first half of the 19th Century.  Homesteading also occurred in the Canada, including the entry upon Crown Lands, i.e., land belonging to the government.  And it was also part of Mexico's  story up until the Mexican Revolution changed the nature of land ownership in the Mexico.

But is this now just a part of our past? That is, can average men and women enter farming or ranching today?  It's certainly not very easy, and not because it's "hard work," or the like. The price of land simply has taken most Americans out of the market.  There are a few exceptions that manage to break into it without being born into it, but  they are truly exceptional.

I have to wonder what this does to the soul of a nation like this one.  It's not easy to discount.  And I also have to wonder what it does to the aspirations of average Americans.  All in all, this is not a good thing.

People like to claim that the United States had its origin in a search for "freedom."  Sometimes, some specific freedom is cited, such as freedom of religion.  And that's quite true.  There are entire groups of people who departed their homelands in search of freedom of conscience, or in some related instances, they were simply fleeing oppression of one kind or another.  North America was unique in its extension of religious tolerance for many decades.  Sometimes people were fleeing for their lives.  Mexican political liberals who crossed over into the United States in the 1910 to 1913 period give us an example of people feeling for political conscience, for example.  And all of this still occurs today.  For example, the United States has become a haven for Middle Eastern Christians, who are being driven out of their homelands today and which are set, unless something dramatic to the contrary occurs, to become extinct in their native lands very soon in one of the great, largely unnoticed, tragedies of the post World War Two era.

But, as significant as those factors are, an equally important one, and frankly a greater one, was the desire to own land.

In most of Europe south of Scandinavia it was simply impossible for an average person to own land prior to the revolutions of the 1840s.  Indeed, on the continent the highly developed guild system meant it was darned near impossible to do much of anything outside of what your parents did prior to those revolutions and the situation wasn't any better, regarding land, in the British Isles.  Indeed, if you were Catholic in the United Kingdom your options were limited in the extreme, although Protestants could move into town and industrial employments.  And if you were Russian, to borrow the Bronx phrase, "forgetta about it."  Russians were born into serfdom and they were staying there.  For male peasants everywhere the Army was always an option, and often the only option.  Of course, for some men, it was the compulsory option on the continent, and some European armies in the 18th Century conscripted for life.  The British, at least, didn't conscript for life.  You joined for life.

Given that, perhaps it's no surprise that the great dream about American, and perhaps the great American dream, was to own your own farm.  And that wasn't just the American Dream, it was the North American Dream. The same impulse that lead people to immigrate to the United States took them to Canada, and in the 19th Century and early 20th Century, northern Mexico. For that matter, it took people to Australia, New Zealand, Chile and Argentina.  It's a universal human constant.  It brought Italian farmers to the Australian coast, English farmers to Chile, Russian farmers to Kansas, Japanese farmers to California and Irish herdsmen to Wyoming.

Now, you can't do that.

And, contrary to what some may feel, that desire wasn't limited to a desperate first generation.  Nearly the entire history of the United States and Canada was controlled by this impulse up into the 20th Century.  It isn't very difficult to find examples of people born into middle class families who left their natives states to homestead on the Frontier.  In the case of the US, homesteading peaked in 1919.  Canada remained an overwhelmingly rural nation until the 1950s.  Even Quebec, which we now associate with as charming metropolitan French culture, was a rural province up until that time.

The U.S. Homestead acts were repealed in the early 1930s and the Canadian ones went away sometime in the mid 20th Century.  Mexico's died during the Mexican Revolution.  Since that time land has increasingly been owned in the European pattern of old.  It tends to pass into the hands of the very wealthy.  And as that occurs, the dollar per acre value of land climbs and climbs.  As that occurs, it climbs up out of site and beyond its productive value.

This has certainly happened in regard to ranch land in the West.  It was already the case, even at the time of my birth, that getting into ranching was very difficult as a start up proposition.  Land was simply too expensive.  It was difficult, but not impossible.  Now, I fear, it's become nearly impossible, and it's become difficult for ranching families to even have their younger members take up the ancient occupation.

There are a lot of factors contributing to this.  For one thing, mechanization of agriculture resulted in the concentration of farms as land that formerly worked by numerous farmers with horses and mules gave way, over time, to being worked by a single farmer with increasingly larger and larger mechanized implements.  The economics of that process had the impact of driving farmers off the land, particularly any who were slow to mechanize, didn't desire to do so, or who were somewhat inefficient in some manner.  Of course, it also ultimately has started to drive even big farmers off the land, as the enormous costs of mechanized implements has meant that they are now in the area where only corporate entities can really own them.  Additionally, mechanization in the form of 4x4 vehicles mean that ranches also could grow bigger and be worked with fewer people.

Motor vehicles also made every agricultural unit closer to town.  Well into the mid 20th Century there were plenty of farms and ranches that were truly isolated. There are still some, but not like they once were. This meant that people in towns, and then cities, and then remote cities, could indulge themselves in participating in the ownership of rural land in a manner wholly impossible to earlier generations.  A remote big city rancher, for example, like Theodore Roosevelt, in the late 19th Century, had to leave his city life for nearly a year at a time in order to actually engage in ranch life.  Now, the wealthy can fly out for some big fun events, like brandings, and never really have to leave home, as they're only 12 hours away, if that.  In the 19th Century and early 20th Century, nearly ever town in Wyoming was at least 12 hours away from the next one.

And the reach of the very wealthy has accordingly been extended.  Even well into the 20th Century it tended to be the rule that very wealthy people might own some large block of land, or at least an additional "summer home" elsewhere, but it wasn't usually all that far, really, from their homes.  New Yorkers in that class, for example, had their second homes in New York.  Many people from wealthy areas located in what was in essence a community of like kind not that far from the town where their wealth was located.  Now, however, there is the ability and even a trend to locate that second block of land at a great distance.  Indeed, novelist Thomas Wolf provided that "a man in full" needed a Wyoming ranch.

And the scale of wealth has shifted so that there are more people in the bottom end of the middle class, where agricultural aspirations are approaching the category of pipe dreams, but there are also probably more of the super wealthy, as a subset of the wealthy.  Indeed, the price of land in some locations is now so high that it probably actually is the domain of the super wealthy alone.  Even a fairly wealthy person would have to invest nearly their entire savings in some outfits only to receive an economic return that would reduce their actual income far below what they were otherwise used to.

And, of course, a country of 300,000,000 people, headed towards 400,000,000, is going to have a great deal of inflationary pressure on real property no matter what.  There are densely populated agricultural nations, but they no longer tend to be first world nations.  When nations become this densely populated, they're urban nations and the land, save for government intervention, is going to go to the wealthy in the population.

What happens when a nation founded on agriculture reaches this state?  I fear that the answer isn't a good one.

In our modern world there seems to be an assumption that everyone wants to work with computers or IT, or something of the like.  But I know that's not true.  And the bloom is really off the rose in a lot of occupations which people have regarded as "good jobs" for decades.  Not a month goes by, it seems, where I don't read in the ABA Journal how young lawyers have diminished opportunities and that they regret what opportunities remain for them.  Law itself is loosing its regional base and jobs are migrating towards an urban center of mass, a process accelerated by the naive assumption that exams like the Uniform Bar Exam do anything other than hand the jobs of rural and small town firms to big city ones.  We are rocketing, in essence, to an all big city world for most Americans, irrespective of whether they desire it, or whether most of them are well suited for it.

In some ways this is part of an overall era of decreasing opportunities in the "Land of Opportunity."  Up through the 1960s the dream of the middle class for their children was that they obtain a college degree; a bachelor's degree, which would insure that they would obtain a "good job."  And a bachelors would indeed nearly guarantee employment in business in that era, irrespective of what that degree was in.  It was proof of ability and intelligence. By the late 1970s, however, with bachelor's degrees becoming increasingly common, the drive towards a second degree of some sort, a Masters most likely started.  Today, bachelor's degrees are nearly as necessary as high school diplomas once were in the 1960s to 1970s time frame (they hadn't been necessary for a lot of employments before that).  At the same time, starting in the 1970s, manufacturing jobs, once the destination for those who didn't really want an office job, started going overseas, from which they never returned, save, oddly enough, for some machinist jobs, which have recently returned, placing machinist in demand in some localities.  More recently, even one of the occupations long, long regarded as immune from decline, law, has.  A J.D. no longer guarantees employment anywhere, a situation which is particularly pronounced in some regions of the country.  Law Schools are struggling to portray themselves as relevant in the situation, even while some states simply hand the work of their rural practitioners to lawyers in remote big cities, giving us the bizarre situation of a State like Wyoming firing the gun at it practitioners with the Uniform Bar Exam, while a state like South Dakota tries to recruit lawyers to rural areas.

All of that may not seem directly related, and perhaps it isn't, but it is related.

It's often noted that civilization is closely tied to farming.  Indeed, more radical theorists note that humans in a true state of nature don't farm, they hunt.  However, that line isn't that clear, really, as there's been a fair number of hunter societies that also farmed as well.  Such farming, of course, was "subsistence" farming, but then so was much of American farming in the 19th Century, being agrarian, rather than production agriculture, in nature.

 Pueblo Indian hunter, probably also a farmer, as their society was not nomadic and engaged in farming ans well as hunting.

Be that as it may, it's inescapable that its farmers who are the ironic vanguards of civilization.  Civilization isn't really possible without farming, but with civilization comes urbanization, and that tends to push farmers out or off, or it pushes the land into the hands of what are effectively landlords, whether that landlord be an Dot Com Baron in the 21st Century, or a true titled Baron in the 11th Century.   That's effectively what we're seeing now, as agricultural land is increasingly owned by people whose connection with it is tangential, or effectively through an office somewhere else.  Or by people who simply wish to own farm ground, but don't have to make their livings from it.

That people wish to do that says something about the basic nature of human beings. Every the very wealthy, who do not need to ever wonder where their next meal is coming from, seem to have a desire to own farm ground.  I've often noticed an odd cycle here that used to occur (but now no longer does, due to the price of land).  That cycle was that the homesteader worked hard to build a ranch/farm that he could hand down to his kids, or more likely just one of his kids. The inheriting kid, in turn, worked hard so that he could send his kids off the farm/ranch, under a still common rural belief that every town job is a good job involving no real work.  Those kids went to university for a career and worked hard to send their kids to university for a better career. And that next generation worked hard to buy a "place", that being some kind of farm or ranch that put them back out on the land.  In essence, if they'd never started the up and out cycle, they'd have been where the latter generation wished to end up in the first place.

Now, however, just getting into agriculture increasingly seems to be a dream, and more and more Americans have to look to urban jobs in most places.  With our firm entrenchment in the economic system that we have, it seems unlikely that this will be addressed in any societal or legal fashion.  But what that does to a culture is an open question.  Even such an urban culture as France has taken steps to keep land in the hands of a farming class. What happens to ours when we don't, and what happens to that generation of farmer hopefuls that instead finds work in Denver, Atlanta or Los Angeles?