I've seen this place from the side of the road quite a few times, although its in a remote location. It wasn't until earlier this fall that I realized that it's all on Federal Land.
I walked in, as you have to do, while hunting doves. I only saw one.
It's a full homestead. Barns, outbuildings, and a substantial house. This is very unusual as a lot of work went into this, but for some reason, it wasn't proved up. I'll have to see if I can figure out the history of it. So far I've had no luck.
It was well thought out, and sheltered. A substantial hay field, on Federal Land, worked by the current leaseholder remains. What's really surprising, however, is the house. It was very well built. So much so, that for a time I debated it if was a school, but it was better built than rural schools by quite some margin, and frankly larger. It's a house.
Usually, although not always, when you walk up on an abandoned homestead, they're on private, not Federal, land. And that makes sense. It only took five years to prove up a homestead, and proving it up was one of the first things the people eligible to do so did. It protected their investment, which was substantial, both in terms of time and labor, but moreover in actual cash outlays, which were actually quite a bit more extensive than people imagine.
The peak year for homesteading was 1913, during which 11,000,000 acres were claimed. I"m a bit surprised by that, as I thought it was 1914. World War One caused a massive boom in homesteading which was aided by the weather. A lot of people took up dry land farming in that period, following the naive popular assertion of the time that "rain follows the plow.
Abandoned wagon.
It doesn't.
A large part of what inspired homesteading entries at the time was the Great War. With Imperial Russia off of the farming export market, which was a huge portion of its GNP at the time, and with European farming massively impacted by the war, grain production, beef production, and horse production turned to the United States, Canada, and Australia.
Trouble began to set in after the war, although interestingly not immediately so. 1919 was the last year that American farmers had economic parity with those who lived in municipalities. That started changing soon thereafter, however, and its never reversed. The Agricultural Depression of the 1920s set in early in the 1920s, and basically carried on until the Great Depression hit in 1929. Having said that, people continued to attempt to file homestead entries, some people naively believing that if they couldn't make it in town, they could as a farmer or rancher.
The buildings on this spread, however, are too nice to be a late homestead entry. I've seen a few comparable ones that were abandoned, but they were all earlier homesteads in which the owners became over extended and couldn't make their bank payments during the Great Depression. A lot of money went into some houses and whatnot while things were going well. That must have been the case here. So what happened?
That is, at least right now, impossible for me to say. But what seems clear is that a lot of money went into this spread during good times, and the owners pulled out when hard times hit. That, and the fact that the abandoned equipment is horse, not vehicle, drawn would suggest that the homesteaders were doing okay during World War One but didn't weather the change in the economic climate of the Agricultural Depression of the 1920s. If I had my guess, this was probably a World War One vintage homestead which collapsed, after a huge investment of time, effort and money, soon after the war.
They didn't last long enough in order to prove up.
Their dreams must have been crushed. I hope, and pray, that the rest of their lives went well.
I'd also note that, more than ever before, when I see places like this I have a maudlin tinge of regret. My dream was something like this too. At age 62, I won't make it.
Dust Bowl farmers, from an era when the GOP would have done pretty much nothing.
TRIBUTE TO HARRIET HAGEMAN
Mr. BARRASSO. Mr. President, it is fitting that Harriet Hageman will be inducted into the 2011 Wyoming Agriculture Hall of Fame. Harriet is known across Wyoming and across our Nation as a stalwart promoter and defender of agriculture. With this honor, she is following in the footsteps of her father Jim Hageman, who was previously inducted in the Agriculture Hall of fame in 2002.
Harriet comes from a long history of agricultural producers. Her great grandfather homesteaded in Wyoming in 1879 and her parents bought their first ranch near Fort Laramie in 1961. Harriet grew up on the family’s cattle ranches in the Fort Laramie area. Rather than pursuing a career in agriculture, she earned a law degree from the University of Wyoming. Yet she did not stray from the agriculture industry. Much of her legal practice has been focused on protecting agriculture’s land, water, and natural resources. She uses her Ag background coupled with her fine mind to effectively argue on behalf of Wyoming’s ranchers and farmers in courtrooms at all levels of the judiciary.
A few of her many accomplishments should be noted. Harriet was the lead attorney for the State of Wyoming in protecting its share of the North Platte River. She fought the USDA to protect Wyoming’s access to national forest lands. She successfully defended Wyoming’s Open Range Law before the Wyoming Supreme Court. Her clients include ranchers, farmers, irrigation districts and grazing permitees. Harriet represents them with a passion that can only come from love of agriculture.
I have had the honor of working with Harriet Hageman and have benefitted from her wisdom. I would ask my colleagues to join me in congratulating
Harriet on this well-deserved honor.
John Barasso in the Congressional Record, August 2, 2011.1
CHUCK TODD: You know, you actually vote less with Joe Biden than Kyrsten Sinema does. You're comfortable being a Democrat in Montana. Why is that?
SEN. JON TESTER: Look, I'm also a farmer. And I can tell you that we would not have the farm today if it was not for the Democratic politics of FDR. And my grandfather and grandmother talked to us about that, my folks talked to me about that. And I will tell you that I am forever grateful for that, because I'm blessed to be a farmer, I love agriculture, and I wouldn't be one without the Democrats.
Meet the Press, December 11, 2022.
I wouldn't be a rancher but for the Democrats. No Wyoming rancher born in Wyoming would be.
Harriet Hageman, born on a ranch outside of Ft. Laramie, Wyoming, wouldn't have been born on a ranch but for the Democrats. If Herbert Hoover had won the election of 1932, she'd have been born in a city somewhere else, if she'd been born at all (and likely would not have, given the way twist of fates work). She sure wouldn't have been born on a ranch/farm.
The Democrats saved agriculture in the 1930s in the West, Midwest and North. They didn't do it any favors in the South, however.
My wife's grandfather, a World War Two Marine, and born on a ranch, remembered that and voted for the Democrats for the rest of his life.
So why do so many in agriculture vote Republican, even though Republican policies would have destroyed family agriculture in the 1930s and still stand to destroy family agriculture in the US today?
Well, a lot of reasons. But it'd be handy if people quit babbling the myths about it.
Indeed, when a person like Hageman states "I'm a fourth generation rancher", or things that effect, it ought to be in the form of an apology followed by "and yet I'm a Republican. . . "
Let's take a look at the reality of the matter.
Farm Policy from colonization up until the close of the Frontier.
Puritans on their way to church. Something that's often omitted in depictions of the Puritans is how corporate early English colonization was. English Colonists may have had individual economic and personal goals, and no doubt did in order to set off on such a risky endeavor, but they were often also sponsored by backers who had distince economic goals and expectations. They remained heavily dependent upon the United Kingdom in that fashion. They also did not, at first, exist as individualist, but part of a community that featured very strict rules.
Up until January 1, 1863, farmers didn't acquire "virgin lands" by the pure sweat of their brow, as the myth would have everyone seemingly believe.
Let's start with a basic premise.
When the Spanish founded St. Augustine, Florida, in 1565, and the English Jamestown in 1622, there were already people here.
I don't think that's a shocker for anyone, but in recent years, the political right has taken this as a bit of a threat for some reason. It's simply the truth. Natives occupied the land.
The concept of the settlers, very loosely, was that the natives didn't have as good of a claim to the land as Europeans did, as essentially their agricultural exploitation, if existent at all, was not as developed as that of the Europeans. In English colonies, it led to the concept of Aboriginal Title, which recognized that Indian nations did in fact have certain sovereign rights, including title, to land, but that it was inferior to that of the Crown, which was a more developed, civilized, sovereign. The Crown could and did extinguish aboriginal title.2
After American Independence, this concept endured. The United States, not the states, but the United States Government, held title of lands. States could hold title, but their title was co-equal with aboriginal title, not superior. Generally, however up until 1862, the United States extinguished most, but not all, aboriginal title prior to a territory becoming a state, and upon statehood ceded the unoccupied public lands to the states. This gave rise to the wackadoodle concept in recent years that the Federal government retains an obligation to do that and must "turn over" Federal lands to the states, a position which should return the adherents of those asserting it to Kindergarten to start all over again in their educations.
After the Mexican War the United States found itself with a double land title problem. For one thing, it wasn't at all certain how to deal with the titles of New Mexicans and Californios who had title from Mexico or Spain. That had to be recognized, of course, but the government was troubled by it in part because in defeating Mexico it hadn't acquired all of the Mexican administration along with that.
The other problem, in its view, is that it acquired a big swath of territory that nobody except wild aboriginals and nearly as wild courier du bois wanted to reside in.
The Homestead Act of 1862 was the answer.
It's no mistake that the Homestead Act was a Civil War measure. In addition to the other problems the US now had a big population of rootless people it wasn't sure what to do with, and this provided a relief valved. And the Southern States being out of the government temporarily opened up the door for the (then) progressive Republicans to really emphasize their use of the American System, which as a semi managed economy with lots of Federal intervention. The Democrats, much like the current GOP, opposed government intervention in the economy.
So the GOP backed a new concept in which the US would directly give the public domain to homestead entrants if they put in at least five years of labor. This too really struck at the South, as the pattern in the South had come to favor large landed interests which destroyed a farm through cotton production agriculture, and then bought new land further west and started again.
Note the essence of this here. Prior to 1863, a farmer seeking land, or a would be farmer, had to buy it from somebody, or the Federal government, or the state. Yes, people moved west and cleared land, but they didn't just get it for nothing.
After 1862 they could, by putting in the labor.
That system massively favored small, and poor, farmers, and disfavored large monied interests. You could still buy the public domain, but entities doing that were in direct competition with those getting it for their labor. It weighted things in favor of the small operator.
Which gave us, for example, the Johnson County War.
We don't think of the Johnson County War as an economic class struggle, and indeed it makes a person sound like a Marxist if you do, but it was. Perhaps in Chestertonian terms, it was a contest between production agricultural and agrarians, which would be closer to the mark. We've discussed the Johnson County War before, and will simply loop that dicussion in:
That got ahead or our story a bit, but consider this.
The homestead act brought the small operators in. The big operators kept coming in. When small operators were the beneficiaries of a Federal land program. When the inevitable contest between the two came, the Federal government sided with the small operators through the intervention of the U.S. Army.
Now let's consider the role of the Army.
All this land was available in the first place as, after the Mexican War, the Federal Government had provided the Army to "deal with" the Indians. Dealing with them meant removing them onto Reservations. Prior to the Mexican War, Native Americans were mostly "dealt with" by the states or even simply by individuals, which made the Indian Wars prior to the Mexican War ghastly bloody affairs, something amplified by the fact that the invention of the Rifle Musket (not the musket, or a rifle, but the Rifle Musket) gave industrialized Americans a real weapons advantage over the Natives for the very first time.
Now, in complete fairness, the Army didn't enter the West like a German SS Division, and the Army spent a lot of time just trying to keep the age-old warfare between European Americans and the Natives from going on. But it was a massive Federal intervention with the result of removing the Natives from their lands even if the reality of what occurred wasn't seen that way, fully, or by everyone, at the time.
The net result is that agriculture in the west was the beneficiary of a massive, liberal-progerssives set of agriculture policies that favored poorer agriculturalist, if not necessary poor agriculturalist.
Put another way, it wasn't the rugged pioneer finding unoccupied virgin soil in the west and creating a farm or ranch out of the pure sweat of their brows and dirt on their fingers. That was involved, but they were given the thing they needed the most, the land, for nothing but that work, and their presence was backed up by the Federal Government, including in an armed fashion if necessary.
The close of the frontier until the 1920s.
The US has always had some sort of farm policy and a lot of it is monetary in nature, and I'm not qualified to really expand on that. What I can say there I basically already have.
In 1890 Frederick Jackson Turner, the director of the U.S. Census Bureau announced that the frontier was closed. This was one year after the 1889 Oklahoma Land Rush which had opened up a vast amount of Indian lands to settlement again on the basis that they weren't in productive use, as European Americans saw it. In 1890, they all were, according to the Census Bureau.
At that point, the Homestead Act should have been repealed, having succeeded in its goal, but its in the nature of Federal programs that they always live on well after they should die. Guaranteed Student Loans provide a current example. So nothing changed
Then came World War One.
World War One sparked a global agricultural crisis.
Little noted, by and large, the world's economy had globalized to an extent which was only recently reestablished (and probably surpassed, maybe). The Great War destroyed that, and part of what it destroyed was global agriculture. The massive Russian and Ukrainian wheat supply was removed from the market as part of that, and this in turn started a massive American homesteading rush, with people who had little knowledge of farming flooding the prairie's to be dry land farmers, something which boosters insisted couldn't fail. At first, in fact, it didn't. The crisis carried on through the war, along with a massively boosted demand for agricultural commodities of all kids. The 1910s saw the largest number of homesteads filed of any decade, and 1919 saw the last year in which farmers had economic parity with urban dwellers.
And then it collapsed.
The Farm Crisis of the 1920s and the Great Depression
For farmers, the Depression really started in 1920, not 1929. Farms were failing, and yet homesteading, at a smaller post Great War rate, continued.
Then came 1929.
Still suffering from a post-war economic crisis, 1929 brought a flood of new homesteaders as desperate town and city dwellers left their homes, having lost their jobs, and sought to try to homestead, not knowing what they were doing. This was destroying the farm and ranch lands of the West. Finally, with Franklin Roosevelt's administration having come in, the Federal Government stepped in to save the situation by repealing the Homestead Acts and passing the Taylor Grazing Act.
The Taylor Grazing Act protected the existing farms and ranches against new homestead entrants, meaning that they could keep grazing that part of the Federal domain which they were, in exchange for a reasonable preferential lease. That's the system we've had ever since, and its what keeps real ranchers in business to this day, although here too times have caught up with the system and at least some farming states, like Iowa, have passed laws preventing absentee corporate ownership of farms. Wyoming should do the same, but wedded to a blind concept of property rights that doesn't meet the reality of our history or the situation, it hasn't and likely won't.
The Roosevelt farm policy went far beyond that. The Agricultural Adjustment Act dealt directly with prices, although it was ruled unconstitutional at the tail end of the Depression in 1936. Programs that resulted in some crops being "plowed under" took products off the market that were depressing prices, and price supports for landowners were put in place, which helped farmers in the West and North, but which were devastating to sharecroppers, who didn't own their own land, in the South.
And now today.
The net result of this, once again, is that the Republicans, by now the conservative party, were doing nothing for agriculture and would have let the occupants of the land go under. The Democrats, now the liberal party, saved them.
Since that time, it's been largely the same story, except not that much help has been needed. The Defense Wool Subsidy was passed in 1954, for defense wool needs, under the Eisenhower Administration, so there was an example of a Republican program that helped farmers, although it was designed to really do so, and it was eliminated in 1993 while Clinton was in office, so a Democrat operated to hurt sheep ranchers. This gets into the complicated story of subsidies, which are not as extensive as people imagine, and which have been part of a Federal "cheap food" policy that came in after World War Two and which is frankly a little spooky when looked at. Overall, the policy is unpopular with free marketers, who tend to be Republicans, but it's been kept in place with it sometimes being noted that the overall post-war history of "cheap food" is an historical anomaly. Anyhow, it gets a bit more complicated at this point.
Which takes us to this.
Looking at the history of it, Progressives and Liberals have kept ranchers and farmers on the land. When Harriet Hageman notes she's a fourth generation Wyomingite from an agricultural background, she's implying that she's a direct beneficiary of a massive government program that 1) removed the original occupants of the land to open it up to agriculture; 2) opened it up to the poorer agriculturalist and kept its hand on the scale to benefit them; and 3) operated to save them in times of economic distress.
Given that, it's been the Democrats that have really helped that sector since 1914, when they became the liberal party, and Republicans before that, when they were.
But that doesn't comport with the myth people have sold themselves very well.
There are lots of reasons not to be a Democrat. I'm not arguing that economic self-interest should dictate how a person votes, nor am I stating that the history of a party should control present votes.
But what I am stating is the current Agricultural loyalty to the GOP is misplaced based on its history. When a person states that they're fourth generation in agriculture, they're stating that they've benefitted from the Democratic Party, and really not so much from the Republicans. A lot of Republican loyalty is therefore based on something else, including a multi generational grudge against policies that saved them.
What else might be at work?
Footnotes
1. I don't know the circumstances of the Hageman's purchasing a ranch in 1961, but the date is interesting, as it would put this within a decade of the last era in which average ranchers in Wyoming could still buy land. This is almost impossible now, something that the current holders of family ranches often completely fail to appreciate.
It's also interesting in that Hageman, who is married but who retains her maiden name, doesn't work on the family farm/ranch, as Sen. Barrasso's accolade noted. She's followed the path of many younger sons, which of course she is not, in agriculture of entering into a profession as there really was no place else to go. This has been less true of women, who often marry into another agricultural family.
Hageman started off following an agricultural career, going to Casper College on a meat judging scholarship, something often oddly omitted in the biographies of her that I've seen, although it is occasionally noted.
1879 is a truly early Wyoming homestead entry.
2. In spite of all the criticism that various European colonist have received, it's worth noting that French and Spanish colonization was quite a bit different than English colonization.
French colonization particularly was. It was done on the cheap, for one thing, and almost all of the French colonist came from Normandy alone, bringing Norman culture, which was much more independent than English culture, with them. French colonist, like Spanish colonist, were also devoutly Roman Catholic, and it was emphasized in their faith that the natives were co-equal to them as human beings, endowed with the same rights before God. For this reason, French colonist mixed much more readily with the Natives than the English did.
This is true of the Spanish as well, who began to take Native brides (and mistresses) almost immediately upon contact. Spanish colonization is more complicated than the French example, however, as it was not done on the cheap and was part of a massive economic effort.
It was a dry New Years Eve. . . at least officially for Americans and most Canadians who, if they were following the law, had to ring in the arrival of 1922 with some non-besotted beverage. I'm sure many did.
Miss Texanna Loomis, December 31, 1921. She was a radio engineer.
And there was a lot to celebrate that year. For Americans, the Great War had officially ended, although the fighting had obviously stopped quite some time prior. For the many Americans with Irish ancestry, it appeared that Irish independence was about to become a de jure, rather than a de facto, matter. Americans were moving definitively past World War One, and in a lot of ways definitively past a prior, much more rural, era and country.
Not all was well, however, as the economy was doing quite poorly. There was hope that would soon change, with that hope being expressed in a regional fashion on the cover of the Casper Daily Tribune.
Also, on the cover of the paper was the news that the County had taken over ownership of the hospital. It'd run the hospital until 2020, when Banner Health took over it, converting it back into a private hospital after almost a century of public ownership.
General Pershing decorates the tomb of Britain's unknown warrior. General Pershing accompanied by the Duke of Connaught inspecting the British Guard of Honor before entering Westminster Abbey, London, to decorate the tomb of Britain's unknown soldier.
October 28
1921 Eula Kendrick, the wife of Wyoming Senator John B. Kendrick, was photographed on the street in Washington D. C. on this day.
Mrs. Kendrick had been born in Round Rock, Texas in 1872 and was fifteen years Mr. Kendrick's junior. Kendrick was also from Texas, and raised in a ranching family, Mrs. Kendrick, née Wulfjen, indicates that at the time of their marriage Greeley Colorado was her home.
The couple had two children and it was really Mrs. Kendrick who was the primary mansion of their famous Sheridan home, "Trail's End". Mr. Kendrick's political career took off shortly after it was built, and he accordingly resided in it very little.
She far outlived her husband, dying in San Antonio in 1961.
The couple's daughter Rosa-Maye was also photographed at the same time.
She was sixteen years old on the day the family moved into Trail's End, and she would ultimately marry Hubert R. Harmon, an Army officer who courted her for five years prior to their marriage. Harmon was an Army aviator and rose to the rank of Lt. General, making the switch to the U.S. Air Force when that service was separated. She would publish a book of letters from London after she and her husband lived there, during which time he was posted there as a military attaché.
Gen. Harmon was instrumental in the establishment of the United States Air Force Academy. He was interned there following his death as was she, when she passed away in 1979.
In North Dakota, Lynn Frazier, the incumbent Governor, was recalled. He was due to discontent with the agricultural depression in the state, but which was being experienced nationwide. Frazier as a member of the left wing Nonpartisan League and conservatives objected to state ownership of industry, which Frazier supported and which to some degree North Dakota had.
Frazier would go on to be elected to the U.S. Senate the following year and would hold the seat until 1940. He was a teacher and farmer by profession, and died in 1947. He's one of only two U.S. governors to be recalled.
It's a really popular thing to look back on the past in a rosy way and agriculture provides no exception. Indeed, a lot of people look back to a romantic sort of imagined past about prior farming generations and what the economics of farming were like.
Indeed, back two decades ago now (my how time flies, eh?) there was a popular pundit of the quasi apocalyptical nature who was convinced that computers were all going to go belly up on the first day of the present millennium and we'd be thrown back into a sort of dark ages. He still thinks that we'll be so thrown back, and indeed I think he secretly hopes for it, but one of the things he maintained at the time as that this would be worse than the Great Depression as so many people had farms to go back to, he believed, in the 1930s.
Well, maybe they partially did, but what' people like that fail to realize is that the depression for farmers started in the very early 1920s, not 1929.
Lots of things played into this, including a vast cycle of over production in North America that commenced with Europe entering into World War One, a dry climatic period that came in the 1920s following a wet one in the 1910s, and the relentless onset of mechanization.
A couple of blogs dealing with the topic by folks more knowledgeable than I.
