February 2, 1919. Beating the high cost of living, Wyoming troops returning home. Senate passes land bill for soldiers. Donuts.

The Wyoming Tribune advised on this Saturday, February 2, 1919 that with a good cow, a flock of hens and a small garden, you could beat old "Mr. H.C.L.", that being the high cost of living.

It's an interesting and possibly accurate observation in some context.

And men from the 41st and 91st Divisions would be back in the U.S. shortly.

The U.S. Senate was anticipating that some of those returning me would want to become agriculturalist, which was in fact correct.

In light of that fact, the Senate's bill did something to give homesteading returning servicemen an advantage, although I frankly don't know what that was.  The various homestead acts were still in existence, so they could have homesteaded anyhow.  The impact of the law, however, was a real one as I know of at least two instances of individuals who took advantage of this provision and I knew one of them.  By reports, this was a fairly popular option for returning World War One servicemen, but a similar effort to reopen the homestead act, on a limited basis, for returning World War Two servicemen, on certain designated grounds (at least some of which were Indian Lands) would not be.

Returning soldiers were celebrated on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post, depicting a soon to vanish means of transportation in use by somebody who is probably supposed to be an aged farmer.

Leslie's, on the other hand, was looking back to World War One still and celebrating the Red Cross and Salvation Army donut girl, although having said that the efforts of the Red Cross were still in full swing in Europe, although a lot of those women were now returning home.

If that illustration looks familiar, it's because it was from an actual photograph.  And if you have a hankering for trying Great War donuts, here's your chance with the recipe.

The donut girl was one Stella Young, serving in France.

I don't know anything else about her, but I'd note that, while a person isn't supposed to make such observations, she has a classically English appearance and my guess is that was her nationality.

Friday Farming: Campbell County Historic Ranches: the Weischedel Ranch

Campbell County Historic Ranches: the Weischedel Ranch

Original homesteader sought isolation, but his descendants made his ranch a gathering place

Friday Farming: The Stock Raising Homestead Act of 1916

Recently I've been posting the centennial of certain events as they occur.  Yesterday one such landmark passed by, that being the centennial of President Wilson signing into law the Stock Raising Homestead Act of 1916.  I noted that event here:

Today In Wyoming's History: December 29, 1916. Stock Raising Homestead Act of 1916 becomes law.

Today In Wyoming's History: December 29:

 

Abandoned post Wold War One Stock Raising Homestead Act homestead.

1916  The Stock Raising Homestead Act of 1916 becomes law.  It allowed for 640 acres for ranching purposes, but severed the surface ownership from the mineral ownership, which remained in the hands of the United States.

The Stock Raising Homestead Act of 1916 recognized the reality of  Western homesteading which was that smaller parcels of property were not sufficient for Western agricultural conditions.  It was not the only such homestead act, however, and other acts likewise provided larger parcels than the original act, whose anniversary is rapidly coming up.  The act also recognized that homesteading not only remained popular, but the 1916 act came in the decade that would see the greatest number of  homesteads filed nationally.

Perhaps most significant, in some ways, was that the 1916 act also recognized the split estate, which showed that the United States was interested in being the mineral interest owner henceforth, a change from prior policies.  1916 was also a boom year in oil and gas production, due to World War One, and the US was effectively keeping an interest in that production.  The split estate remains a major feature of western  mineral law today.

I've noted the Stock Raising Homestead Act of 1916 before, but having noted it in series, in association with the horrific events of World War One, the onset of Prohibition, the reelection of President Wilson and the Punitive Expedition has put this into focus.  This change in the homestead laws, allowing stockmen to claim a square mile, 640 acres, rather than a mere 40 acres.

40 acres had been the Eastern standard for a yeoman farmer, but in the west agriculture was based on animal husbandry, not farming, and a lot more than 40 acres was necessary.  Indeed the unrealistic 40 acre size of homesteads had contributed to the development of two competing systems that ultimately attempted, unsuccessfully, to sort itself out violently in the Johnson County War.  The Stock Raising Homestead Act of 1916 recognized this unreality and tried to make homesteading entries a bit more realistic in size, although they still were about half the size that they really needed to be in order to be realistic.  Still, at that size entrants could more realistically adjust.  It should be noted that a prior attempt, the Desert Lands Act, had been tried in 1877, so this wasn't the first effort at fixing the unrealistic size of the original Homestead Act.

In this sense the Stock Raising Homestead Act was a necessary revision.  In other ways, however, it was a bit late.  It came on the cusp of a massive, World War One inspired, boom in homesteading, but most of the homesteads would fail. That had always been the case, but the peak of homesteading of this era would have a fairly spectacular fall in the end. For the most part, at least in the Rocky Mountain West, that failure was cushioned by assistance from local banks and also from neighboring ranches of more substantial size acquiring the smaller units through purchase.  In a few instances, such as in the Thunder Basin, the Federal Government would come in to purchase back the smaller units that came in too late.

To some extent the Stock Raising Homestead Act reflected the end of an era, although that was not obvious at the time.  It would really only remain in effect for sixteen years, at which time further entrance was withdrawn.  It has had a lasting impact, however, in that it established the concept of a spit estate with a reservation in favor of the Federal Government, a feature of Western lands ever since.

The Wyoming Tribune for September 11, 1916

The bridge disaster in Quebec managed to make the front page the very day it happened, which is truly remarkable.  The big news for Wyoming, however, was the failure of the Stock Raising Homestead Act to pass to pass on its first attempt.  The act, a modification of the series of Homestead Acts dating back to the 1860s, was important for those in Wyoming agriculture and therefore extremely big news.  Particularly as the entire West was in the midst of a homesteading boom at this time.

Something was also going on with a "border patrol", which wouldn't mean the agency we think of when we hear those terms, as it did not yet exist.

The Cheyenne State Leader for August 10, 1916. One battalion to be ordered to the border.

One battalion of the Wyoming National Guard looked to be deployed.  The Guard was nearly one soldier short, however, due to an elopement, one of quite a few that these papers reported on.

And, the World War One homesteading boom was really on.

Friday Farming: Recalling a 1916 homestead

Old Picture of the Day: Homesteader

Old Picture of the Day: Homesteader: Today's picture shows a Homesteader in Alamosa, Colorado. The picture was taken in 1939. Really a great picture of a hard working f...

Salon: "What nobody told me about small farming: I can’t make a living People say we're "rich in other ways," but that doesn't fix the ugly fact that most farms are unsustainable" ??? OH BULL. You weren't paying attention.

 

In the "you must be deaf category" is the author of this story that appears on Salon and which has been commented upon by Forbes:

What nobody told me about small farming: I can’t make a living

People say we're "rich in other ways," but that doesn't fix the ugly fact that most farms are unsustainable 

Oh really.  Where were you living?  In a box?

Anyone who has looked at this topic and not been predisposed to be completely and totally enamored with the concept of modern "homesteading" would have been well aware of the fact that these small scale agricultural enterprises are not economic in a modern economy.  I've blogged about it here:
 

The "Homestead" movement

Homesteading then and . . .not now.

For that matter, the economics are tough for people who simply want to get into agriculture, but are unrealistic about a 17th Century agrarian model of farming.  I've blogged about it here:

Lex Anteinternet: You can't do what you want

You can't do what you want

Economic viability of entering agriculture, a question.

Unsolicited Career Advice No. 5. How do you become a rancher?

Land Values and American Agriculture

And its not just me. Did she check out Kevin Ford's posts on the New Catholic Land Forum, as he slipped slowly into having to abandon his farm? What about Devin Rose's blog as he tried the same thing and also failed?  Hmmm?

Apparently not.

Let's look a little closer at this.

My farm is located in the foothills of Northern California, 40 miles east of Sacramento on 10 acres my partner, Ryan, and I lease from a land trust. In the heat of summer, my fields cover the bronzed landscape like a green quilt spread over sand. Ten acres of certified organic vegetables trace the contours of a small valley floor. Tomatoes glow crimson. Flowers bloom: zinnias, lavender, daisies. Watermelons grow fat, littering the ground like beach balls.

Ten freaking acres, and you rent it?  And you thought this was going to work?

Shoot, this isn't even the classic American homestead acreage model.

 

 19th Century Nebraska homestead. This would be a prosperous homestead.  A married couple with at least three, and probably at least four if not six children (the two adult men are possibly hands).  Nice house, and a windmill.  They've farmed right up to the house.  They're on at least 40 acres, if not more.

No, this is something like the Italian peasant model.

Italian peasants on their way to Tivoli.  They're riding a donkey.  The donkey is carrying their product. In other words, they're poor farmers, probably on a small acreage, taking their product to a big city.  They'd probably have preferred to be in the United States farming on 40 acres.

And, in the spirit of getting older and crankier, let's be blunt. By "partner" here, I'm going to assume that the author means romantic partner without the benefit of marriage.  I'm not going to lecture anyone on this, but farming is a really hard, stressful, way to make a living even in the best of times.  Ryan and Jaclyn would be better off being married partners as at some point any kind of business partnership is pretty darned stressed under in this line of work, let alone a romantic one that has no legal or formal constraints.  But this all says a lot, really.  A hip, cool, couple living the hip cool lifestyle in a hip cool location doing the hip cool organic thing. Of course this is doomed to failure.  There's a reason that farming has never been hip and cool.  It may be romantic, in the classic definition of the word, and I'll admit to feeling that way about it. But hipsters need not apply as it isn't hip.  At some point, when somebody decides its not that hip and cool to be working hard in poverty, the romance of this informal arrangement may very well wear immediately off, and that's the end of it, irrespective of the destructive consequences of that.

The point is that this occupation has been engaged in by human beings for millennia and the basic nature of it, right down to daily living, is highly defined as its been through the refiners fire.  If a person isn't aware of that, and more if they intend to reinvent major aspects of it, they better have analyzed that down to the elemental level.

As a further aside, on using terms, the author of this item says she "owns" the farm.  No you don't.  You lease it.  You are a tenant.  Don't fool yourself.  Owning is owning.  Leasing is leasing.

Wife of tenant farmer on the Texas Panhandle, and therefore a farmer herself.  This farm would appear to be considerably larger than 10 acres.

Son of tenant farmer, 1930s, Oklahoma. At this guys age he was undoubtedly in the Army a few years later, and probably never went back to being a tenant farmer.

Now, a lot of operations lease land.  But to lease 100% of your acreage, save in family operations, does not equate with "owning" anything.

So, back to the acreage.  

So you are committed to an economic outflow on land you don't own, and on an acreage that doesn't even meet the American agrarian standard of 40 acres.  Freed slaves wanted 40 acres, not 10, for a reason.  No wonder that Forbes deemed this farm to be "Medieval".  To quote from Forbes:

There’s a really delightful little essay over at Salon about the trials and tribulations of someone trying to make a living as a small scale farmer. Her point being that despite the vast amounts of labour that she and her partner throw at their 10 acres they’re not in fact able to make anything much of a living. This is entirely true of course: their income looks to be about that of a prosperous peasant farmer in the Middle Ages. And that’s the delightful part of the essay, although it’s not quite noted. Simply because the economics of all this is implacable. If you’re trying to live off the produce of 10 acres then your maximum income is going to be the value of what can be produced off 10 acres: not a lot. This is why the Middle Ages, when 90% of the population were trying to live off such plots (often a little larger, 20-30 acres was about right for an English villein) were so darn poor by our standards. This is also why other areas of the world, where people are living off such small parcels of land, are poor today.

That's about right.

 Farming, circa 1330.

Save it doesn't even rise up, or down, to that standard.

The author notes that she heard an interview of people entering this lifestyle, and I've seen quite a few recently about it myself.  I think I've linked some in here.  Here's what she noted, which related to the point immediately above.

What the reporter didn’t ask the young farmers was: Do you make a living? Can you afford rent, healthcare? Can you pay your labor a living wage? If the reporter had asked me these questions, I would have said no.

Duh!

Farm incomes have not had rough parity with urban incomes since 1919.  And that's on conventional production farms.  What does that mean? Well, what it means is that the level of income for participation in the economy has been below the average urban income since that time.  In practical terms, that means there's less money around for buying that X Box, or that new television, or healthcare. 

And with only 10 acres are you seriously suggesting you pay labor?  People farming on 10 acres don't have paid labor, and they never have.  Labor on a small farm is husband and wife, father and mother, uncle, aunt and cousins, and close friends whom you are going to help next.  Not you, "partner" and paid labor.

Now, having said that, I'll note that on actual realistic farms and ranches, people often make do around this topic as people are capable of doing and acquiring in a way that urban people are not.  More realistic agrarians, quasi agrarians, and conventional farmers are well aware of that. They fix their own machinery, do things in a manner that is cheaper than a more electronic and mechanized manner, grow much of their own food, etc.  Indeed, one of the real changes in post 1930 agriculture has been a push away from subsistence in farming and I feel that's bad.

But if you are looking at ten acres, that's something else entirely.  If you are a market farmer, you are on a market garden, not a farm.  Or, as Salon says, you are a Medieval tenant.  You aren't even a Russian pre revolution tenant, which at least had the commune to rely on.

And that means you are going to have to live like a Medieval tenant.  No income for health care?  No kidding.  You'll have to rely on yourself, your family (although given your "partner" situation, you don't have a family like they had) and your community, all of whom live in the same tiny village and go to the same small church, all of which matters to them above all else.  You don't have that social network.  They were eating what they produced, caught and killed and that alone, and therefore had a diet that varied little compared to what you are used to. They didn't think themselves hip and cool as they drank fair trade coffee as they didn't drink coffee, or tea, or soda, at all.  They drank beer, and they brewed it and consumed it in massive quantities as the water was lethal.  And they lived close to death.

 

Old Believer village in Alaska. Yes, they live on little plots (I don't know how little), and they fish as well (they don't try to be limited).  But they're not living near the big city and they're an isolated, non hip, group living an intentionally isolated life in a distinct ethnic and religious community with defined community beliefs, relationships and networks.  You, dear hip and cool neo homesteader, are not.

Now, I'll confess to agrarian leanings.  But a person has to be both aware and have some sense of history before they leave their hip coolness and try to engage in the world's oldest fixed labor.  Forbes is correct, ten acre plots haven't been viable since the Medieval period, and even then most farmers were tenants in most of Europe. There's a reason that European farmers immigrated anywhere, North America, South America, Australia, New Zealand, and even Africa, to do the exact same occupation they were doing in Europe. . . farm. And that reason was land. 

And there's a reason that all over Europe farmers, when they had a chance, wanted land reform.  The Irish didn't keep the land lords when the English went, now did they?  And up until 20 years ago farming remained the biggest business in Ireland.  The English farmers struggled for and got their land after World War One. French farmers got it after the French Revolution.  Everywhere you look, you'll see, if you look, that the thing farmers wanted was to own land, not till the landlords land on a tiny substance plot.

Sheesh.

Now, all this from a person who laments the inability of the average person to get into agriculture now, and would frankly like to see that changed.  But at a certain point, you have to look at an ill thought out endeavor and shake your head.  This isn't helping anyone, its confirming the opposite. This is going to fail and fail badly.  Indeed, most homestead in the second half of the 19th Century and early 20th Century failed, but at least they were more realistic.  Pie in the sky endeavors ignoring agriclutural history and agriculture's nature aren't helping anything.

And that's my problem with the neo homesteading movement in general.

Age and filing homestead claims

Offhand, does anyone know the youngest age a person could file a homestead claim, back in the day?

21?  18?

The "Homestead" movement

 Nebraska homesteaders, 1884.

While most folks probably rush by in their daily lives oblivious to the Homestead movement, or Homesteaders in 2015, as I'm a fan of agriculture and all things agrarian, I've taken note of them.

But I wonder about them.

 Nebraska homesteaders, 1886.

For those (almost everyone) who wonders what I'm talking about, and who associate Homesteading with Little House on the Prairie, there's a subculture in the US today that uses this term to describe a small agrarian unit, but with no precision.  It's more than a little confusing.

Of course, by using the term "agrarian", I'm probably adding to the confusion. A lot of people associate the work "agrarian" with "agriculture", and they are not the same.

 Nebraska homesteaders, 1889.

Agrarian refers to a certain type of economics, which does tend to be farming centric, but which isn't really limited to farming. Used properly (as it tends to be by people who are agrarians) it refers to a Distributist economy focused on small freeholders, the majority of whom are farmers.

Eh?

Okay, basically that means an agrarians look towards the same sort of economy that Thomas Jefferson wrote about as being the foundation for democracy.  Individual heads of households who own and operate their own farms, with those farms basically being subsistence farms.  If that sounds a lot like Distributism, that's because Distributist are Agrarians in terms of their agricultural thought, and they too were agriculture focused, but not to the same extent.  Agrarian farmers ("yeomen") in Agrarian thought weren't precluded from selling their surplus, but the basic idea was that by and large they and their families survived on the fruits of their own land and labor, and hence they were independent men.  That's why Jefferson thought them the core of a democracy, a thought that wasn't unique to him by any means.

 American farmer plowing with oxen.  Use of draft animals remained common in American agriculture up until the 1950s, but most of the modern "homestead" community (but not all), is tractor dependent, which means they're tied into the larger economy pretty directly but they might not realize it.

There truly were a lot of yeomen in the United States for a very long time, but the Great Depression, in part due to economic polices of that era, and the policies of the Department of Agriculture in the 1950s, tended to finish them off, although there are still farmers who could be considered agrarians today.  Almost all farmers who farmed land they owned, prior to mid 20th Century, were various degrees of yeomen, with the degree to which that was true varying considerably from region to region, but more or less true everywhere.  Big exceptions, we should note, existed in the form of "farmers" who leased the land to tenant farmers, neither of which can be considered yeomanry. That was always true, I'd note, as "Planters" in the Old South were not agrarians, so for instance Jefferson, the great American admirer of yeomanry, wasn't a yeoman by any stretch of the imagination.

Okay, so now we know what a yeoman is, but what does that have to do with being a "Homesteader".

Good question, and its not even entirely clear to me.

 How it was done, well into the 20th Century.

"Homesteading", to most people, is associated with the late 19th Century after Congress passed the first Homestead Act. That allowed individuals to obtain a workable piece of the public domain (you could also simply buy land from the Federal government as well), under certain conditions, those conditions all tending towards working the land. The act aided small farmers, which most Americans were.  Put another way, most Americans at that time were in agrarian families, to varying degrees.   The concept of homesteading had been around since colonial times, but in that final version of it, the Federal government took a direct role in it for anyone willing to work the land, irrespective of whether they'd ever served the government or even if they were American citizens.

On that, it probably comes as a surprise to most people that it was actually the 20th Century that saw the most homesteading of this type in the US.  The period just before, and during, World War One, saw the peak of homesteading.  It continued on until the Great Depression, when the Homestead Acts were repealed, with the final homesteads being "proved up" in the lower 48 in the 1950s.  The act actually continued on in Alaska until 1986, which given the attitudes and desires I had in my youth, it may or may not be a good thing that I was not aware of (particularly as in 1986 I graduated from the University of Wyoming with a degree in geology and into unemployment).  Alaska does retain a state homestead statute, although the units it applies to are principally used by people who use them for vacation homes.  Michigan revived a type of homestead at one time some years ago for the impoverished Upper Peninsula, but I don't know that ultimately became of that.

 Sheep herders, Wyoming.  This is still done, where there are sheep (which there are many fewer of than even when I was young), but rarely are Americans the herders. They aren't willing, generally, to do it, at least at the wages it pays.  Peruvian herders may now be the most common.

Obviously members of the Homesteading Movement don't mean this sort of homesteading, although perhaps they sort of associate their efforts with it.  You can't go out on the Public Domain today and file a claim under the Homestead Act of 1862 or the Desert Lands Act or the Stock Raising Homestead Act.

Most people couldn't make a go on a small portion of land either, which is where my problem sort of starts with this movement. What people seem to be suggesting is that they move off the grid to some degree, and they live by the fruits of their farming labors.  But living off a few acres in 1862 was quite a bit different than trying to do the same in 2015.

A lot of them seem to acknowledge that, and for that reason, a lot seem to cross into what some call "hobby farming".  I have my own problems with that, and in regards tot his, if you are working a day job in town and farming a small plot on the side, are you really "homesteading"?  I don't think so.

 Typical farmer of the late 1930s, early 1940s.

Beyond that, what's the motivation for "homesteading"? That's an interesting topic in and of itself.

For some, it's just a disgust or disdain with the modern materialistic world.  A person can't be faulted for that really, as materialism and consumerism aren't all they're cracked up to be by a huge measure.  For some its a certain type of idealism, that's now wholly unrelated really do  turning of the back to materialism.  For some other, and tied into the other factors mentioned above, it's tied in to religious sense that finds the current Western world intolerant or inconsistent with their religious beliefs.  Along those lines, I've seen blogs by Anglican homesteaders, Catholic homesteaders and various other Protestant homesteaders.  I suppose, in a way, the rural Old Believer communities of Alaska express this goal in sort of a way, and perhaps the various Anabaptist groups like the Amish are also a long lasting example of this.  Indeed, it's not uncommon in at least Catholic homesteading movement circles to cite the Amish as a practical example, even tough the theology involved is considerably different.

 Old Believer village in Alaska, a model for religious homesteaders?

And not only is it different, it's interesting in that in Europe the Distributist movement that existed prior to World War Two had a strongly agrarian element to it, that fit in well with the concerns of modern Catholic and Anglican adherents to the same, particularly as the agrarian distributist of that time considered this topic in the context of a desire for small scale economic independence and family rural isolation (in the European context) due in part to a belief that the aggressive Capitalist and Socialist economic forces of the time were inherently anti-Christian.

But whatever its origin, how well does the practice of these folks fit the reality for farming?  The evidence would be not very well.

Almost every single example of this I run across is either not practiced in the full, and hence its questionable if its practiced at all, or it's a failure.  At least two Catholic writers who publish blogs, one of whom is very dedicated to the concept, have failed at it.  Others of all ilks actually seem to mix it heavily with non farm activity, which perhaps doesn't mean it isn't "homesteading", but which at least raises the question as to whether or not it's actually hobby farming.

 Illustration for the front piece of a Chesterton book.  A Distributist, Chesterton, like other English Distributist, imagined "Three Acres and a Cow" for English (Catholic) agrarian farmers.  This view was similar to that of freed slaves following the Civil War, who imagined Forty Acres and a Mule as the ideal set of circumstances.

Why is that?

Well for one thing, even while there are farms and ranches today that are very self reliant (and some that are not), but they're all market farms.  The market controls the price of farmland, and frankly ranchland is priced at playground prices now, rather than by agricultural production.  The point is that farmers and ranchers have always engaged in agriculture in a the context of their economic community, and today that means production agriculture.

If a person is conversely hoping that they can live like 19th Century yeomen, they're probably fooling themselves and are definitely fooling themselves if they have a family.  But even if they don't, they likely are.  Yeomen of earlier eras, even in the first half of the 20th Century, were largely part of the national and regional economies.  What that tells us is that they lived tolerably within the range of their economic potentials in eras when there a lot more poor, the poor were poorer, the middle class was often near slipping down into poverty, and there were very few who were wealthy.

Indeed, it's been noted here before that the last year that American farmers had economic parity with their urban cousins was 1919.  That's because, in part, farmers had done extremely well during World War One.  So well, in fact, that there'd been a flood of urbanites into the farming belts, most of whom attempted to engage in grain farming.

After that, however, middle class urban dwellers began to exceed rural residents in their standard of living, and that by extension forced things out in the countryside.  At first big urban changes were easy to ignore.  People in town might have cars, but they weren't all that useful, at first, in the countryside.  People in town might have radios, but that wasn't much to a person who lived beyond the range of the station.  People in town might get to go to the movies during the week, but farmers could still catch them on Saturday or could go to something that a fellow agriculturalist was putting on by way of entertainment nearer to their farms or ranches.  All that began to change, however, by the 1930s.  Indeed, it would have changed more rapidly but for the Great Depression.

And that was because farmers are part of the population, after all.  At some point it becomes impossible to not live in the larger economic community.  "Living off the grid" may be all fine as a dream, or even as a reality for a dedicated person or perhaps a dedicated family, but for most it isn't really possible.  Most people can't home-school, for example, so they need to be able to go to town for their kids and that means having a car.  Most farmers will need to sell their products and that means having cell phones and computers. It also means having vehicles.  It's charming and romantic to imagine farmers going to town in a Model A flatbed like a scene out of the Waltons, and farmers and ranchers do use a lot of old vehicles, but that's less common than it used to be and they need to have some functional vehicle as well which means a modern truck.  In short, being a farmer in the market, even though they nearly all save where they can, is more expensive in 2015 than it was in 1955, or 1915.

And unless a person is completely self sufficient, at which point they're purely making a statement by their lifestyle or strictly living according to a personal philosophy, they're going to need to make some money, and hence the problem.

In order to make that money, you have to sell to somebody. And that person has to be willing to pay your price. For small units, and particularly those with children, that puts you at a huge disadvantage in most markets.  Indeed, most of the "artisanal" locavore type of farming that homesteader types imagine can actually only occur very close to urban centers, and in some instances large urban centers.

Indeed, it's interesting that one of the loudest voices for traditional farming lives in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley, a bucolic location we associate heavily with farming but which is also quite near some large population centers.  I've noted that a farmer whose blog I follow, who failed at this, tried the same thing in rural Kansas. But in rural Kansas, the market likely simply isn't there.  People in that setting might buy some vegetables from you, but they're probably more likely to price things out, by necessity, at the Safeway.  And many others (but not all) who assert they are homesteaders, are actually doing it on a hobby basis.

So, I guess, my skepticism here is brought about by the fact that so many "homesteaders" seem to come from the non agricultural community and they don't seem to know what they're getting into.  They're romantics, or in some cases romantic fugitives.  But farming has never been an endeavor for fugitives really, or at least it is rarely so.

Which doesn't mean that farmers aren't in many cases pretty darned self sufficient, or that there's not a lot of merit to it.  But I often wonder if the people who imagine living on a classic American Farm realize that farm was part of a larger economic community?

It isn't that I'm not  sympathetic. And I think the dream of owning your own piece of farm ground and living from it, on your own labor, and in a simple way, is an age old American, indeed North American, one.  But I wonder to what extent those trying to enter it in the 19th Century, or even the 18th Century way, but living in the 21st, are realistic.

Friday Farming. The basic unit.

"Forty acres and a mule".  The basic agrarian unit in the American east in the 19th Century, and hence the unit that freed slaves were hoping to obtain, with the basic animal necessary to work the same.

"Three acres and a cow."  The basic agrarian unit in the United Kingdom in the 19th Century and early 20th Century, and hence the slogan of land reformers and Distributists.

At the end of the road.

Holscher's Hub: Where you have to hike in.

 

These are all photographs, taken from a long distance away, of an old ranch house.

The location of the house isn't a bad one.  In a valley, near a stream that runs year around. The house is a two story house. I'd guess it was built somewhere in the 1900 to 1920 time frame.

Now it's abandoned.  I have to wonder why, but I can't help but note that a newer house is within eyesight of the highway.  Perhaps that provided the incentive?  This house would have truly been out at the end of the road, the only thing on the road at that.  I wouldn't have abandoned this location, and I don't really know why the owners did, but it's interesting to speculate on.

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?

A Natrona County Homestead

A Natrona County Homestead:

I'm not sure of the vintage of this one, but it was occupied for a long time, probably as late as the 1970s.

Post World War Two Homesteading

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.

The Old Homesteads

I went to a ash spreading (i.e., a type of funeral really) out at an old homestead the other day. By 4x4, it was a long way out. Long, long way, or so it felt. I learned while there that the original homestead had first been filed and occupied in 1917, a big year for homesteading.

It was a very interesting place, and felt very isolated. In visiting about that with my father in law, however, he noted that there had been another homestead just over the hill. And, as I've likely noted here before, there were tiny homesteads all over at that time. It was isolated, but sort of locally isolated. There were, as there were with most of these outfits, another homestead just a few hours ride away, at most, if that.

That is not to say that they weren't way out. I'd guess that this place was at least a full days ride from the nearest town at that time. Even when cars were commonly owned, and they were coming in just about that time, it would have taken the better part of a day to get to town, or a town (there were a couple of very small, but viable towns, about equal distance to this place at that time). It's interesting how agricultural units everywhere in North American have become bigger over time, even if they are all closer now, in terms of time, to a city or town.