The Agrarian's Lament: Dreams denied and abandoned.

The Agrarian's Lament: Dreams denied and abandoned.: 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 f...

 

Dreams denied and abandoned.

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.

Lex Anteinternet: A thought about not thinking things through on Indigenous Person's Day.

Lex Anteinternet: A thought about not thinking things through on Ind...: 

A thought about not thinking things through on Indigenous Person's Day.

Wyoming politician Bob Ide is saying he's going to sponsor a bill to take the Federal domain into state hands, requiring, as if Wyoming can require the Federal Government to do anything, the fulfillment of a promise that the Federal Government never made at the time Wyoming became a state.

In fact, the opposite was true.  Wyoming promised not to seek any more Federal land than it was getting.

But a promise was made regarding those lands. . . to the Cheyenne, Arapahoe and Sioux tribes. . . that being that they could keep them for hunting grounds.

And a larger reservation than they currently have was originally given to the Shoshone.

In her campaign to displace Liz Cheney, Harriet Hageman emphasized the hardworking nature of her family and forebearors, and has been a standard-bearer of conservative and populist values in her brief time in Congress. She's from, she related, a fourth generation ranching family.

But most families that have been in agriculture in Wyoming that long, outside the descendants of British remission men, are remote beneficiaries of a gigantic government system which used Federal agents, in the form of the U.S. Army and Federal Indian Agents, to dispossess the occupants of that land, sometimes by force, and remove them to where they did not want to go, so that the land could be transferred free or cheaply to European Americans.  Those original European American occupants, we might note, in the case of homesteaders, were not the wealthy and were perfectly willing to take advantage of a government program.

My point?

Well I don't mean to be one of those who are going to engage in hagiography of any one group of American people, Natives nor European Americans, but on this day it might be worth remembering something.

The "pull up by the bootstraps" argument that the middle class, or lower upper class, so frequently states, or imagines about themselves, fails pretty readily upon close examination.  Almost every class of American with longstanding roots in the country that have been here for quite some time benefitted from a government program, whether that be homesteading, Indian removal by the Army, the mining law of 1872, the Taylor grazing act (which saved ranching in the West), the GI Bill, and so on.

That is, in fact, the American System.  Not the Darwinian laissez-faire economics that libertarians so often proclaim.

I'm not demanding reparations, or that injustices committed to people of the past be retroactively lamented.  Indeed, that's pointless.  What I’m suggesting instead is that justice be done for those now living, and that as part of that we admit when we are vicariously beneficiaries of some Federal program in the past, as I am.

And as part of that, I'm also suggesting that we don't engage in myths or hagiographies about our own predecessors.  Nobody carved a civilization out of an empty wilderness, unless we go back in North America 15,000 years.  Nobody promised that Wyoming could have the public domain.  None of us are as independent or virtuous as we pretend, if we pretend that we are, and nobody's ancestors were hearty bands of go it alone giants.

Shoot, even Columbus, if you prefer to ponder him on this day, was on a state funded mission.