Homesteading

Many outsiders who look at the sparsely populated areas of the Buffalo Commons assume that people leave this country because they cannot sustain themselves off the land. This is a deceptively easy answer, and I suspect not entirely correct. It’s true that a farmer on the short grass prairie needs more land to survive than one who farms the classic areas of rich land seen in all those nostalgic calendar pictures. John Murphy, in his conversations with The New York Time’s Jon Margolis, said you need more than the 160-acre tree claim his grandfather had to make it on the Buffalo Commons. This is perhaps true today, but was not necessarily so in 1882 when Murphy’s grandfather homesteaded. Back then, when farmers raised a variety of crops, including most of the food and meat they ate, they could survive. Some even prospered. And those that did often bought more land.

So to compare the farmer today with the early settler on the plains is not really comparing apples to apples. Farmers today do not live the lifestyle the early settlers did. The early settlers in this area were much more like today’s back-to-the-land homesteaders, the people who deliberately simplify their lives so they can live on less. And for these people, 160 acres is probably about enough even today, depending upon what they are doing to generate income. I have personally often wondered if farmers wouldn’t be better off working fewer acres with horses than spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on equipment so they had to work thousands of acres.

When the farmland is prime and farmers can’t make it, there is some credence given to the possibility that those farming are not as skilled as those who prosper under the same circumstances. Where the farmland is marginal, as it is on the Buffalo Commons, there is a far greater tendency to blame the land rather than the farming practices. The kind of farming that must be done on the dry grass prairie requires a different kind of land management than areas with richer soil and greater rainfall. Many of those who failed at farming in the early years failed because they were unable to adjust to the different kind of farming this land required.

My grandfather was one of them. Originally from near Louisville, Kentucky, with a sojourn in southern Minnesota as a hired hand for his cousin, he was sorely unprepared for the kind of farming he would have to do on the very fine gravel hill he chose for a homestead. As Dale said, there really wasn’t any way for these early settlers to tell whether the land they chose was good farmland. It was covered with very thick, tall grass, even in the area called the short grass prairie. My grandfather evidently chose his quarter of land without so much as stomping a spade into the ground.

At a family reunion years ago, I once overhead my relatives talking about how my grandfather always planted too deep. In Kentucky, that was fine. In central North Dakota, the seed never came up well. My grandfather evidently had trouble adjusting. It took his son Dale, who grew up on the land, to adapt to the kind of farming required in this county and to prosper enough to buy back the homestead my grandfather lost. My uncle, who grew up tending dry grass prairie, was able to finally prosper and buy up several more quarters of land.

Although some people evidently thought my grandfather wasn’t as good a wheat grower as he might have been, he was without a doubt a fine gardener — even in the gravel. People around Tuttle, North Dakota — the ones over 70 — still remember his rock garden. He edged an area near his claim shack with hefty boulders and planted and tended what was for this area a lush flower garden. Remnants of the gate pillars to the garden and the boulder boundaries still rest quietly near the foundation of his homestead house. There is only one picture of my grandfather standing in his waist high wheat, but there are lots of pictures showing him standing proudly in his piece of Eden.

So while it is correct that North Dakota’s population, especially the young people, are leaving the farms and moving to urban centers such as Fargo, or leaving the state entirely, the implication that they are doing so because the land will not support farming is somewhat inaccurate. Certainly it’s true that some marginal land better suited for grazing cattle was plowed up and planted. However, it seems to me that the economists are overlooking a very important element of the exodus. While some of the people who leave farms do so because they lose them to creditors, and in some cases for reasons unrelated to the topography, others leave because they choose a different lifestyle. Young people have generally shown very little tolerance for a back-to-the land lifestyle, with the exception of a brief heyday in the ’60s. It’s usually older, and some would deem wiser, middle-aged people who consciously choose to scale down their standard of living and turn their backs on the material things the advertisers tell them they must have — often the very same things by which the economists measure prosperity.

Perhaps we shouldn’t view the movement of people away from the Buffalo Commons as a failure, but as a strength. The increasing sparseness of the population has brought change and will continue to bring more, but the social fabric of the society remains remarkably in tact. The people who choose to remain here like it in part because it is not crowded. Many have grown up close to the land and they do not want to be insulated from it with metropolitan frenzy. Why, then, must the decreasing population in states such as North Dakota always be measured in terms of some kind of failure to maintain the status quo?

The land here is stark, the hues are often subtle, and the climate definitely brutal. For those who choose to live here, perhaps the measure of why we persevere needs to be calibrated differently, the feasibility studies charted from a different perspective.

Dale’s father, Milton Samual Goldsmith (called Milt), was born in 1871 in Cupio, Kentucky (in Bullit County). Sometime in the 1890s he traveled to Cleveland, Minnesota, to work as a hired hand for his uncle. In the fall of 1902, at the age of 31, the lure of 160 acres of free land enticed him to travel to Kidder County, North Dakota, to file a claim for a homestead. In the spring of 1903, he returned and build a two-room claim shack on the land.

According to surveying practices outlined in the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, much of the land west of the Appalachians is divided into one-square-mile sections, These square-mile sections are grouped into packets of 36, called townships, located by reference to range lines. The government, to encourage the railroads to build in these areas so settlement could occur more rapidly, gave the railroads all the odd numbered sections, sections 16 and 36 were reserved for schools. The railroads sold what land they didn’t need to individuals, which were usually land developers, who then sold or mortgaged the land to settlers. The odd numbered sections were opened up to homesteaders, who were entitled to take ownership of one quarter of a section (160 acres) by making improvements and living on their quarter for five years. My grandfather homesteaded the northeast quarter (160 acres) of Township 144N (Northwest Township), Range 74W, Section 20, Kidder County, North Dakota, and that is where Dale was born and was to spend his entire life.

In the fall of 1903, Dale’s father, Milt, and his cousin, Owen Goldsmith (always called Ode), rented a farm near Bowdon, North Dakota, about 40 miles northeast of their homestead. That way, they could attempt to earn something farming while they continued to develop their homesteads, where they needed to build a house, dig a well, put up a barn, and fence pasture.

In the spring of 1904, Milt went back to Minnesota to marry Olive Susanna Everett (called Ollie), who grew up on the farm adjacent to Milt’s uncle’s farm in Cleveland, Minnesota. Ollie, born June 30th, 1886, was only 18 when she married a man fiftenn years older than she was. Milt and Ollie returned to North Dakota and rented another farm near Bowden. On December 1, 1904, their first child, a daughter, was born. In the fall of 1905, they moved to their homestead and took up permanent residence there. On April 7, 1907, Dale Goldsmith was born on the homestead.

Ollie, then, had left a comfortable home in Cleveland, Minnesota, to travel to North Dakota and homestead on a quarter of land she had never seen and move into a two-room clapboard house which measured 15 x 20 feet. There wasn’t a tree in sight, the wind blew constantly, the summers were hot and dry, and in winter the temperature frequently dropped to 30 below. A home that by today’s standards would be considered one of poverty. In 1910, an 8-ft wide lean-to was added onto the north of the house, creating a third room, which became the kitchen. By 1916, four children, ages 3 to 11, along with two adults, lived in this three-room clapboard building. Cots that served as sofas during the day served as beds at night. In the fall, manure was shoveled from the barn and piled up around the foundation to help protect those inside from blizzards and 30-below nights. A trap door in the kitchen floor lead to the makeshift refrigerator — a dirt basement under part of the house where potatoes were stored for the winter and the milk and cream kept cool. If the crop was good, there would be a bushel of apples down there too. If the crop was really great, there would be a bushel of pears down there as well. But there were seldom pears.

A humble existence. But in our rush towards material overload, towards a throwaway society, we have a tendency to merely marvel at the starkness of this kind of life rather than examine it for the clues it might give us about what gives life meaning. Dale’s lifestyle was really very little different from anyone else’s around Northwest Township. People who remember Dale’s mother recall that they never saw her smile, but she was a wonderful cook and almost always had a mixing bowl in her hand.

Ode, the cousin who had homesteaded near Dale’s father, had married a school teacher, and while he also rented a farm near Bowden, his wife taught school to help them get a start. His two daughters were old enough to remember the move to the new homestead. In a letter many years later, the younger daughter wrote:

It may seem odd that a forty-mile trip could take two days, but there were no roads — none — at this time, and there were very few fences. Travelers simply cut across the prairie in the general direction that they knew they needed to travel. A few trails were used enough to leave wheel ruts in the prairie grass, but for the most part, people took the shortest route to wherever they were going, trudging through unplowed prairie grass, avoiding rocks and sloughs as best they could.

According to Ode’s daughter, Ode and Dale’s father Milt often helped each other out. She remembers Milt once remarking:

A few of the settlers who came to Kidder County in 1900–1905 had enough money to buy land rather than homestead it. Money, however, didn’t make a lot of difference here. It bought a little better house and a little nicer furnishings, but the land drove a hard bargain. Everyone had to work hard whether they had money or not. The differences between rich and poor were subtle. There were no servants here, only hired hands.

Many gave up and left, the poor as well as rich. Ode left his homestead in the fall of 1913 and moved his family to Oregon. His wife’s school teaching, it turned out, was to be a major support for his family most of his life. In the end, whether these early settlers had money or not, their backs all looked the same as they retreated from the grim reality of life on the short grass prairie.

The quality of the land people homesteaded had something to do with whether they were ever able to survive or not. Dale and his younger brother often discussed how poor the land was on their father’s homestead.

Even though Ode gave up on farming in North Dakota in 1913, Dale’s father stayed, rented additional land, and eventually prevailed on the poorer homestead. After many years, Dale was able to purchase the quarter Ode abandoned and it remained some of the best land on Dale’s farm.

Dale hadn’t been born when his father and mother moved to the homestead, but he recalls a lot about what life was like when he was little. He and I often talked about it.

My uncle, I discovered, after he developed Parkinson’s, had a terrible fear of dark holes. Parkinson’s destroys the part of the brain that processes positional information. If Dale saw your belt buckle, he would think it was his. As the disease destroyed his ability to process this kind of information, he began to dislike shaded areas near the floor, such as shadows from furniture. He became afraid that he was going to fall into a dark hole. Since I had always regarded my uncle as fearless, I often wondered about the origin of this worry. Until I began to remember our discussions about hand digging a well.

I had heard a lot about sod houses, but by the time Dale’s father homesteaded, claim shacks were usually built of wood, although they had a sod chicken house.

“Dad built a chicken house out of sod. It was there for four or five years after, I can remember.”

“Did you dig the sod or what?”

“Plowed it. Plowed it and then picked it up. But it was a lot of work, but I guess they was a good warm building. You know, the plow turned that sod out in strips about that wide. Take a spade and cut it off in chunks that you could lift. Laid them on top just like blocks. The roof was made out of lumber. They’d have a few dollars. They could buy a little lumber for the roof. A lot of people had lived in sod houses, but that was before my time. Nobody built sod houses though after the folks [Dale’s parents] come.”

“And we built a barn, kind of a barn. It wasn’t too much, but it was good enough, I guess. Could get by with it,” Dale said.

“I don’t remember too many pictures of the barn. Did it just not last very long or what?” I asked.

“Well, it lasted quite a good many years when it was just a flat old building. There wasn’t much to it. But it served the purpose, I guess. I think it lasted until 1928 and that was what, 23 years? Then it fell down. Then we built another, set one up, kind of. An old barn. It wasn’t much, but it served the purpose until we moved over here. When we moved over here, we tore some of the lumber off to build a cattle shed here.”

The barn on the adjacent farm Dale bought was a grandiose, huge affair that had been built in 1911 at a cost of $1500. A few years later, two granaries were moved onto this farmstead and attachted to the east side. The barn stands today as regally as it did in 1911, a monument to the optimism of the early settlers in this area. Barns like these are simply no longer built. They would cost too much, and have been replaced by the ubiquitous pole barn, an aluminum sided, totally utilitarian structure than lacks any kind of style whatsoever. Many old barns like these are falling down because owners can no longer afford to maintain them.

Old habits die hard. Not far from the barn is a pile of old lumber, salvaged from buildings which have fallen down or been torn down. Repairs to the barn were often taken from this pile. When a storm passed through and blew the chicken house down, it was carefully dismantled and the salvageable wood added to this pile. There are probably still pieces of the 1928 barn buried somewhere in the rubble. Many farmers today, like city folk, no longer accept “It was probably good enough.”

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