R. Douglas Hurt is a professor of history at Purdue University. He is the author or editor of numerous books, including Food and Agriculture during the Civil War; The Big Empty: The Great Plains in the Twentieth Century; and The Great Plains during World War II (Bison Books, 2010). His newest book, Agriculture in the Midwest, 1815-1900, was published last month.

In this broad and authoritative survey of midwestern agriculture from the War of 1812 to the turn of the twentieth century, R. Douglas Hurt contends that this region proved to be the country’s garden spot and the nation’s heart of agricultural production. During these eighty-five years the region transformed from a sparsely settled area to the home of large industrial and commercial cities, including Chicago, Milwaukee, Cleveland, and Detroit. Still, it remained primarily an agricultural region that promised a better life for many of the people who acquired land, raised crops and livestock, provided for their families, adopted new technologies, and sought political reform to benefit their economic interests. Focusing on the history of midwestern agriculture during wartime, utopian isolation, and colonization as well as political unrest, Hurt contextualizes myriad facets of the region’s past to show how agricultural life developed for midwestern farmers—and to reflect on what that meant for the region and nation.

Chapter One

Seekers

“To view the rowling Prairies covered with tall grass and Flowers of evry Hue wavering in the wind was something grand it can be seen but hardly described.” So wrote Aristarchus Cone, who at the age of twenty-two in the summer of 1837 sought land in the Midwest. After arriving at Peoria via steamboat from Cincinnati by way of Saint Louis and the Illinois River, Cone and a friend “struck out on foot on the Big Prairies of Illinois with scarsely any Roads more than Indian Trails.” He said, “We had no particular place in view, our object was to find a location where we could get Timber and Prairie Land together and get it at government price for Farms.” They made their way to Rock Island and liked the country, but Cone recalled that “squatter Claimes” controlled most of the land. They traveled southwest into Iowa keeping their course by the sun, swatting hordes of mosquitoes, and negotiating their way through head-high grass. When possible and mostly by accident they stayed nights in isolated cabins where the inhabitants proved happy to provide food and shelter for the sake of company. Eventually they entered present-day Muscatine County. There he wrote, “We came to a beautiful looking Prairie Surrounded on three sides by Timber or Wood Land with a stream of Water running through it. The tall grass waving in the Wind as far as the eye could see to the South I said to my Friend and fellow traveler this is the place I have been looking for I am going to lay claim to this Land.” Cone lived there until he died at the age of ninety in 1905.

With the signing of the Treaty of Ghent on December 24, 1814, the Old Northwest and later the Midwest lay open for uncontested settlement, other than the removal of the Indian nations by land cession treaties and occasional violence, such as the Black Hawk War of 1832 and the Sioux Uprising in 1862. In 1815 the great migration into the Midwest began. Reports of sweeping prairie lands north of the Ohio River in present-day Indiana and Illinois lured many settlers. By 1820 squatters had settled on government land along the West Fork of the White River in Indiana and soon spread into the Illinois Country. Settlers scattered along the Ohio River to the Mississippi River and up their tributaries. Soon they would look west to Iowa and north to Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. For many who sought the acquisition of cheap or free land, the Midwest proved irresistible because it offered opportunity, security, and prosperity.

Indeed, many settlers considered the rich bottom and prairie lands nothing less than a garden spot in the world. Emigrants who became immigrants upon arrival considered the Midwest a new beginning. In Minnesota a Norwegian wrote home proclaiming, “This is Canaan.” Many correspondents writing to kith and kin praised the country as a land of “milk and honey.” During the early nineteenth century, then, the rich lands of the Midwest attracted thousands of men and women whose desire to own a farm some people likened to a fever. Settlers migrating into the Midwest might catch “Ohio fever” or “Illinois fever,” and later “Iowa fever” and “Minnesota fever,” but apparently few caught “Indiana fever.”

Not everyone, however, considered the region a proverbial Garden of Eden. John S. Wright, a farmer in New York State, spent six months seeking land and traveling in the Ohio Valley soon after the War of 1812 ended. He intended to relocate his family, but he returned home “profoundly disillusioned.” Most immigrants, however, found the region that one day would become the Midwest a Canaan of sorts so long as they did not expect a paradise and were ready and willing to work. If not, they would find only “sorrow and regret.” But if they did work hard, they would be “better rewarded” than anywhere in the world. In 1838 an immigrant settler in Illinois proclaimed that “no sensible man could wish for a better place.” The Midwest offered the promise of a better life.

With the war over and expectations that the tribes north of the Ohio River would peacefully cede lands that the federal government desired, the General Land Office began efforts to survey the newly secured public domain for agricultural settlement. Organizational and weather delays, however, lingered into 1816 when 3.5 million acres in Illinois and 2 million acres in Michigan lay ready for survey and sale. By November 1816, the Kaskaskia Land Office offered public lands for two to five dollars per acre. Squatters claimed many of these surveyed lands and only speculators actually bought land while the intruders anticipated congressional recognition of their claims through preemption legislation. During the summer surveying work proceed apace in Illinois. Congress reserved the rich lands of western Illinois between the Illinois and Mississippi Rivers, known as the Illinois Military Tract for veterans, and the federal government expected those lands to be settled quickly—as soon as they were available. Given the vast expanse of the military tract, the surveying begun in 1815 was not completed until 1822. The tract included approximately 5,360,000 acres, of which two-thirds or about 3.5 million acres were reserved for settlement by holders of military land bounty warrants.

The secretary of war authorized land warrants to all eligible veterans who sought land in the Midwest if they applied. Upon receipt of a warrant, the veteran could take or mail it to the General Land Office in Washington, DC, and indicate that he wanted to move to Illinois. His specific acreage was then drawn by lot and eventually the veteran received a patent (that is, title) to the land. Distribution of the Illinois Bounty Lands began on October 6, 1817. Many veterans, however, chose to sell their 160- or 320-acre allotments to speculators for a few cents on the dollar because they did not want to relocate to northwestern Illinois and begin farming. The speculators then sold that acreage in small lots, such as eighty acre tracts, for prices that farmers could afford but still at great profit to themselves. Speculators not only used those warrants to select land in the military district but also could apply their value to the purchase of public lands. Before speculators could gain title to these bounty lands, however, squatters moved into the military tract, particularly settlers from Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, and Tennessee. Later, in Iowa, speculators also used military bounty warrants to make large land purchases. Overall, the Illinois Military Tract settled slowly. Congress did not open the nearly two million acres not reserved for soldiers until 1831. The prairie also discouraged many land seekers who considered this grassland too wet, unhealthy, and difficult to plow. In the meantime, the large-scale speculators bought up land warrants from soldiers and the tracts previously purchased by small-scale speculators, usually paying $1.00 to $1.15 per acre. After 1820 public land sales began at $1.25 per acre, and so these speculators saved a considerable amount of money by purchasing military bounty warrants.