Richard Edwards is director emeritus of the Center for Great Plains Studies at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. He is author or coauthor of numerous books, including The First Migrants (Nebraska, 2023) and Homesteading the Plains: Toward a New History (Nebraska, 2017). His latest book Great Plains Homesteaders (Nebraska, 2024) was published last month.

Great Plains Homesteaders tells the epic story of how millions of people, white and Black, women and men, young and old, and of many different religions, languages, and ethnic groups, moved to the Great Plains to claim land. Most were poor, so the government’s offer of “free” farms through the Homestead Act of 1862 seemed a godsend. The settlers found harsh growing conditions and many perils—including exploitation by railroads and banks, droughts, prairie fires, and bitter winters—yet they persisted. The settlers successfully “proved up” nearly a million claims between the 1860s and the 1920s. They filled up the immense grassland, transforming it into productive farms, the beginning of the region’s agriculture. They also created a distinct culture that continues to shape their estimated fifty million descendants living today.

Every homesteader’s experience was different, as particular and distinct as the people were themselves. Yet their collective story, with all its hardships and toil, its ambitions and setbacks, its fresh starts and failures and successes, is central to the American experience.

Chapter One

Homesteaders

They were a phenomenon. Nearly three million of them tried to take up the government’s dare—“bet you a quarter section you can’t last five years on our prairie land”—and 1.6 million succeeded. Including family members, ten million or more people moved west to try their luck. Their numbers paralleled those of the Great Migration of Black people out of the South to northern cities. The homesteaders claimed 285 million acres, amounting to 15 percent of the land area of the Lower 48 states. The majority, 960,000, settled in the Great Plains, where they gained patents (title) to 180 million acres of prairie. That was nearly as much land as in the thirteen original American colonies. Most homesteaders became owners of 160 acres, but some got less and some more.

They came from all over. Most were whites, but they included Black people, too. Both men and women filed claims. They came from all regions of the United States: from both British and French Canada, Norway, Germany, Britain, Sweden, Russia, Switzerland, Austria, Denmark, France, Italy, and even Arab lands. They represented thirty or forty nationalities and many languages. They brought all varieties of Christianity. They included Jews and Muslims as well.

They came because the government offered them a quarter section (160 acres) of “free land.” True, you had to work for it. After filing and paying a small fee, the homesteader had to build a dwelling, live on the claim for five years, and cultivate at least ten acres. (The government slightly revised these requirements over the years). At “proving up,” they provided affidavits and other documents to show the General Land Office (GLO) that they had met all the law’s requirements. Some months later, the GLO mailed them their patents. For millions who feared they would never be able to own land, it was a godsend.

The Homestead Act of 1862 directed land offices to begin accepting claims on January 1, 1863. Few land seekers filed claims until the Civil War ended in 1865, but by 1868 they started showing up in large numbers.

Most came to the Great Plains, an enormous grassland stretching west. Gateway cities—Kansas City, Omaha, Sioux Falls, Fargo—ringed its eastern border. On its west edge, Billings, Cheyenne, and the growing metropolis of Denver marked where the prairie gave way to the Rockies’ foothills. The grassland ranged from Oklahoma to the Canadian border (and beyond, but we do not consider Canada here). In its vast spaces there were virtually no cities. The Great Plains offered 350 million acres of unbroken prairie.

The homesteaders’ migration crested in two great waves. The first phase lasted from 1868 to the mid-1890s. Homesteaders journeyed in their prairie schooners and wagons to fill up the central plains of Kansas, Nebraska, and eastern Dakota Territory. These areas accounted for 38 percent of all claims, leaving the remainder scattered among the other twenty-five homesteading states. Large numbers continued arriving until about 1892, when hard times for farmers and a deep national depression discouraged further migration.

Better times returned later in the 1890s, stimulating homesteading’s second phase. With the central plains mostly filled up, new migrants were forced to file their claims in more peripheral areas. They rode the railway spur lines to the end of newly laid tracks. Then they took to wagons, or even Model Ts, to penetrate the remote, marginal reaches of the plains. Claimants focused on North Dakota, Colorado, and Montana. This phase lasted until the early 1920s.

The agricultural depression of the 1920s and the Great Depression of the 1930s ended homesteading. Congress repealed the homesteading law in 1976, except for in Alaska. The last homesteaders filed claims in Alaska in the 1980s.

The government wanted these homesteaders to succeed. National leaders saw “unimproved” prairie as simply unproductive land. But officials set the homesteaders a horrendously difficult task in asking them to turn the harsh prairie environment into productive farms. Some claimants arrived with farming experience; others came fresh from factories or city occupations unadorned with agrarian skills. But few were ready to farm in the semi-arid, windblown Great Plains.

Many initial filers failed, perhaps as many as 45 percent. They were inept farmers or suffered bad luck or bad timing or got injured. Some fell deep into debt and couldn’t get out. Some couldn’t stand the blistering summers and frigid winters. Others suffered loneliness, anxiety, or a pervasive sense of failure and hopelessness, and so they gave up. The causes of failure were myriad.

Some failed because they were so poor. Most homesteaders arrived with few possessions, and they were chronically short of cash. So to get started, many had to borrow. Thor and Gjertru Birkelo left Norway in 1904 to homestead in the Big Meadow township of Williams County, North Dakota. They borrowed money to migrate, so they were already in debt when they arrived. After filing, Thor borrowed money from his brother Kristen to buy two horses, a wagon, a plow, and harnesses—essential equipment for getting his farm going. In 1905 he borrowed from Kristen to buy a cow, in 1906 another cow, in 1907 a second team of horses.

In 1908 a finance company gave the Birkelos a $600 mortgage on condition that they use $200 to commute (buy) their claim. Now, as owners, they could legally offer their farm as loan collateral. But even with these infusions of cash, the Birkelos kept falling deeper into debt. In 1919 they borrowed $4,506 to consolidate their debts, but they could not make the payments. In 1924 the investment company holding their mortgage foreclosed, and the Birkelos lost their farm. They had gone from landless in Norway to landless in America in twenty hard years.

Some people thought that if the government was going to give them a nice 160-acre farm, why, they’d take it! All you had to do was live on it for five years and make some small improvements, and who couldn’t do that? Owning land seemed as desirable in the nineteenth century as owning Apple stock is in the twenty-first.

Solomon Butcher was one who tried. He filed a homestead claim in 1888 in eastern Custer County, Nebraska. But he quit after only two weeks. It was too hot, too dirty, and too buggy for him. “Any man that would leave the luxuries of a boarding house, where they had hash every day, to [turn] Nebraska sod . . . was a fool,” he said. He switched to photography. And it was fortunate for us that he did—he bequeathed to us the best collection of nineteenth-century homesteader photographs we have. Others like Butcher, of the educated and more affluent classes, had easier options than homesteading available to them, and few of them filed claims.

While many claimants failed, more succeeded than failed. Roughly 55 percent of initial filers earned their patents. They succeeded through some combination of smarter choices, harder work, more self-denial, and better luck. They avoided debilitating injury and illness. They dodged hail damage and grasshoppers. Whatever their successful formula, they brought grit and determination to transform the land and create new lives out of the opportunity that homesteading gave them.