By: Jay Jackman, Travis Terrell and Pam Cook

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By Jay Jackman, Travis Terrell and Pam Cook
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Our House

• We started out on 160 acres, with a house, and
  two barns.
  
• Our land is located two and one half miles east
  and four miles north of Cimarron, Kansas in Gray
  County.
  
• We filed on the land using the Homestead Act of
  1862.

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Where is Gray County?
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How We Got Our Land

• We read an ad in the Kansas City Star advertising
  free land in Western Kansas.
  
• So we left the ground we were renting and packed
  up a wagon full of supplies including seed,
  food, a few pieces of furniture and stove.
  
• We set out on the old trail and finally reached
  the land office in Garden City, Kansas.
  
• There we selected a quarter section of land and
  paid the filing fee. The land was now ours!

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Building Our Homestead

• When we filed our claim they explained that we
  had to build a house, a barn and live on the land
  for five years.
  
• So once we arrived on our land we quickly began
  to build a sod house using a plow to cut the
  bricks out of the sod.
  
• We started with one team of horses, one milk cow,
  a plow and a seeder.

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Here we are cutting the bricks for our sod house.
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Cimarron, Kansas Our Town

• Cimarron is a very small, but growing town.
• The Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe railroad runs
  through it and there is a grain elevator, a
  general store and a post office. There is also a
  doctor and several churches.
• We take all of our crops to the elevator to sell
  and our eggs and butter too.
  
• We buy most of our supplies at the general store,
  but we also order things from the Montgomery Ward
  catalogue.

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Cimarron, Kansas
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Everyday Life Outside

• My family and I farm our ground and have gotten a
  herd of cattle put together over the years.
  
• This year we planted corn and wheat and we have
  had enough rain so the crops are doing well.
  
• We are planning to buy another windmill this year
  and another team of horses if the crops remain
  good.

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Everyday Life Inside

• We have a few nice convinces. There is a stove
  and the first sewing machine in our area.
  
• We have four children so we are very busy with
  the cooking and washing.
  
• Also, we often have invasions of bed bugs that we
  kill with kerosene.

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The Grasshopper Plague

• Back in 1874 we had grasshoppers take over our
  ground.
  
• They ate all of the crops and the grass and even
  ate our clothes!
  
• We almost starved that year but we made it
  through by butchering many of our cows that
  almost starved because there was no grass.

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Here we are, ten years later!

• We have built a new two story house with boards
  brought in on the railroad.
  
• We got the deed to our land after five years and
  then acquired 320 more acres.
  
• We have 50 head of cattle and 25 chickens.
• It hasnt always been easy, some years we had
  very bad draughts and have almost given up to go
  back East.

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Our first house and our new house
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How Do We Compare to the 21st Century?

• Well, imagine people moving out to the country.
• They buy a double-wide trailer home and take out
  a loan from the bank to buy their land.
  
• They may not have grasshopper plagues but they
  would still have to deal with droughts, low crop
  prices, high cost of living and floods just like
  we had in the 1800s.

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Works Cited Page

• Women of the West Museum. There are No
• Renters Here. http//www.wowmuseum.org/gallery/s
  od/ cuttingsod_full.html 15 October 2001.
  
• Women of the West Museum. There are No Renters
  Here.
  
• http//www.wowmuseum.org/gallery/sod/dugout_full.
  html 15 October 2001.

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Works Cited Cont.

• Wichita State Library-Special Collections.
  http//specialcollections.witchita.edu/collections
  /ms/92-27/92-27C.html 15 October 2001.
  
• Chinn, Steven, Nancy Sween, and Lynn Nelson. In
  Memory of Kansas. http//www.ukans.edu/heritage/
  InMemoryOfKS/ 15 October 2001.