Homesteaders and Sod Busters

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Homesteaders and Sod Busters
Soddies, Dugouts, Cabins . . . and their Roommates
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Homesteaders came to the Great Plains
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The Homestead Act

• In 1862 the U.S. Congress passed the
  Homestead Act.
• This law permitted any 21-year-old citizen or
  immigrant with the intention of becoming a
  citizen to lay claim to 160 acres of land known
  as the Great American Prairie.
• After paying a filing fee, farming the land,
  and living on it for five years, the ownership of
  the land passed to the homesteader. 

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• Immigrants like the Czechs came to Nebraska
  because of a steady stream of advertisements and
  glowing reports in Czech-language newspapers and
  magazines published here and sent back home.

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• Some homesteaders "jumped" the claim of men
  who had claimed a piece of land but never lived
  on it.
• This transfer of claims was common and
  developed a whole industry spawning land offices
  like this one in Round Pond, Oklahoma in 1894.

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Freeman Cabin Beatrice Nebraska
1st homestead after the Homestead Act
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The Log Cabin

• The log cabin has long been a symbol of
  American self-sufficiency. Neither arrows nor
  bullets could penetrate its thick wood walls
  which--if well built and carefully chinked--would
  keep out rain, snow, and cold.

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• As people continued to move westward in search
  of more and better land, they would abandon their
  cabins knowing they could easily build new ones
  as long as timber was available.

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• The whitewash sprayer on the right is from
  the 1895 Montgomery Wards and Co. catalog and is
  available in many sizes starting at 20 cents for
  the 6 inch size and going up to 1.30 for the
  very top-of-the-line 8 and one half inches wide
  brass-bound Acme Whitewash model.

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• Mail order was often the only way to go on the
  frontier.

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• Whitewash is a paint-like fluid. Powdered
  fish glue was commonly used as the adhesive
  additive.

Ingredients used on the American frontier
included flour, molasses, soap, sand and various
calcium compounds.
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Weather could be severe on the plains
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With extremes of every kind
Locust Swarm
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Storm Shelter for Tornados
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• On the high plains, logs for cabins were not
  available.

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• Building materials were scarce so people had
  to use what was available.

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Uriah Oblinger in 1873 wrote to his wife, Mattie,
trying to prepare her and their baby for the
reality of life on the plains. "Ma, you must make
up your mind to see a very naked looking home at
first.
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• You will see nothing but the land covered
  with grass and a sod house to live in. The
  prospect will no doubt look monotonous enough to
  you at first -- no fences (as none is needed) in
  sight. But we have a soil rich as the richest
  river bottoms of Indiana and no clay hills. One
  thing we won't have to do here is clear land
  before we can put up a house. All we have to do
  is plow up some sod (which will hang together for
  a half mile without breaking), cut in lengths to
  suit, and lay up a wall cover it and you have a
  house."

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• Without trees or stone to build with,
  homesteaders had to rely on the only available
  building material
• prairie sod, jokingly
• Called
• Nebraska Marble.

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• Many settlers began by building dugouts.
  Dugouts were small, dark spaces dug into the side
  of a hill that could be made quickly and were
  much warmer and drier than tents.

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Wagons could run over a dugout at night
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Soddies

• Soddies are small houses with walls built of
  stacked layers of uniformly cut turf. The
  individual bricks of sod are held together by
  the thick network of roots that made preparing
  fields for planting so very difficult.

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Sod was cut with special plows, or by hand, with
an ax and/or shovel. Roofs were made from timber,
rough or planed, and covered with more sod. If
timber was not available, roofs were built up
with twigs, branches, bushes and straw.
Cutting Sod
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• The roof was the most difficult and
  dangerous part of the house to build. The lack of
  normal roofing materials, like wooden shingles or
  slate tiles, led to the inventive use of natural
  materials.

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• A series of cedar poles held up layers of
  brush tied into bundles, mud, grass and sod.
  These roofs were a constant source of irritation
  and concern.

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• Dirt or water, depending on the weather, fell
  from the ceiling most of the time.

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• People hung muslin sheets from the ceiling to
  keep dirt from dropping into their food or an
  occasional snake from falling on to their bed.
  Roofs that became too wet sometimes collapsed.

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Whitewashed interior of a soddie
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Soddie interior
Beamed ceilings support the roof and newspapers
wallpaper the rooms.
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Sod House Museum
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Sod housemuseum 3 mi. S. of Aline Ok. on
SH-8 House built in1894
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Sod House North of Cleo Springs, Oklahoma
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Everything about the prairie was extreme. The
land was flat and treeless and the sky seemed to
go on forever. On a tall-grass prairie, the grass
sometimes grew to be more than 6 feet tall. It is
said that riders on horseback could pick
wildflowers without dismounting. Women worried
about their children getting hopelessly lost in
the grass.
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Summer could bring temperatures exceeding 120
degrees. Drought, rainstorms, tornadoes, swarms
of grasshoppers could destroy fields of crops,
and never-ending wind also challenged settlers. 
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• Winters were long and cold. Blizzards could
  trap livestock and homesteaders under the snow.
  During the long winter of 1886, horses and cattle
  died when their breaths froze over the ends of
  their noses, suffocating them.

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Two Story Sod Castle
Isadore Haumonts two-story sod house on French
Table north of Broken Bow, Custer County,
Nebraska 1886. It was demolished in 1967. It
cost 100 to build.
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Building a home and establishing a farm was a
challenge for even the most experienced farmers,
but the free land, abundant wildlife, and
richness of the soil made the challenge hard to
resist. 
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Eventually farm families were able to build a
frame house.
A family posing beside their new frame house and
their sod house.
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There was endless work on a prairie farm
Because wood was scarce on the prairies, buffalo
chips were burned for cooking and
heating. Pioneer Ada MCColl 1893 in Southwest
Kansas
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Using all the farm for crops - planting corn up
to the front door.
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Mill for grinding corn
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Bringing dinner to the fields.
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Digging a well
We will have water near the house for washing
and watering stock, but for drinking and cooking
I will have to haul a little over 1/4 of a mile
till I get time to dig a well. --Uriah
to Mattie, April 27, 1873
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• Hauling water

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Women worked along side their husbands as well as
doing their jobs as mother and homemaker.
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• There was spinning

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And Quilting Gardening
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But it wasnt all work
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There was time for fun and for school
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One of the first things homesteaders started was
a school.
Going to school on the prairie in a sod school.
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Various sod school houses
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The light meal homesteaders' children carried to
school was called "lunch." They ate lots of
sandwiches, but what kind of sandwichescornbread
and syrup. Bread and lard, maybe with a little
sugar. Or, bread and bacon. It was a special
treat to have a sandwich with meat in it. It was
carried in a tin container either purchased or
left over from lard or syrup.
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Former slaves moving west were sometimes called
Exodusters
Broadsides such as this encouraged emancipated
slaves to settle in Kansas. The Nicodemus
community, Graham County, Kansas was settled by
Blacks from Kentucky
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• A former slave born in Nashville, Tennessee,
  became the leader of the "Exoduster Movement" of
  1879, and in later years he was accorded the
  title "Father of the Exodus.

Benjamin "Pap" Singleton (1809-1892)
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Some African American homesteaders
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Windmills brought water up from the well
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These people are an inspiration for other African
Americans of their time. . . successful
Exodusters!