Chapter 8
We are now ready to start on our way down the Great Unknown,” John Wesley Powell wrote on August 13, 1869.
Our boats, tied to a common stake, are chafing each other, as they are tossed by the fretful river. They ride high and buoyant, for their loads are lighter than we could desire. We have but a month’s rations remaining. The flour has been resifted through the mosquito net sieve; the spoiled bacon has been dried, and the worst of it boiled; the few pounds of dried apples have been spread in the sun, and reshrunken to their normal bulk; the sugar has all melted, and gone on its way down the river; but we have a large sack of coffee. The lighting of the boats has this advantage: they will ride the waves better, and we shall have but little to carry when we make a portage.
We are three-quarters of a mile in the depths of the earth, and the great river shrinks into insignificance as it dashes its angry waves against the walls and cliffs that rise to the world above; they are but puny ripples, and we but pigmies, running up and down the sands or lost among the boulders.
We have an unknown distance yet to run; an unknown river yet to explore. What falls there are, we know not; what rocks beset the channel, we know not; what walls rise over the river, we know not. Ah, well! we may conjecture many things. The men talk as cheerfully as ever; jests are bandied about freely this morning; but to me the cheer is somber and the jests are ghastly.1
Powell’s gloom might have intensified had he known that the world had given him and his small party up for dead. When the ten men and their four boats had put into the Green River at the town of Green River, Wyoming, where the just completed Union Pacific Railroad bridged the stream, amateur geographers and other followers of exploration anticipated a compelling story from the Powell party. Twenty-five years after emigrants to Oregon carved their trail to the Willamette Valley, twenty years after the forty-niners made a highway of the Humboldt River across Nevada, fifteen years after stage lines started rattling their passengers and mail across the northern and southern edges of the Great Basin, ten years after surveyors scouted the passes and river crossings that would enable the Pacific railroad to link Omaha to Sacramento, maps of the western United States contained a single blank region. The Colorado Plateau—the vast tableland bisected by the Colorado River—was almost as unknown to outsiders as when Coronado of Spain came through in the 1540s looking for the seven cities of Cíbola. By the 1860s geographers had inferred that the Green River and the Grand River, the former rising in Wyoming, the latter in Colorado, were actually branches of the Colorado River, which emptied into the Gulf of California. But no one had physically confirmed this inference by descending from the Green or Grand to the lower Colorado.
A few had tried. William Ashley and a party of fur trappers floated a stretch of the Green River in 1825. William Lewis Manly and a group of gold miners sought a shortcut to California and floated down the Green River for a hundred miles or so before encountering an Indian chief who through gestures and a few words they understood convinced them that to continue meant certain death.2
John Wesley Powell wasn’t so easily dissuaded. Powell’s strength of will became evident after the Civil War battle of Shiloh, in which a cannonball blasted his arm off at the elbow. Spurning a medical discharge, he transferred from engineers to artillery to get closer to the front and repay his injury in kind. He rose to command the field guns of the Seventeenth Army Corps and at war’s end boasted the rank of major, a striking black beard, and an irrefutable claim to have given his right arm for the Union.3
The combination made it impossible for the War Department to deny his request for support of a journey down the Colorado. Powell’s interest in science antedated Sumter but blossomed only after Appomattox, when he landed a job in the geology department of Illinois State Normal University. The major-professor wanted to know what the rocks of the Rockies looked like up close, and he organized an expedition across Colorado. Nothing of particular value came of the journey except a larger appetite for adventure and a nagging curiosity as to where the Grand River went when it disappeared to the southwest. He traveled to Washington, where he asked the War Department for cash but settled for supplies drawn from army posts in the West. He might have pressed harder for money had he not guessed—correctly—that he would be able to convert some of his ration tickets to hard currency once he reached the frontier.
The interest of the War Department in an expedition to the Southwest began with the army’s Indian troubles in that district, where Geronimo and the Apaches were vigorously disputing Washington’s authority. But the interest also reflected a desire to please capitalist-minded members of Congress who had heard stories that the Colorado might be navigable. Powell’s mission could open a whole new region to economic development, starting with the discovery of the gold and silver it was bound to contain.
Consequently, with enough War Department backing to get his expedition going but not so much that he couldn’t ignore Washington’s wishes when he chose, Powell returned to the West. He stopped in Chicago to pick up four boats crafted to his specifications. Keeled of oak and ribbed of pine, the boats ranged in length from sixteen to twenty-one feet. Their peculiarity consisted in watertight compartments fore and aft, which allowed them to float even when swamped or capsized. Powell pulled the boats off the Union Pacific at Green River, regathered the best men from his previous expedition, and at noon on May 24, 1869—two weeks after the golden-spike ceremony at Promontory, Utah, two hundred miles to the west—he and his hardy crew set off down the river.
The first fifty miles were uneventful. The men acquired the feel of the boats and learned to appreciate the power of the current, swollen by the late-spring runoff from the snowfields of the Wind River Mountains. But just at the border between Wyoming and Utah the south-flowing river bent abruptly to the west before circling back to the east. The cause of the river’s confusion—already the men were anthropomorphizing the stream—was the wall of the Uinta Mountains, one of the few ranges in North America with an axis that runs east and west rather than north and south. The river is older than the mountains, which thrust themselves athwart its path, forcing the waters to seek a way around. To the west the rocks were too hard and rising too fast, which compelled the river to turn east for an escape route. The battle between water and rock produced Flaming Gorge, so called by Powell and his men for the fiery-hued cliffs that soar a thousand feet above the river. “The rocks are broken and ragged,” Powell wrote in his diary, “and the water fills the channel from cliff to cliff. Now the water turns abruptly around a point to the right, and the waters plunge swiftly down among great rocks; and here we have our first experience with cañon rapids.” The current hurled the boats down between the cliffs and among the rocks. “We thread the narrow passage with exhilarating velocity, mounting the high waves, whose foaming crests dash over us, and plunging into the troughs, until we reach the quiet water below.… Then comes a feeling of great relief.”4
The relief at danger survived enabled the men to appreciate the beauty of the park—an open space, in this case of some three hundred acres, amid the mountains—through which the river proceeded. “The river is broad, deep, and quiet, and its waters mirror towering rocks,” Powell wrote. But the calm soon yielded to more rapids. “The river rolls down the cañon at a wonderful rate.… The water rushes into a narrow gorge; the rocks on the side roll it into the center in great waves, and the boats go leaping and bounding over these like things of life.”
Again they passed the river’s test and again congratulated themselves on their skill and luck. Yet as the rush of the last rapids diminished, a new sound displaced it. “A threatening roar is heard in the distance.” Powell ordered a halt and walked along the bank till he could see the source of the noise: a waterfall over which the entire river plunged. The boats might weather the falls, he judged, but the men and cargo couldn’t. Powell ordered the craft unloaded and their cargoes carried around the cataract. The boats were then lowered down the falls by ropes.
Just below the falls one of the party noticed writing on a rock face above the bank. “Ashley 18–5,” it read. “The third figure is obscure,” Powell remarked, “some of the party reading it 1835, some 1855.” In fact it was 1825, which helped explain the confusion. Powell had heard of Ashley from an old mountain man, who thought he remembered that party had come to a bad end, with at least one man drowning. “The word ‘Ashley’ is a warning to us,” Powell wrote, “and we resolve on great caution.”
But not great enough. With each hazard overcome, the men gained self-assurance, till the rising curve of their confidence intersected the constantly falling curve of the river bed. The boats were maneuvering to shore above another falls when one of the boats passed the point of no return. The current grew too strong for the oars of the crewmen and the vessel was swept into the maelstrom. Powell on the shore watched in helpless dismay. “I pass around a great crag just in time to see the boat strike a rock and, rebounding from the shock, careen and fill the open compartment with water. Two of the men lose their oars; she swings around and is carried down at a rapid rate, broadside on, for a few yards, and strikes amidships on another rock with great force, is broken quite in two, and the men are thrown into the river.” The men clung to the remnants of the boat and were carried into another set of rapids, where the boat parts were pulverized further.
Amazingly no one drowned, but the boat was lost, of course, along with most of the cargo. Powell had divided the provisions among the four boats so that the destruction of any one wouldn’t doom the expedition. But for some reason he placed all the barometers—for measuring altitude—in a single boat, the one that crashed. To the great luck of the group, however, the portion of the boat containing the instruments snagged on a rock, and the next day the men were able to salvage them—along with a three-gallon keg of whiskey a few of the men had smuggled aboard when Powell wasn’t looking. “Now I am glad they did,” Powell wrote, “for they think it will do them good.” While the men were building a fire to dry themselves and the salvaged instruments out, they discovered some old tin plates, a Dutch oven, and fragments of a boat. Powell concluded that this was where Ashley wrecked. “We adopt the name Disaster Falls for the scene of so much peril and loss.”
The party proceeded more carefully. They portaged around a cataract they called Triplet Falls and a chute they labeled Hell’s Half Mile. On the evening of June 16, while the others prepared supper, Powell and a companion explored a defile from which a brook emptied in the main canyon, in hope of gaining a vantage.
We climb up to the left for half an hour, and are a thousand feet above the river, and six hundred above the brook. Just before us, the cañon divides, a little stream coming down on the right, and another on the left, and we can look away up either of these cañons, through an ascending vista, to cliffs and crags and towers, a mile back and two thousand feet overhead. To the right, a dozen gleaming cascades are seen. Pines and firs stand on the rocks, and aspens overhang the brooks. The rocks below are red and brown, set in deep shadows, but above they are buff and vermilion and stand in the sunshine. The light above, made more brilliant by the bright-tinted rocks, and the shadows below more gloomy by the somber hues of the brown walls, increase the apparent depths of the cañons, and it seems a long way up to the world of sunshine and open sky, and a long way down to the bottom of the cañon glooms. Never before have I received such an impression of the vast heights of these cañon walls.
Powell’s ability to scramble up sheer walls and find his way across narrow ledges made the others wonder what he could have accomplished with two arms. But sometimes his reach exceeded his grasp. Powell spotted a cliff whose summit seemed a likely spot for measuring altitude. George Bradley accompanied him. Up they went, with Powell as usual in the lead. “We are nearly to the summit. Here, by making a spring, I gain a foothold in a little crevice and grasp an angle of rock overhead. I find I can get up no farther, and cannot step back, for I dare not let go with my hand and cannot reach foothold below without.” Powell shouted to Bradley for assistance.
He finds a way by which he can get to the top of the rock over my head, but cannot reach me. Then he looks around for some stick or limb of a tree, but finds none. Then he suggests that he had better help me with the barometer case, but I fear I cannot hold on to it. The moment is critical. Standing on my toes, my muscles begin to tremble. It is sixty or eighty feet to the foot of the precipice. If I lose my hold I shall fall to the bottom, and then perhaps roll over the bench and tumble still farther down the cliff.
At this instant it occurs to Bradley to take off his drawers, which he does, and swings them down to me. I hug close to the rock, let go with my hand, seize the dangling legs, and, with his assistance, I am enabled to gain the top.
For seven weeks the party descended the river—running rapids, portaging falls, measuring cliffs, noting geology. In mid-July they reached the confluence of the Green River with the Grand. Powell had packed provisions for several months, but the loss of the one boat and various swampings and capsizings of the others ate into the supplies, leaving the men to live on musty flour, rancid bacon, redried apples, and black coffee. The canyon grew deeper than they had imagined a canyon could be—and then grew thousands of feet deeper still. “The walls now are more than a mile in height, a vertical distance difficult to appreciate,” Powell wrote. “Stand on the south steps of the Treasury building in Washington and look down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol Park, and measure this distance overhead, and imagine cliffs to extend to that altitude, and you will understand what I mean. Or stand at Canal street in New York and look up Broadway to Grace Church, and you have about that distance.”
The forms and colors of the canyon walls stunned the men into silence. “The gorge is black and narrow below, red and gray and flaring above, with crags and angular projections on the walls, which, cut in many places by side canons, seem to be a vast wilderness of rocks. Down in these grand, gloomy depths we glide.”
The river rumbled, often roared. The men came to recognize the different sounds and associate them with the degrees of danger they represented—but not always in time. One of the boats was sucked into a whirlpool and swamped; when the vortex released the vessel it wallowed amid the waves of the main stream. “Breaker after breaker rolls over her, and one capsizes her. The men are thrown out.” The others watched helplessly, hoping for the men to surface amid the foam. They finally did, and clung to the overturned craft while the others attempted a rescue. It ultimately succeeded but not before the river claimed additional provisions.
By late August they had been on the river more than three months. Powell’s readings of altitude and latitude suggested that less distance remained than they had already traversed, but whether the route ahead would be more difficult than that behind neither he nor any of the others could say. Nor could he guarantee they wouldn’t reach a point where the river became impassable and the cliffs unscalable. Then they would truly be trapped.
Three of the men decided to take their chances climbing the walls while they still could. As they, like all the others, had volunteered for the expedition, Powell couldn’t order them to continue. He could only hope their example would not prove contagious. Some of the others did consider joining them but finally cast their lot with Powell and the river. “Two rifles and a shot gun are given to the men who are going out. I ask them to help themselves to the rations, and take what they think to be a fair share.” They declined, saying they could shoot their dinner after they reached the canyon rim.
Later that day the others had reason to wish they’d left the canyon, too. A waterfall prompted Powell to order the boats lowered by ropes. Bradley took the helm of one of the boats, which got caught in a crosscurrent. Time and again the water smashed it against the sheer face of the canyon wall while the rope kept it from being washed free. Bradley determined to cut the rope before the boat shattered beneath him. But as he unsheathed his knife the stem post, to which the rope was fixed, tore away.
With perfect composure Bradley seizes the great scull oar, places it in the stern rowlock, and pulls with all his power (and he is an athlete) to turn the bow of the boat down stream, for he wishes to go bow down rather than to drift broadside on. One, two strokes he makes, and a third just as she goes over, and the boat is fairly turned, and she goes down almost beyond our sight, though we are more than a hundred feet above the river. Then she comes up again on a great wave, and down and up, then around behind some great rocks and is lost in the mad, white foam below. We stand frozen with fear, for we see no boat. Bradley is gone, so it seems.
But now, away below, we see something coming out of the waves. It is evidently a boat. A moment more, and we see Bradley standing on deck, swinging his hat to show that he is all right.
He signaled too soon. A whirlpool seized the boat, and without the stem post he couldn’t fight the raging eddy. Powell and two other men leapt into their boat and followed Bradley over the falls. Now they became the victims of the river’s strength and cunning. “A wave rolls over us, and our boat is unmanageable. Another great wave strikes us; the boat rolls over and tumbles and tosses.” Powell perhaps hit a rock, for he lost consciousness. The next thing he remembered was being pulled from the water by Bradley, who somehow had escaped the whirlpool.
As fortune would have it, this closest brush with death was their last. The very next day the canyon walls suddenly receded, the current slackened, and they reached the lower part of the river, which Powell recognized from the accounts of Mormons who had settled near there. The men savored their release, but none more than Powell, who had particular memories of confinement. “When he who has been chained by wounds to a hospital cot, until his canvas tent seems like a dungeon cell …,” he wrote, “at last goes out into the open field, what a world he sees!” Powell suddenly saw that new world again. “How beautiful the sky; how bright the sunshine!”5
POWELL’S DESCENT OF the Colorado was the most dramatic of several postwar expeditions, but others drew scarcely less attention. Clarence King headed a survey of the West roughly along the 40th parallel, the object of which was “to examine and describe the geological structure, geographical condition and natural resources” of this central swath from Denver to Sacramento. King would assess railroad routes, assay mineral deposits, test soils, take temperatures, measure rainfall and stream flow, and, on return, publish his estimate of the uses to which the region might be put. The 40th parallel survey consumed several years starting in 1867 and concluded with King’s debunking a bizarre hoax involving planted diamonds, dizzying share prices, the ruin of investors, the murder of one of the principal perpetrators, and the mysterious disappearance of the other.6
George Wheeler’s survey of the Southwest concentrated on topography: on mapping the Colorado Plateau and the basin-and-range district to its west. Wheeler found desert far starker than anything previous explorers had encountered. The expedition traversed Death Valley on a forty-mile path of what Wheeler described as “light, white, drifting sand.” (In fact this wasn’t the worst of the valley, where the sand gave way to salt.) Wheeler had chosen the toughest wilderness men of the West for his trek, but this hellish place was too much for even some of them: “The stifling heat, great radiation, and constant glare from the sand were almost overpowering, and two of the command succumbed near nightfall.” All counted themselves lucky to escape with their lives.7
Ferdinand V. Hayden’s first survey, of western Nebraska, won him fame for its seeming confirmation of the theory promoted by a minority of scientists and a majority of western boosters that “rain follows the plow.” The idea was that turning the soil and planting crops released moisture that subsequently returned to earth as rain. Pleased proponents of the theory sponsored additional surveys, for which Hayden had the insight to hire a photographer, who captured for public consumption the wonders of the upper Yellowstone basin and the beauties of the Colorado Rockies. One of William H. Jackson’s prints, of the Mount of the Holy Cross (so named for the intersecting crevices near the summit, which caught snow in a cross-shaped pattern), allowed Americans of a mystically religious bent to see the hand of God in the work of the explorers. Hayden himself was moved to remark, “Never has my faith in the grand future that awaits the entire West been so strong as it is at the present.”8
LIKE NEARLY ALL other emigrants to the Great Plains, Howard Ruede had heard of the Homestead Act of 1862 and its promise of free land to ordinary people. But like many of the others, he knew few details of the law’s operation. Ruede arrived in western Kansas in the spring of 1877 from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. He was twenty-two and single and for some years had eavesdropped on conversations of elders who complained that Pennsylvania’s future wasn’t what it once had seemed. The depression of the 1870s set many of them back, and the Molly Maguire violence alienated others. More than a few told young Howard that if they were his age they’d leave. So in March 1877 he withdrew his life savings of seventy-five dollars from a Bethlehem bank and boarded a train for the West.
Free land near the railroads had long since disappeared; the land for sale cost far more than Ruede could afford to pay. Besides, many of his fellow German Americans from Bethlehem had preceded him west to the vicinity of Osborne, fifty miles from the nearest railroad, and had established the “Pennsylvania Colony.” Ruede reached Osborne on a Sunday; the next morning the son-in-law of the colony’s founder appeared at Ruede’s hotel and offered to show him available tracts of land. How much Ruede paid the agent for his services is unclear, but he could hardly do without such a guide. On the featureless prairie outside Osborne it was impossible for a newcomer to tell what land had been taken and what remained for claiming. The 1862 law required homesteaders to live on their claims for five years, but those who actually did so were a minority. Some evaded the condition by erecting a flimsy structure, summoning a witness who then swore to the federal land agent that an abode existed, and then dismantling the building for reuse elsewhere. Efficiency-minded finaglers put their structures on wheels. One imaginative homesteader acquired three empty wood crates in which apple trees had been shipped from the East. On end each could just accommodate a short man standing; on a crate laid horizontal the same small fellow could uncomfortably lie down. The homesteader got two friends to try each configuration; the trio then traveled to the land office, where the friends testified that the claimant had erected a house on his property tall enough to walk around in and roomy enough for three men to spend the night, each in his own bed. The claimant received his papers, and the crates went on to better things.9
Absentee homesteaders weren’t the only problem confronting a newcomer looking for land. The Homestead Act lay in a series of laws dating to 1796 designed to facilitate the transfer of land from the public domain to private ownership. The motivation for the laws was at once ideological and fiscal: to spread the wealth of America to ordinary Americans and to fund the operations of the federal government. The most important of the pre-Homestead acts was the Preemption Act of 1841, which allowed small landowners (of not more than 320 acres in any state or territory) to purchase a quarter section (160 acres) from the public domain at a very modest price, in most instances $1.25 per acre. The principal constraint was that the land be held for use and not immediately resold. The Homestead Act differed primarily in that it eliminated the purchase price (although it allowed the homesteaded land to be purchased at the preemption price of $1.25 after six months’ residence). Yet the Preemption Act remained in force, meaning that a person such as Howard Ruede could acquire a quarter section under the Homestead Act and another quarter section under the Preemption Act. A third land law, the Timber Culture Act of 1873, allowed a settler to claim an additional quarter section provided that forty acres of it were planted with trees. The three laws and their differences in conditions meant that many districts were patchworks of ownership impenetrable to outsiders. And, ownership aside, settlers weren’t above simply lying, telling newcomers that land—perhaps surrounded by the settlers’ claims—wasn’t available in that neighborhood.10
Such bogus claims could be challenged, as Howard Ruede discovered. His agent led him and some potential partners to a pair of tracts not far from Osborne. “These two claims—one of 160 and one of 80 acres—would have to be contested before we could get hold of them,” Ruede wrote home. “And it would cost us about $50.… As none of us could afford that, those claims will lie open awhile yet.” The next day Ruede and his friends found available tracts farther from town. “My claim is the S.W. ¼ of section 4; Levin is next west, and Jim west of Levin, all on the same section line.… The land is of the intermediate grade, neither bluff nor bottom land, and is covered for the most part with buffalo grass, which Mr. S.”—the agent—“says is a sure sign of its being good. This buffalo grass does not get more than 3 inches long, and about the middle of August turns into hay—cures on the ground, and if you pull up a bunch, you are sure to find green grass close to the roots.” Ruede and the other two returned to Osborne and the next day filed their claims with the federal land agent there. Lacking the money to purchase the land by preemption, they applied for homestead status. “We must live on it five years. The first two years we live ‘off and on’—that is, we must sleep on it once in a while and make some improvements on it within 6 months, or it will be forfeited. It is to be our home, but we can hire out by the day or month as we like.”11
Had Ruede been a farmer, he would have begun plowing his quarter section at once. But like many other homesteaders he was a town boy and saw his land claim more as an investment—or even a speculation—than as a commitment to the farmer’s life. He would “prove up” his claim (complete the requirements for a clear deed) and sell to a genuine son of the soil. Meanwhile he would find work where he could and make the minimal improvements on his property, starting with a house.
For the cash-strapped, the cheapest accommodation was a dugout. “We found a spot … where a patch of wild sunflowers had killed the grass,” Ruede recorded. “Here we began to dig, and by noon had made some progress. We laid off the ground 10 × 14 feet, and we’ll have to dig it about 6 feet deep.” Ruede and Jim, his neighbor and coworker on the project, broke for dinner before resuming their labors. “We went back to the hole and in about two hours had dug about half of it to the depth of two feet.” A spring shower compelled the diggers to quit, which was fine with them, as their hands were blistered and their backs sore. “Talk about hard work, will you? … The ground is packed just as hard as could be, and it is no fun to pick and shovel it.” But already Ruede felt the pride of ownership. “My dugout is at the head of the prettiest draw on my claim, and if the clouds clear off we will have it finished by the middle of next week.”
The pace of digging quickened when Levin joined them. The packed soil didn’t loosen the deeper they got, but neither did it turn to anything harder. “We have not found a single stone as big as a marble yet,” Ruede declared as they approached the five-foot mark. Late on the fourth day, a Saturday, the hole was completed, and after a break for Sunday—which happened to be Easter, celebrated in the German style—they started on the superstructure. Levin and Jim walked to Osborne for some lumber, which they paid for with a few days’ work at the sawmill there. Ruede paid cash—$1.50—for a burr-oak ridgepole. More rain delayed construction further, but by the following Friday the hole in the prairie was beginning to look like a house, or what passed for a house in western Kansas. “We finished off the gable ends of the dugout and got the boards on the rafters, ready for the straw.” Over the straw went sod, cut in 12 by 18 by 2½ inch bricks. “Covered the whole roof with a layer of sod, and then threw dirt on it, and the ‘house’ was finished.” The three moved directly in, and the next day Ruede wrote, “We begin to feel right at home.”12
FOR THREE MEN to share quarters (in this instance pending excavation and construction of dugouts for Levin and Jim) wasn’t unusual on the Plains. Men greatly outnumbered women among the homesteaders, as they did among frontier folk generally. The aphorist wasn’t wrong who declared that “plains travel and frontier life are peculiarly severe upon women and oxen.” Yet if life on the Middle Border—as the Plains were often called—was hard on women, it could be rewarding as well. The Homestead Act drew no distinction between men and women, making it easier for women to acquire property in their own names in the West than in other parts of the country. Women, moreover, gained value from allowing underage husbands to acquire homesteads. The 1862 act required claimants to be twenty-one unless they were “the head of a family.” Howard Ruede learned of a nineteen-year-old who coveted a particular quarter section. For several months the young man kept other claimants away with the assertion that he was holding it for his brother-in-law, who was coming from Iowa. But as more people arrived in that county, his ruse wore thin. He was tempted to lie about his age and file a preemption claim. But should his lie become known, his claim would be revoked and he would lose the improvements he made to the property. He had a female friend, however, the daughter of a neighbor, who agreed to a scam to help him resolve his dilemma. “He saddled his pony and went over to Mary Ann’s home to confer with her,” Ruede explained. “She looked favorably on the project and consented to become his bride.… He continued his journey to the county seat and got a license to wed. Next morning he was over at Mary Ann’s bright and early. She was busy with the week’s washing, but took her hands out of the suds, dried them, and went with Tommy to the nearest justice of the peace, by whom they were made man and wife.… Mary Ann returned to her wash tubs and Tommy hiked for Kirwin where the land office was located. The officials were not overinquisitive and Tommy got his homestead papers.”13
More frequently the women followed the men to the Plains, often at months’ or years’ remove. Husbands left wives and children with in-laws farther east while they broke the sod, built the dugouts, and otherwise smoothed the roughest edges of frontier life. Eventually the wives and little ones followed. Unattached men returned east after claiming and partly improving their quarter section, hopeful that landownership made them appealing to unattached women. Winter was courtship season; when the snows and cold precluded outdoor work, a young man’s fancy turned to love. More than a few dugout doors rattled in the icy wind, secured by a wire and a notice to claim jumpers: “Gone to get a wife.”14
The strangeness of their new surroundings caused many women to despair. One young mother held her emotions in check only to break down when her young son, seeing nothing familiar or pleasing from horizon to horizon, fell to the dirt floor and cried, “Mama, will we always have to live here?” Her heart sank further when, upon being told that they would indeed live there, the boy wailed, “And will we have to die here, too?”15
The prairie hid dangers of a sort those from the East didn’t know. Children—and adults—could be lost in blizzards only several feet from the doors of their houses. Rattlesnakes coiled in the tall grass. Indians remained a threat till the late 1870s. Distance itself became an enemy when business in town took the man of a house away for days at a time, leaving his wife and children to look out for the drifters that inhabit every frontier. Distance also magnified the ordinary trials of nineteenth-century life. Many women bore babies unattended by anyone except their husbands; complications could quickly become dire. The isolation of Plains life bred depression, which could be lethal to the depressed and, in extreme cases, to other members of the family.
HOWARD RUEDE HOPED to marry, but for the present the women he wanted to bring west were his mother and sister. His father would accompany them, and the family would be reunited. But he knew he couldn’t ask the women to live in a dugout. “I don’t want them to come till I get a decent house for them to live in, and that can be done in a couple of years,” he explained. Meanwhile he scrimped on every expense imaginable. “I’ll get Hoot to cut my hair; the barber here charges 25 cents, and that is a big sum for me now.” His clothes wore out and weren’t replaced. “Underclothes I don’t wear.… Socks there are none.” In summer he dispensed with shoes. Necessities in the East became luxuries on the Plains. “I never know what time it is when I get out of bed, because clocks are like angels’ visits—few and far between.… Most people out here don’t drink real coffee because it is too expensive. Green coffee berries sell at anywhere from 40 to 60 cents a pound.” (By comparison, Ruede reckoned that his whole house, including lumber, a door and hinges, and a window, cost less than ten dollars to build.) “So rye coffee is used a great deal—parched brown or black according to whether the users like a strong or mild drink.… When rye is not used, wheat is sometimes used for coffee but is considered inferior.”16
Hardships came in other forms. “The people who live in sod houses, and, in fact, all who live under a dirt roof, are pestered with swarms of bed bugs.… You don’t have to keep a dog in order to have plenty of fleas, for they are natives, too, and do their best to drive out the intruding settlers. Just have a dirt floor and you have fleas, sure. They seem to spring from the dust of the earth.” Fleas were the primary reason settlers got out of their dugouts and sod houses as soon as they could afford wooden ones. “People who have board floors are not bothered so much with these fleas.” Smaller creatures caused the “Kansas itch”—“which attacks nearly everybody within a short time after arrival here.… There is only one way in which a sufferer can get relief: scratching. And that aggravates the itching and sometimes produces raw sore spots.”
There were compensations. Itching aside, Ruede had never been healthier. He attributed his well-being to the massive doses of fresh air. “If I catch cold one day, the wind takes it away the next. I can stand more wet feet here than at home”—Pennsylvania—“and can sleep in an awful drafty room without taking cold.” He ate well (except for the coffee). Much of his first season he devoted to acquiring capital to develop his claim, which was to say he hired himself out to neighbors; they paid cash and typically furnished bed and board. “For breakfast I ate about ½ lb. steak, a plateful of fried potatoes, 5 fried eggs, two rounds of bread, a slice of cake and two ginger cakes, and washed it all down with two cups of coffee.” The food got better as the work grew heavier. “When you work for somebody in the harvest field, you may count on getting No. 1 board. They set a first-rate table then.” Of one day in particular he wrote, “Had a staving good supper: fried rabbits”—flushed and killed in the process of the harvest—“bread and butter, onions, radishes, pie, and coffee ad libitum.” Work continued after supper, but “when we got to the house we found Horace was making ice cream. After putting away the team and feeding them, I went back and had about a pint of the luxury.”17
IN MARCH 1878 Ruede tallied his accounts for the previous month. He had been in Kansas a year and had spent most of that time hiring himself by the day and week to neighbors (meaning persons who lived within a fifty-mile radius of his homestead) who needed work done (nearly everyone) and who could pay cash for the labor (a much smaller group). He earned about five dollars a week, plus food and lodging. By the beginning of 1878 he had accumulated some hundred dollars, but he soon spent it all. “Total expenses for February were $105.01, divided as follows: oxen, yoke and chain, $61.25; wagon, $30; household goods and tools, $4.50; provisions, $4.30; oil”—to keep down the fleas—“30 cents; sundries, $4.41.”18
During the first few years, most small Plains farms weren’t expected to yield a profit. Homesteaders plowed money into the soil even as they turned the prairie sod. The money arrived in the homesteaders’ pockets; it went to purchase provisions and the labor of the likes of Howard Ruede. In time, though, the new land had to return the favor: to produce sufficient profit to sustain those homesteaders who intended to make the Middle Border their home and to attract the second wave of immigrants who would buy out the speculators.
Profits, however, proved elusive. The farmers could control certain of their revenue and costs—by working long hours and weeks, by forgoing new shoes (or, as with Ruede, shoes at all), by subsisting in dugouts longer than they had intended. But they had no control over such central elements of the production process as the weather. Plains weather was notoriously fickle—or it would have been notorious had the homesteaders possessed any substantial knowledge of it. The remarkable fact was that whole tiers of the Middle Border were settled on the basis of wishful thinking about the climate of the region. Boosters so often told themselves that rain followed the plow that they came to believe it. But no one had any idea whether it was true, for rainfall records were either nonexistent or so short as to make extrapolation meaningless.
John Wesley Powell was sure it wasn’t true. And he was equally certain that most of the American West would never yield agricultural profits, at least not by any honest accounting scheme. Powell’s death-defying descent of the Colorado had made him a national celebrity, the Civil War hero who extended into peacetime his exploits on behalf of the American people. He didn’t hurt his cause by befriending reporters, by recounting the adventure in evocative present-tense prose (“We are now ready to start on our way down the Great Unknown”), and by cultivating friendships in Washington. Congress funded further expeditions, which Powell parlayed into control of the scientific agenda for the public domain in the West.
At the top of Powell’s agenda was disabusing the American people of the notion that settlement habits and patterns developed in the East might be readily translated to the West. In the same season when Howard Ruede was tallying his cash flow, Powell prepared a report on what he provocatively labeled the “Arid Region” of the United States. “The eastern portion of the United States is supplied with abundant rainfall for agricultural purposes, receiving the necessary amount from the evaporation of the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico,” Powell wrote. “But westward the amount of aqueous precipitation diminishes in a general way until at last a region is reached where the climate is so arid that agriculture is not successful without irrigation. This Arid Region begins about midway in the Great Plains and extends across the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Ocean.”19
Powell took twenty inches of rain or its equivalent as the minimum to support unirrigated agriculture. The twenty-inch isohyet—the line connecting locations with the threshold amount of rainfall—ran roughly along the 100th meridian; from there to the Pacific, with the exception of the high mountains (which were unsuited to farming for other reasons) and a strip along the coast, the West was a great desert. Nor was the twenty-inch isohyet any guarantee of agricultural success. Rain along that line often fell irregularly. “Many droughts will occur; many seasons in a long series will be fruitless; and it may be doubted whether, on the whole, agriculture will prove remunerative.” East of the isohyet was a band Powell called the “Subhumid Region.” Much of the region of the Plains settled to date lay in this region. Though the rainfall averaged as much as twenty-eight inches, Powell warned that even here agriculture was risky. “In the western portion disastrous droughts will be frequent; in the eastern portion infrequent.”
Powell adopted the dispassionate tone of the scientist, but his purpose was explicitly political. He aimed to burst the bubbles of speculation that were populating the Plains with innocents whose fortunes would be lost and lives ruined by the land dealers, hucksters, railroad agents, and civic boosters who preached that rain followed the plow and other such nonsense. Beyond revealing the hucksters for what they were, Powell hoped to lay the foundation for the settlement of such portions of the West as could sustain populations over the long term.
Powell’s West was divided into three parts. The “irrigable lands” were a small portion of the whole West, located on or near streams that could be dammed to focus the rainfall and snowmelt of an entire desert watershed upon a few fields, which could thereby thrive. The “timber lands” were the wooded mountain slopes and mesas. These lands could not be farmed but might be reserved for the production of lumber and firewood. The “pasturage lands” constituted the largest part of the West. Covered with native grass, these tracts could not sustain cultivation but, if carefully managed, might support livestock.
The key to developing the Arid Region was wise public stewardship. Land laws that had evolved in the wet East must be modified. The grid system of rectangular surveys, for example, made no sense where stream courses, rather than township and section lines, determined patterns of husbandry. “If the lands are surveyed in regular tracts as square miles or townships, all the water sufficient for a number of pasturage farms may fall entirely within one division.… For this reason divisional surveys should conform to the topography.” The quarter section—the 160 acres hallowed in American tradition as the sustenance of the yeoman and his family—was similarly unsuited to the West. In those few places that could be irrigated, a quarter section was too large. A single family couldn’t do all the work an irrigated farm required. Moreover, quarter section allotments were wasteful in the irrigated zones, which could support a denser population than the quarters allowed. In the region that ought to be reserved to pasturage, quarter sections were too small. “Pasturage farms, to be of any practicable value, must be of at least 2,560 acres, and in many districts they must be much larger.”
Patterns of use needed to be as carefully regulated as patterns of ownership. Only the largest streams were worth damming, but to preserve their worth their tributaries had to be kept free of diversion—which often meant free of settlement. Fences should be banned from much of the pasture lands, as they prevented stock from finding shelter from storms and making the most of the available grasses. But common grazing required communal policies regarding the number of stock each farmer could place on the range.
Communalism informed Powell’s vision from start to finish. Individualism had sufficed to develop the East, but individualism would fail in the West. Powell knew Congress—to which his report was addressed—well enough not to lecture the lawmakers explicitly on how this communalism ought to be accomplished. He pointed out that in Utah Territory the Mormon Church took the lead in developing and enforcing communal policies, especially with respect to irrigation. Yet, given the hostility most (Gentile) Americans held for the Mormons, Powell’s example was really a caution and an implicit argument for action by secular government.20
POWELL SPOKE FOR a distant future, as things turned out. His views would inform the development of the Southwest during the twentieth century, when government did take the lead in making the desert habitable and profitable. For the rest of the nineteenth century, however, another vision—one better tuned to the times—shaped western development.
William Allen White was a Kansan, a child of Emporia who left his home to learn journalism but returned to purchase and edit the local paper, the Emporia Gazette. His vigorous style caught the attention of his colleagues in the fourth estate, who reprinted his editorials and appointed him pulse taker to the American people. The editors of Scribner’s Magazine, as part of a series called “The Conduct of Great Businesses,” commissioned White to assess the state of the agricultural industry. The assignment seconded certain notions White had reached while watching agriculture evolve on the Middle Border. “When one is cataloguing the callings of men, one says, ‘the business man and the farmer,’ never the ‘the business man and farmer’ or the ‘business man engaged in farming,’ ” he wrote. “In daily speech modern men and women pay unconscious tribute to the ghost of the old order which seemed to decree that the farmer’s existence depended upon brawn and not upon brain.” The old order had vanished, White asserted, and with it the distinction between businessman and farmer. “The successful farmer of this generation must be a business man first, and a tiller of the soil afterward.… He must be a capitalist, cautious and crafty; he must be an operator of industrial affairs, daring and resourceful.”
Nowhere was this truer than on the large farms of the West, where agriculture in the 1890s took a particular bent. In the Central Valley of California and on the volcanic plateaus of eastern Oregon and Washington, wheat growers plowed, planted, and harvested on vast tracts that dwarfed anything found in the East. But the most striking examples of the “bonanza farms,” as the giant wheat operations were called, lay along the Red River in North Dakota. Accordingly, to the Red River Valley White traveled to observe the capitalist farmers at work.
The first thing that struck him upon entering the valley by train was the thoroughness of the cultivation. “There is not a barren acre. Wheat stretches away from the car window to the horizon, over a land flat as a floor. The monotonous exactness of the level makes one long for the undulating prairies of the middle west. Yet the very evenness of the plain has a commercial value, and makes the location here of the great wheat-farms possible. For in a rolling country there is waste land—here an ‘eighty’ on a hill top, there a ‘forty’ in a swamp. But in bonanza farming every foot of land must be productive with the expenditure of the least possible amount of human labor upon it.”21
Providence and geology had combined to endow the Red River Valley with its flatness, which in turn produced the deep soil, nearly devoid of stones, that made the task of the plowman almost a pleasure. But it was capitalism that fostered the creation of the large tracts—of thousands and tens of thousands of acres—of the biggest bonanza farms. The Northern Pacific Railroad had reached the Red River in 1872, underwritten by the same sorts of land grants as the Union and Central Pacific railroads. The financial panic of the following year left the Northern (and many other railroads) starved for cash, which the Northern’s directors partially obtained by unloading their land grants. Eastern and European investors shortly constructed some of the largest privately owned farms in North America.
The investors were betting on the future of the wheat industry, which during the late 1870s and 1880s indeed became an industry. Decades earlier millers had discovered the falls of the Mississippi and made Minneapolis a center of grain grinding. But after the Civil War they devised new methods for separating the coarse bran and oily germ of wheat from its starchy endosperm. Millstones gave way to steel rollers, which cracked the kernels and culled all but the fluffy white flour. This prized product yielded airy loaves and stayed fresh far longer than its whole-grain predecessors and so could be shipped across the country and across the sea. Not coincidentally—cause and effect being intimately entwined in economic and industrial development—the hard red wheat that grew best in the Red River hinterland of Minneapolis was ideally suited to the machining techniques of the milling industry. The investors envisioned their Red River farms feeding the world.22
But doing so required efficiency, for investors in other countries—Russia, Hungary, Argentina—had the same idea and access to the same markets and techniques. The farms of the Red River became outdoor factories, as mechanized in their own way as the refineries of John Rockefeller and the steelworks of Andrew Carnegie. “From the plough to the elevator,” William White observed, “from the first operation in wheat farming to the last, one is forced to realize how the spirit of the age has made itself felt here.” This was farming unlike anything previous generations had known. “The man who ploughs uses his muscle only incidentally in guiding the machine. The man who operates the harrow has half a dozen levers to lighten his labor.… The reaper needs a quick brain and a quick hand—but not necessarily a strong arm, nor a powerful back.… The threshers are merely assistants to a machine, and the men who heave wheat into the bins only press buttons.” The farm laborer of the West became decreasingly distinguishable from the factory worker of the East. “Each is the tender of a machine.”
The bonanza farms were to the yeoman’s plot what Carnegie’s works were to the corner blacksmith. “It is difficult to present the idea of the bigness of these farms to the person whose preconceived notion of a farm is a little checkerboard lying upon a hillside or in a valley,” White said. Seven thousand acres constituted the average Red River farm. “Distances across fields are so great that horseback communication is impracticable. Crews of workmen living at one end of the farm and operating it may not see the crews in other corners from season’s end to season’s end.” Most of the workers were full-time agriculturalists but part-time Red River men; they followed the spring from the southern Plains north, arriving in time to plow the warming ground. They worked in gangs, driving their horse-drawn harrows in echelon across the endless fields. Behind the harrows came the wheat drills, boring a bushel and a peck of the prime of last year’s crop into each acre. After the seeding all but a skeleton crew of eight or ten workers were dismissed. Most of those let go circled back to the southern Plains, where crops were already beginning to ripen, and they harvested their way north. Few paid rail fare; the railroad corporations, as a service to their largest customers—the bonanza farms—ensured the arrival of the labor forces by letting them ride free.
The harvest was the frantic season in the valley. Beginning in late July, weather permitting, it continued till all the wheat was in the elevators or rain ruined the rest of the crop. The men worked hard and long. “They eat breakfast at five o’clock and supper at half-past seven,” White wrote. They spent the intervening hours in the field. “It is found profitable to feed the hands in the fields rather than to allow them to trudge through the hot sun to the dining-halls for dinner.” The shrewdest managers—the only ones who lasted in this competitive industry—took good care of their men. “In the old days, before the system of farming had been reduced to a business problem, no sleeping quarters were provided, and the men slept in the open and upon the straw.… But this plan brought sickness to the farms in the harvest season, and the farmers found that it was more expensive than housing and caring for the men in the best possible manner.” Similar thinking inspired the menus. “The bonanza farmers—at least the better class of them—are as careful of the food set before the men as they are of the fodder that is put before their horses.” A typical dinner consisted of “corned beef, boiled potatoes, salt pork, baked beans, stewed turnips, tea and coffee, milk, white sugar—and that is a point that has caused many a strike in the Mississippi Valley—syrup, hot and cold bread, cookies, doughnuts, pickles, two kinds of pie, and cheese.” The foremen imposed a certain social discipline upon the crews. “On the best farms there is no drinking, and card-playing is strictly prohibited. The foremen say that cards keep men out of bed at night, and they have not their best strength to work during the day.”
The hard work didn’t end with the harvest. The wheat had to be threshed and the grain sorted. The field stubble had to be burned to kill pests and fertilize the soil with the ash. After the ground cooled the fields were plowed, again by gangs of machines staggered across the field, each turning a twin furrow. The plows averaged twenty linear miles a day and up to three hundred acres per season. When the plowing ended the men went home to Chicago or St. Louis or Milwaukee, to the embraces of their wives and the economic benefit of their communities. “They bring home probably a million dollars in wages.” To White they seemed the salt of the earth. “They are steady, industrious men with no bad habits, and small ambitions.”
The ambitions of their bosses were larger. White found fascinating the obsession of the farm managers with costs; John Rockefeller couldn’t have been more ruthless in routing inefficiency. White laid out the operation as it appeared from the manager’s office.
This is his plant: First there is the land—about seven thousand acres of it. The raw land—if there were any raw land in this part of the world—would be worth about $175,000. The improvements are worth about $35,000. There are three divisions of the farm, each division having its division superintendent.… At each division house there are stables and implement barns. In each division stable are about one hundred head of horses.… In the machine-shed upon each division are ten four-horse ploughs, eight four-horse drills, half a dozen harrows, and seven binders.… There are three steam-motor threshing machines on the place, but except while they are in use they are kept at the division nearest the manager’s house.… Two elevators, one with a capacity of 40,000 bushels and the other with a capacity of 60,000, are located upon opposite corners of the farm by the railroad track which runs through the great field. A central office, wherein the bookkeeper and the manager conduct the business of the farm, is connected with the three division houses and with other important points on the farm by telephone.… A set of books, kept as carefully as the books of a bank are kept, and a telephone connecting the farm with a telegraph wire to the world’s markets complete the list of articles which may properly be called the tools of the business.
The manager and the bookkeeper monitored every step of the productive process—that is, of the life cycle of the wheat. Planting the wheat, for example, cost seventy to ninety-five cents an acre, depending on weather (once the crews arrived at the farm they drew their weekly wage of nine to twelve dollars even if rain kept them in the dormitories for days at a time). Feeding the men cost thirty cents a day (a bit more at first, as the men bulked up after eating for months on their own accounts, a little less afterward). White noted that casual observers of modern farm life often blamed farmers for carelessness in leaving their equipment in the fields to rust over the winter. On the bonanza farms this wasn’t carelessness but calculation. “The Dakota farmers, who buy machinery by the car-load, say that many times it does not pay to take a machine to the shed after a hard season’s wear and tear.… More money is lost in time repairing and tinkering with an old implement than would pay for two new ones.” On the bonanza farms, a piece of heavy equipment was not a capital investment but an item of consumption. If a harvester or a binder lasted a single season, the manager was satisfied, for he knew how much the equipment magnified the labor power of his men.
It was in the use of equipment that the big farms gained their greatest economies of scale. A farmer who planted a mere forty acres of wheat required a binder to tie it in sheaves. But the binder could easily tie the wheat from several times that acreage, leaving the small farmer to spread its cost over a much smaller harvest than the large farmer could. Likewise with harvesters and threshers. The small farmer might be tempted to share equipment with neighbors, and some did. But the wheat came ripe all at once, and the farmer who didn’t have the equipment at his instant disposal could be ruined by an untimely rain.
The output of the bonanza farms was prodigious.
Averaging twenty bushels to the acre, as many farms will this year, the total number of bushels in a crop on a bonanza farm would be 140,000. Putting five hundred bushels of that crop in a freight car, and allowing forty feet to the car, the train which would haul the crop from the farm would be two miles long, and if it were to come charging down Fifth Avenue and Broadway in New York, the rear end brakeman would be craning his neck from the caboose to catch sight of the Vanderbilt mansion while the engineer and fireman were enjoying themselves bumping the cable car down by Union Square.… If this crop had to go to mill the old-fashioned way, in two bushel sacks on a mule, the procession would stretch more than halfway from Brooklyn to Buffalo.
Yet huge output was no guarantee of profit. The farm managers didn’t open their books to White, and so he had to guess at some of the costs of production. Labor and equipment were relatively straightforward, as were the purchase cost and upkeep of livestock. Taxes were a matter of public record; interest and insurance premiums were not. Tallying it all up, White arrived at a cost of about eight dollars per acre to operate one of the big farms. In a good year this translated into a cost of about forty cents per bushel of wheat. The price of wheat the last several years had averaged more than fifty cents, leaving the bonanza farmers a tidy profit.
But not every year was a good year. When the rains came too soon or too late or not at all, the acre yield fell off dramatically, while the farmers’ expenses did not. Over time the yields diminished even in good weather, as the wheat monoculture depleted the soil. And in even the best years, the Red River farmers were at the mercy of occurrences half a world away. Price tickers in managers’ offices recorded fluctuations in the grain markets in Minneapolis and Duluth and Buffalo, which in turn responded to developments on the world market. “A rainfall in India or a hot wind in South America is felt upon the Dakota farm in a few hours. The nerves of trade thrill around the globe, and the wages of the harvester in the Red River Valley are fixed by conditions in the fields of Russia, or in Argentina, or in India. The distance between the fields has been lost. The world’s wheat crop might as well lie in one great field, for the scattered acres are wired together in the markets, and those markets are brought to the farmer’s door.”23