Homesteading the Plains: Toward a New History by Richard Edwards, Jacob K. Friefeld, and Rebecca S. Wingo (review)

The story of homesteading is one of the most popular narratives within the history of the American West. Rugged individuals moving west in search of free land is told and retold in well-known fictions such as Willa Cather’s O Pioneers! (New York, 1913), O. E. Rolvaag’s Giants in the Earth (New York, 1927), and Laura Ingalls Wilder’s nine Little House on the Prairie novels (New York, 1932–1971). Much of the historical evidence seems to follow along, portraying “homesteaders as hardy and deserving recipients of federal largesse, common folks who used their opportunity to make farms for themselves, turn the United States into a food-producing colossus, and help create the vast American middle class” (1). Either the 1862 Homestead Act was “one of the most important laws which have been enacted in the history of the country,” as Gates, a land historian, suggested, or according to many of the New Western historians, one of the best examples of conquest, fraud, dispossession, and failure (6).¹

Edwards, Friefeld, and Wingo argue in Homesteading the Plains that a re-evaluation of the Act and the process is necessary to determine how land preemption, speculation, and land distribution actually played out in the Homestead Era. The authors also seek to explain the sharp disconnect “between the public’s highly positive image of homesteading and scholars’ negative and disapproving assessment” (6). Each side characterizes these tensions through the social-science concept of “stylized facts,” which synthesize the consensus of historical and common popular views into four main notions: “Homesteading was a minor factor in farm formation; most farmers purchased their land; Most homesteaders failed to prove up their claims; The homesteading process was rife with corruption and fraud; Homesteading caused Indian land dispossession” (13). The authors complicate or dispute these stylized facts through a powerful mixture of newly digitized primary sources and innovative spatial and digital technologies to map the practices of homesteading.

The most significant findings suggest that homesteading played a fundamental role in western farm formation and that most of the people who staked their initial claims were successful in proving up to obtain free land. Homesteading, from 1863 to 1900, also “accounted for nearly two-thirds of the new farms created. During these years, at least, homesteading was the most common path to making a new farm” (198). The authors insist that community policing of claims was an effective method to deter fraud. By mapping micro-community relationships, they offer a powerful critique that the notion of ubiquitous homesteading fraud is misleading at best, finding its origins in the “Wild West” mythology. This emphasis on community policing confirms what historians such as Mark Ellis, in Law and Order in Buffalo Bill’s Country: Legal Culture and Community on the Great Plains, 1867–1910 (Lincoln, 2009), have noted; the persistent narratives of lawlessness and violence in the American frontier are driven more by popular culture than historical evidence.

The book’s most controversial finding is the complexity of homesteading’s role in Native American dispossession. Based on newly digitized data, the authors insist that large-scale homesteading in states such as Nebraska, Colorado, and Wyoming played a minor role in dispossession since Indian land claims “had already been extinguished before any large-scale homesteading in those regions began” (201). Such was not the case, however, in the Dakota territory, where data patterns suggest that “would-be homesteaders actively agitated for further dispossession” (95).

Homesteading the Plains is an innovative book in its approach, evidence, and analysis. Readers of this journal will find much value in its digital resources, spatial analyses, and collaborative effort. The authors’ interdisciplinary approach will encourage “other scholars to return to the topic, reexamine old findings and new results, dig deeper into the newly available data, adapt our methodologies, and extend this learning to new and unexpected insights, whether...