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

Homesteading holds a special place in American cultural memory. Popular belief holds that 160-acre tracts of free land enabled poor individuals to pull themselves out of poverty into independence, setting their families on a path to becoming middle class. Generations of scholars, in contrast, have problematized this view of the Homestead Act of 1862. Homesteading the Plains works to bridge this gap between popular and scholarly understandings. This study challenges four of what the authors call “stylized facts,” which, they explain, most scholars today assume to be true: that most American farmers purchased land rather than “proving up” homestead claims; that most homesteaders failed to prove up their claims; that there was widespread corruption in the homesteading process; and that homesteading caused Native American land dispossession (13). The book’s close examination of homesteading records from two Nebraska districts also enables a reexamination of women homesteaders and the nature of homesteading communities.

Authors Richard Edwards, Jacob Friefeld, and Rebecca Wingo begin by reexamining past scholars’ “misguided calculations” of homesteading’s importance to western settlement (26). They demonstrate persuasively that it enabled the formation of nearly two-thirds of all new farms between 1863 and 1900. Moreover, they show that homesteads accounted for almost a third of new land brought into farming during that period. These claims nearly reverse scholars’ assumptions.

Having established homesteading’s importance, the authors focus on quantitative analysis of newly digitized homesteading claims from central and western Nebraska. Whereas previous homesteading studies relied heavily on anecdotal evidence supported by rather shoddy statistical analysis, Edwards, Friefeld, and Wingo offer careful quantitative work supplemented by qualitative evidence. Their reexamination of homesteading fraud demonstrates the power of this approach. The authors flagged as potentially suspicious each homestead claim within their study area that sold within one year of proving up. They closely examined each suspicious claim, differentiating between sales driven by hardship on the arid western Great Plains and potentially fraudulent misuse of homesteading privileges offered to soldiers and unmarried women. In their sample of 621 proved-up homesteads, the authors found that 91.5 percent of cases were not fraudulent. Even some of the 8.5 percent of cases that may have defrauded the government likely did so without claimants’ intent. The authors rightly emphasize that the misappropriations of up to 160 acres of land that did occur were dwarfed by much larger land grabs by railroad financiers and others who manipulated various nineteenth-century federal land laws. They emphasize, too, that informal neighborhood policing effectively combatted widespread homesteading fraud.

Homesteading the Plains also offers nuanced analysis of homesteading’s impact on Native dispossession. The authors demonstrate that most western states forced Indigenous populations onto reservations decades before homesteading took hold in those locales. The authors differentiate between places where dispossession predated the 1862 Homestead Act and places where mining and railroad construction drove dispossession decades prior to a homesteading boom. They rightly acknowledge that homesteading did directly contribute to dispossession in parts of the Dakotas and in Indian Territory (later Oklahoma). Identifying these distinct patterns demonstrates the importance of closely examining local conditions to avoid overgeneralizations. However, the authors’ conclusion that homesteading did not drive dispossession in most of the United States is too narrowly drawn to fully respond to criticism by scholars of settler colonialism. While settlers could not have claimed land in the Central Plains under the Homestead Act prior to its adoption in 1862, those who subsequently homesteaded in Nebraska nonetheless directly benefitted from federal policies designed to take lands from Indigenous peoples for the sake of White (and, unintentionally, some Black) settlement. It makes sense to narrowly focus on Homestead Act land claims to understand the extent of fraud committed under the terms of that act, but the book’s arguments concerning the extent to which homesteading drove Native dispossession miss the mark: Scholarly debates about this question...