Over time, many historical events take on a romantic aura that obscures what actually occurred. As I have written previously, that was true of the passage of the 1862 Morrill Act, which launched land-grant colleges..
The 1862 Homestead Act, too, acquired “a halo of political and economic significance which has greatly magnified the importance to be attributed to it,” as historian Paul Gates wrote in 1936. [1] Free land! Yes, it sounded (and still sounds) humanitarian. Under the Homestead Act, a person could obtain ownership of 160 acres (320 acres for a husband and wife) by building a cabin, improving the land, and living on it for 5 years.
Yet homesteading created heartache.
By the time the act was passed in 1862, much of the good, well-watered farmland in the Midwest and West had already been taken. And even after the passage of the Homestead Act, other laws (such as the Desert Land Act and the Timber Culture Act), along with corrupt land grabs, enabled railroads, speculators, cattle ranchers, and others to get large tracts of land that were closed to settlers.
But the problem was more fundamental. The title of Richard Stroup’s article on homesteading is suggestive: “Buying Misery with Federal Land.”[2]
In order to find available land, families had to go beyond what is called the “farm frontier,” the point where, at that moment in time, there was enough buildup of transportation and markets for a family to sell its produce and obtain supplies.[3] Essentially, homesteaders had to pick their land and then wait for the frontier to catch up, while carrying out the requirements of the act. Most never lasted that long on the homestead. Historian Fred A. Shannon reports that before 1890 (often called the end of the frontier) only a third of those who had staked a claim ever completed the process.[4]
But that does not exhaust the problems with the Homestead Act. It may have caused the Dust Bowl of the 1930s.
The Dust Bowl was the devastating drought described in The Grapes of Wrath (“In the morning the dust hung like fog, and the sun was as red as ripe new blood.”)[5] Two economists described it more objectively: “Severe drought and damaging wind erosion hit in the Great Plains in 1930 and lasted through 1940. Strong winds blew away an average of 480 tons of topsoil per acre, degrading soil productivity, harming health, and damaging air quality.”[6]
These two economists, Zeynep Hansen and Gary Libecap, have argued that the severity of the impact was caused by homesteading. Here’s how:
The Great Plains stretch from North Dakota and Montana to Texas, and from Colorado to Iowa and Missouri (the official definition is based on counties). Much of that region is arid, and it was homesteaded in farms of 160 or 320 acres—plots too small to cope well with low precipitation.
Hansen and Libecap explain that a farmer had only one or two options for preventing soil erosion. One was to create a windbreak with trees and “brush,” but trees were hard to grow. The other was to create fallow (uncultivated) strips that protected the soil with stubble from previous cultivation. But any land set aside that way meant less land for cultivation for a farmer whose success was marginal to begin with.
Furthermore, many of the benefits of stopping wind erosion went to other farmers. The incentive to cut production in order to protect other farms as much or more than one’s own farm discouraged the level of erosion control that was needed. To be effective, everyone had to do it.
In his summary of the Hansen/Libecap article, economist Daniel Benjamin wrote:
“In principle, the small farmers of the 1930s could have voluntarily banded together to jointly agree on the use of best practices in soil conservation. But this would have required contracts among thousands of landowners spanning hundreds of thousands of acres—a daunting proposition at best.”‘[7]
It was only after 1937, when the federal government created the Soil Conservation Service and its multiple conservation districts, that the problem declined. SCS districts could force farmers to adopt erosion control measures, and also provide subsidies to small farmers to help them do so.
In addition, farms gradually got larger, Hansen and Libecap point out. In 1930, 27 percent of all farms in the Great Plains were less than 180 acres. By 1964 that figure had fallen to 15 percent. In 1930, 65 percent of the farms were under 500 acres; that fell to 39 percent in 1964.[8]
Slowly, the detrimental impact of homesteading became a distant memory and the romanticization began.
[1] Paul Wallace Gates, “The Homestead Law in an Incongruous land System,” American Historical Review 41 (1936): 652-681, at 653.
[2] Richard L. Stroup, “Buying Misery with Federal Land,”Public Choice57, no. 1 (1988): 69-77.
[3] Stroup cites Gilbert Fite as the source of this term. Stroup, 70.
[4] Fred A. Shannon, “The Homestead Act and the Labor Surplus,” American Historical Review41, no. 4 (1936): 637-51.
[5] Quoted in Zeynep K. Hansen and Gary D. Libecap. “Small Farms, Externalities, and the Dust Bowl of the 1930s.” Journal of Political Economy 112, no. 3 (2004): 665-94, at
[6] Hansen and Libecap, 666.
[7 ]Daniel Benjamin, “The Dust Bowl Reconsidered,”PERC Reports 22, no. 4 (December 2004), https://perc.org/2004/12/10/the-dust-bowl-reconsidered/.
[8] Hansen and Libecap, 673.
