FARMING ON THE GREAT PLAINS
In the ideology of Thomas Jefferson, the yeoman farmer was the central figure in the development of the American character. The abilities, fortitude, and luck of the yeomen were severely tested as they moved to the Great Plains. Many settlers who went west were immigrants with families (unlike the single male immigrants who lived in New York, Boston, and other Eastern cities).
The harshness of life on the plains was simply too much to bear for many settlers and their families. Temperatures ranged from over 100 degrees in the summer to bitter cold in the winter, and many of the sod houses built by settlers did little to keep out the heat or the cold. Having enough water was a constant problem, with some of the water collected in barrels or buckets carrying “prairie fever” (typhoid fever). In a single year a settler and his land might be attacked by fierce blizzards, howling dust storms, and locusts or grasshoppers. The rosy picture of life on the Great Plains presented in recruitment brochures found in New York or in Currier & Ives prints popular in the East were a harsh contrast with reality. By 1900 two-thirds of the homestead farms failed, causing many ex-farmers to return to the East.
How did the settlers who survived on the Great Plains manage to do so? Survival on the plains largely depended on cooperation with other settlers that lived near you. Groups of men would put up new barns and construct fences; women on the plains would get support from wives of other settlers. In short, successful farmers on the plains were no longer the individual yeomen envisioned by Jefferson.
In the ideology of Thomas Jefferson, the yeoman farmer was the central figure in the development of the American character. The abilities, fortitude, and luck of the yeomen were severely tested as they moved to the Great Plains. Many settlers who went west were immigrants with families (unlike the single male immigrants who lived in New York, Boston, and other Eastern cities).
The harshness of life on the plains was simply too much to bear for many settlers and their families. Temperatures ranged from over 100 degrees in the summer to bitter cold in the winter, and many of the sod houses built by settlers did little to keep out the heat or the cold. Having enough water was a constant problem, with some of the water collected in barrels or buckets carrying “prairie fever” (typhoid fever). In a single year a settler and his land might be attacked by fierce blizzards, howling dust storms, and locusts or grasshoppers. The rosy picture of life on the Great Plains presented in recruitment brochures found in New York or in Currier & Ives prints popular in the East were a harsh contrast with reality. By 1900 two-thirds of the homestead farms failed, causing many ex-farmers to return to the East.
How did the settlers who survived on the Great Plains manage to do so? Survival on the plains largely depended on cooperation with other settlers that lived near you. Groups of men would put up new barns and construct fences; women on the plains would get support from wives of other settlers. In short, successful farmers on the plains were no longer the individual yeomen envisioned by Jefferson.
