Homesteading in Montana

By John Krist,
Senior reporter

History buffs with an interest in the 18th and 19th century fur trade gather at significant sites such as Fort Mandan in North Dakota to re-enact trapper-trader rendezvous.

WASHBURN, N.D. -- Paddlers traveling the Upper Missouri National Wild and Scenic River pass scores of abandoned cabins perched on grassy benches above the steep banks.

Almost all these weathered structures date to the period between 1900 and 1930, and serve as a stark illustration of how the federal government's efforts to encourage settlement in the West often failed when confronted with the implacable harshness of the region's climate.

The federal government began using land as a tool of policy early in the nation's history, offering grants of property as enlistment inducements and as rewards for service to soldiers in the Revolutionary War.

The Continental Congress, in fact, offered land bounties as a way of mustering troops before the nation properly owned so much as an acre - before it was properly even a nation. With passage of the Land Ordinance of 1785, the process was given formality and, at least at the outset, some logic.

As displaced Indians (and later, foreign governments defeated in war or persuaded by other means to abandon their claims to North America) ceded title to their lands to the U.S. government, surveyors marked off the landscape into huge squares six miles on a side.

Abandoned homesteader cabins serve as reminders of how difficult it is to eke out a living farming and ranching in the drought-prone northern Plains. Census figures show a continuing loss of population in most of central and eastern Montana, parts of which are so sparsely inhabited as to meet the Census Bureau's definition of the frontier.

Each of these townships was subdivided into 36 sections of one square mile each. Each section, comprising 640 acres, was further subdivided into quarter-sections of 160 acres each. Following the survey, the government would sell the townships at public auction. Land not sold at auction was available for purchase from the General Land Office for $2 an acre (reduced in 1820 to $1.20).

Congress could not resist tinkering with the system, passing 375 law amending the Land Ordinance between 1789 and 1834, according to historian Richard White. In the latter half of the 19th century, lawmakers decided that offering public lands for sale was not a sufficient inducement to settlement of the vast territories the United States had acquired in the West, and they devised a series of ever-more-generous land-allocation laws.

The Homestead Act of 1862 is perhaps the most widely known. It granted 160 acres (a quarter-section) of the public domain to anyone willing to live on the land and farm it for five years, and was intended to accomplish several goals: It would lure unemployed workers from cities in the industrializing North, as well as the unemployed children of farmers in settled areas, decrease the chances of civil unrest and establish a stable, agrarian society in the wide-open territories of the West.

Along with it that year, Congress passed the Pacific Railroad Act, distributing public land to railroads willing to link the Pacific and Atlantic Coasts, and the Morrill Land Grant College Act, which gave the states land they could sell to pay for public colleges and universities (the University of California traces its genesis to the Morrill Act).

The railroad bill was intended to provide access to markets for the new western farmers, without which they could not prosper, and the land-grant colleges and universities were intended to provide opportunities for higher education in the newly settled territories, making possible cultural and social advancement.

Without irrigation, however, 160 acres in the semiarid West is a prescription for disaster, not a ticket to financial independence. Settlement stalled when homesteaders tried to move into the western prairies. Congress responded with several additional laws.

The Timber Culture Act of 1873 promised a quarter-section to anyone who planted and maintained 40 acres of trees for 10 years on the hitherto treeless Plains. Predicated on the mistaken belief that the absence of tree cover was a cause of the region's sparse rainfall, and not a consequence of it, the law failed miserably to accomplish its goals.

In 1887, Congress passed the Desert Land Act, promising title to a full section - 640 acres - of arid land if the settler could bring irrigation to it within three years and pay $1.25 per acre. Again, this was impossible in most cases; widespread irrigation in the West would have to await the development of powerful pumps able to suck water from ancient aquifers deep underground, and the development of large systems of dams and aqueducts.

In 1909, Congress passed the Enlarged Homestead Act, which doubled the amount of land a settler could claim, and in 1912 it amended the law to reduce from five years to three the length of occupancy required to prove the claim.

The Stock Raising Homestead Act of 1916 further boosted the acreage limit to 640 acres. It was this last flurry of legislative enticements that at last lured a meaningful number of settlers into the driest of the Plains states, including the part of Montana traversed by the Upper Missouri National Wild and Scenic River.

The boom proved ephemeral, however. The farm population of the High Plains states of Montana, Colorado, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, Kansas and Nebraska peaked in 1920 at 2.6 million. It has declined steadily since then.

Even with federal irrigation projects and other generous subsidies, farming simply proved too difficult to carry out on such relatively small parcels under conditions of recurring drought, insect infestations, and long, brutal winters. The abandoned cabins and farmhouses scattered across Montana and the Dakotas are mute reminders of this episode in history.

Sources: "It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own": A New History of the American West, by Richard White (1991: University of Oklahoma Press); Montana's Wild & Scenic Upper Missouri River, by Glenn Monahan (1997: Northern Rocky Mountain Books); Westward in Eden: The Public Lands and the Conservation Movement, by William K. Wyant (1982: University of California Press).