HOMESTEADING

Archibald Strachan, my great-grandfather, born in 1850, was a successful finish carpenter in Scotland with three children.  He gave it all up to come to South Dakota to homestead.  Why?  It wasn’t in pursuit of money.  He was a great admirer of Thomas Jefferson and believed that land ownership was freedom.  Once arrived, he built a house full of windows so he could look out over the prairie, which seemed like a good idea until winter came.  My grandfather, Sam Strachan, educated while the family was still in Scotland, and my grandmother, who grew up in Michigan, were teachers, but each also took a homestead and when they married, they towed their tarpaper shacks together and started their family there.  

How is it that the promise of land was so powerful?  In Europe both status and wealth were based on land ownership, which was basically controlled by kings.  One of the great scandals and engines of emigration was the British land clearances, also called the enclosure movement.  In the earlier times, the land had been occupied and farmed by crofters and small farmers who paid the technical land owner, the squire or the lord.  Also, the privilege of hunting in the forests was reserved to the “landed gentry.”  Then sheep became very profitable and many were evicted to make room for pasture.  Once those same people got to the American prairies where they expected British conditions, their lives were forever changed.

In the case of the ancestors of many people in Valier, a Jesuit priest helped a whole Belgium village move to the east slope of the Rockies.  Bringing their family and much of their congregation intact made their experience less shocking.  But there were still many hardships to endure, if only from the forces of nature.  The stories of suffering and heroism from the homesteader days are many and support the strong fabric of shared lives even today.

But there’s also a dark side to this story, because the highland clearances were echoed by prairie clearances.  The indigenous people could not emigrate -- where would they go? -- but they were greatly decimated by war, smallpox and starvation and could be confined to reservations.  What happened next was different in Canada than it was in the United States.  Canada put the ownership of the reservation in the hands of the Queen and the tribes as a communal body.  The US followed the homestead pattern.

The Dawes Act, which divided reservation land into individually Indian-owned parcels, was passed on  February 8, 1887  (U. S. Statutes at Large, Vol. XXIV, p. 388 ff.)  “Congressman Henry Dawes, author of the act, once expressed his faith in the civilizing power of private property with the claim that to be civilized was to ‘wear civilized clothes...cultivate the ground, live in houses, ride in Studebaker wagons, send children to school, drink whiskey [and] own property.’”  In other words, assimilate.  The results of this tactic still echo through the lives of tribal people.  

Homesteading was accompanied by another great shift in civilization, one much more concrete than the idea of owning land.  It coincided with the beginning of the industrial revolution:  trains, steamships, machinery far beyond “Studebaker wagons,” including the development of movable-type newspaper printing and the ability to distribute mail over long distances.  Steam-powered tractors for breaking virgin prairie, steam-powered thrashers with their great power-belts made of buffalo hide, and the mechanics of grain elevators (grain must be handled like a liquid, carried up high on conveyor shovels and then poured into the structure’s sections, to be later drawn out at the bottom) are all key to the operating of a successful wheat farm.  Drilling for water, engineering macadam roads, stringing line for electricity all proceeded parallel to the homesteaders locating and stubbornly developing their land.

Some are fascinated by the romance of warfare and the pathos of a culture destroyed, but there are many other stories told about the years just after 1900 and many of us heard them from our grandparents, who were there.  My father-in-law arrived in Browning, Montana, in 1903 about the same time as the Great Northern railroad, which stalled for a while until it could find a way through the Rocky Mountains, now called Marias Pass.

Roughly a hundred years later the Industrial Revolution with its dependence on combustible fuel and steel machinery is again being pushed aside by another revolution which is still so much in progress that we can’t really understand its impact.  We see the revision of whole businesses, the transformation of institutions, and the overthrow of governments.  Like the Industrial Revolution, it is both terrifying and exhilarating because it offers so many new opportunities.  Our homesteads now are desktop computers in bedrooms or basements, but those are swiftly being bypassed in favor of laptops, now considered basic to the briefcase of every businessman, and the even newer tablets.  A whole new infrastructure webs the land and this time its not overseen by one government or another but by international corporations working through high satellite communication and offshore “cloud” storage.

Some people are just realizing that ebooks  (love ‘em or hate ‘em, as they say around here), are just the tip of a very big iceberg.  The entire industry of publishing is up-ended:  the bookstores, the editors, the agents, the journalists,  are all shifting -- many very educated and gifted people out of work.  Many others desperately writing books they hope will hit the jackpot.  Publishers tweaking the manuscripts they get in order to make them juicier, more appealing.  Inventory, distributing, warehouses, the whole custom of “a printing,” literary awards, university workshops, writer’s conferences.   The very media of print is now pushed over by video, which means that an illiterate kid living on the street in Bombay can tell his story as powerfully as any educated white explorer.  People in the most remote parts of Africa can find small wireless telephones and “call out.”  But we are also creating a two-class society between the computer-literate and those who are not, who are afraid of it in much the same way as the early people of the prairie confronted with a steam boat on the Missouri, more change-making than the sailing ships that brought Columbus to the east coast.