(mandolin plays softly) ♪ ♪ (male narrator) In 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act and created a world of opportunity for some 372,000 families that poured onto the prairies.

They came for many reasons-- a hunger for land, a vision for the future, a longing for adventure, an interest in profit.

Some failed, some scraped by, some succeeded, and in the process put down roots that changed this land forever.

♪ ♪ (woman) Production funding for "Homesteading" is provided by... North Dakota Humanities Council North Dakota Council on the Arts Minnesota Arts & Cultural Herita and the citizens of Minnesota ♪ ♪ My grandfather was a grumpy old man to a lot of people, but he was such a dear person to me.

And one day I came for a visit, and he said, "Come here, I have something for you."

And he pulled out a packet of photographs and said, "I think you should have these."

I said, "But Grandpa, you have to tell me who these people are," and he proceeded to explain who the photographs were, and he said, "You know, my mother was a homesteader."

(gasps in amazement) I got my very own woman homesteader in my family!

There are stories like that everywhere.

I think that all you have to do is ask a question or two, and pretty soon people tell you things that you just never, you just didn't even know that information was out there.

♪ ♪ (fiddle & guitar play in bright rhythm) ♪ ♪ (narrator) It was called "The Great American Desert," a wasteland, a barrier to be crossed on the way to the Pacific Coast.

The flat, treeless prairie was some of the most fertile land on the continent, yet to early explorers accustomed to thickly forested landscapes, the land looked worthless.

To others, the vast prairies of the Midwest offered a chance to achieve the working class dream of land ownership and economic independence.

(din of many people talking; a gavel taps on wood) (man) Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, that any person who is the head of a family or who has arrived at the age... (narrator) At the height of the Civil War, passage of the Homestead Act brought an end to decades of bitter controversy over federal land policy.

The Act at last achieved what so many had worked so long for-- ensuring that it was not just the rich and powerful who would claim the unbroken plains but anyone willing to work to achieve their dream of becoming landowners.

(man) ...upon which said person may have filed a preemption claim.

♪ ♪ All of this was part of a general philosophy of the Republican Party but especially of Abraham Lincoln which has been called "the right to rise," "the free labor ideology," a dynamic kind of Democratic capitalism and the opportunity for farmers to take up 160 acres of land and to develop that land very much fit in with this philosophy which was at the core, I think, of Lincoln's ideology-- give everybody an opportunity, and then if they work hard, they'll get ahead, and they'll develop America.

(man, as J.G.

Towle) "March 1st 1884.

Dear Old Friends, You speak of goin' to Nebraska.

Let me say to you that Nebraska is a nice country, but the government lands are about all taken there.

I came to Dakota 3 years ago last fall with Mr.

Wilder.

We liked it then, and we still like it.

I could start from my very door and mow a straight 100 miles if I choose.

The same with breaking no stumps, no roots, but very few stones to interfere in any way.

The soil's good, and it makes a fellow feel good to get good crops.

A homestead or tree claim costs first on entry $14, and at time of proof of residence costs $4 more making $18 for 160 acres!

Is this cheap enough for you?

(laughs) If so, pull up stakes, and come to Dakota as soon as you can.

When you are about ready to start, write me, and I will tell you where to land here.

Newcomers are arriving here to get a slice of Uncle Sam's domain.

And what other folks can do, why with patience cannot you?

Only keep this rule in view, come to Dakota and begin anew.

J.G.

Towle."

♪ ♪ The primary reason people came out to the Great Plains was because of land.

The land acts during the 1800's provided free land or greatly reduced cost land to the people who came out.

And at the time, the United States and the world was an agrarian society, and so land ownership meant economic enhancement, it meant power, it meant a future for your family.

So the vast majority of people came out to seize on the opportunities that free land presented to them.

(a rooster crows) (woman) When I began to research my great grandfather, I didn't know very much about him-- Joseph Marquart, the wheat king of Logan county, (laughs) you know?

I knew those few facts about him, that somehow between 1886 when he fled Russia and landed in Dakota territory, and in the 1930's when he died, he managed to accumulate almost 6000 acres of land.

Well, inevitably you had to say, how did he do that?

My great grandfather left because he got involved in a little altercation with the commanding officer, and he was secretly taken out under cover of darkness.

When they came to Dakota territory they got oxen, carts, and then made their way north to this completely unbroken landscape.

Apparently my great grandfather's response to it was just complete awe, amazement, excitement, just exhilaration.

He saw what he would make of it.

He saw a completely blank canvas that he could just build a life on.

(5-banjo plays "Turkey in the Straw") (narrator) Lincoln and supporters of the Homestead Act realized the vast tracks of land in the Great Plains could not support settlers if the only way to ship goods was by oxcart and wagon.

It would take high-speed dependable transport.

It would take the railroads.

In addition to the Homestead Act, Lincoln also signed the Pacific Railroad Act which made land grants to railroads to build across the continent.

That's for economic development tying the whole nation together.

The federal government realized transcontinental railroads were crucial to economic development, political cohesion as a nation, and all the rest.

The problem was when the charters for these transcontinental railroads were awarded, we were at war.

Lincoln's government was cash poor.

They were spending all the money to fight the Confederate states during that conflict, but they were land rich, so they decided to award land grants to railroads as an inducement to build west.

The Northern Pacific which received alternating sections of 160 acres, kind of a checkerboard pattern, on each side of the line nearly 50 million acres from the Great Lakes to Puget Sound.

(woman, as Louisa Winckler; German accent) "For 10 years we had no neighbors to the north of us except the antelope visited us now and then.

The first human visitors were Indians.

Never before had I seen Indians.

These came for several summers to make their appearance and hunt.

Not far from our house, they set up their tent, and we must say this for the redskins-- they were more ambitious than we!

Frau Louisa Winckler."

(narrator) It did not seem to matter in the least to supporters of the Homestead Act that the lands about to be given away were, in fact, already populated.

Before homesteading could occur, there had to be some way of taking the Indian title from them.

Settlers were in many cases clamoring to get in, and a few of them, of course, had anticipated and moved across the Red River and began to in effect squat, or set up places that they thought were on national land, and, of course, most of it, the title was still part of Indian land.

(narrator) As a result of the Fort Laramie treaties and the Dawes Act of 1887, the government seized title to millions of acres of Indian lands.

The United States did see all of this as a way of getting Indians out of the way and of making land available to "real Americans."

And in fact, you often hear that phrase "real Americans," and Indians were simply not going to be allowed to stand in the way.

(narrator) Quarter section by quarter section, railroad and government lands began to attract homesteaders.

At first just a trickle, but soon a flood.

(man, as Edward Kennedy) "June 17, 1878.

My Dear Mother.

No doubt by this time you are all wondering where Ed is and what he's doing.

I have serious thoughts of pitching my tent right here-- not a fence to be seen in any direction.

The air is so clear and light you can see farmhouses nearly 10 miles away.

I wish you could see this country and the immense fields of grain on the prairie.

There is one whole quarter section about a mile distant of wheat nearly ripe.

It looks grand!

I tell you, this country air makes me feel like a different man.

With much love to all, I am your affectionate son, Edward C.

Kennedy."

♪ ♪ There was a great deal of boosterism, the railroads especially.

They had their agents in Scandinavia and in Germany.

They tied up with steamship companies so somebody could buy a ticket, one ticket, to get them across the Atlantic and then on the railroad to wherever they were going to go.

(narrator) Thanks to aggressive marketing by both the government and the transcontinental railroads, lands opened up by the Homestead Act drew settlers in unprecedented numbers.

(woman) My dad's name was Arne Thorstad.

Mother was Hilda.

They came to this country in 1903, yeah.

My older sister was born in Norway.

She was 3 months old when they came over.

(laughs) How they decided to come to North Dakota I have no idea, but I suppose it was homesteading.

If you weren't the oldest son, you had to get out.

That was the way it was over there.

They came-- a lot of people came at that time, yeah.

When my aunt and uncle came, it was in the fall, and it was so rough, and they were so sick!

So it makes a difference what time of the year, I think.

When my folks came, it was in May.

Mother said the water was just barely a ripple at all.

She said her and dad danced all the way over here.

They loved to dance!

That was the best time of her life!

(laughs) (narrator) Between 1878 and 1890, the non-Indian population of the Great Plains would skyrocket from 16,000 to more than 191,000.

The Northern Pacific, for example, had an entire land department devoted to selling plots of land to induce settlers to arrive from Germany and other parts of Europe to come west, to build family farms, to take advantage of the Homestead Act and other pieces of legislation to sell the land, if you will.

(woman) There was a brochure that was put out-- I believe it was simply called "Dakota" that is sent to inquiring folks for a penny postcard, and they get this brochure, their comments about the health of this particular region, that the cold air actually kills off all my asthma, all bad air, that the land is beautiful enough to cause the angels to stop mid flight in the sapphire skies to look down upon the land and wonder if a new Eden had not been formed where the farmers wear diamond stickpins in their collars, and anybody can make a living on a quarter section.

If you're living in Scandinavia farming 4 acres, 5 acres this has to sound wonderful!

♪ ♪ (narrator) The marketing campaign in Europe was wildly successful.

By the time of the 1890 census, one out of every 3 North Dakotans was born in a foreign country.

Behind us that was the original George Schreiber homestead and house built here in the 1890's.

What got him is the railroad story of free land, telling him how fertile it was and so on.

The railroads had great PR persons!

(laughs) You'd have to consider what they left.

Conditions were not good over there either.

They both came from that Alsace Lorraine territory originally as the wars would just keep going back and forth, and when they heard free land in the United States, well, I mean after all, if the guy back here is shooting at you and the gate's open over there, you might as well head for the open gate!

(laughs) ♪ ♪ I think they did anticipate that this would encourage immigration, and in fact immigration had been the central part of American life through most of the adult lives of these people.

I think most Americans were very much in favor of immigration at that time, immigration of what they considered to be desirable peoples, and not everybody was considered by everyone else to be desirable, but that's another issue.

Lincoln was certainly pro immigrant.

I think they did anticipate that this would help to develop the country, to fill up the empty spaces in the west.

(narrator) It wasn't just experienced farmers who came west to claim a homestead.

It was also railroad workers, shopkeepers, farmhands, schoolteachers, bankers, doctors, lawyers, even mail-order brides.

(woman) My grandmother came over in 1898 and went through Ellis Island.

She had come from a city called Sauri.

(ph) In those years it was probably a part of Hungary.

She went to Mansfield, Ohio, and she worked there for awhile whether it was just to get more money to come to North Dakota to see her sister, but I believe that she also was putting a dowry together because her sister arranged a marriage for her.

When she came up here, she got off the train, and I'm sure that the only thing that was there was the train station.

It was absolutely treeless, just plain, it was just flat.

All she could see was those railroad tracks going, she thought that train can't turn around-- I'm stuck here!

She felt that she was never gonna get out of North Dakota-- that she couldn't.

♪ ♪ (narrator) Not everyone who filed a claim planned to put down roots.

Land speculators saw free land as the way to make a profit.

The rough-and-tumble life on the frontier drew some rough-and-tumble characters...like Lorenzo Merry.

Born in New York in 1818, Merry skipped town on his debts, moving ever west until he came to the edge of the frontier, the Minnesota Territory.

♪ ♪ He happened to have military scrip that he got his hands on from a seaman who served in the Mexican-American War, and he applied it to a quarter of land which eventually turned into the city of Albert Lea.

Lorenzo was a very uncouth man, and he was not the right fit as a town proprietor.

By 1854, he had lost his entire fortune, moved again, under somewhat of a cloud to Walnut Lake just south of Wells, Minnesota.

It was here that Lorenzo in 1863 shot and killed his neighbor, a Frenchman by the name of Crappieu (ph) over a dispute on the land claim.

He left that area and went by oxcart to Bismarck.

Bismarck was a rough-and-tough town then, so the Merry's wintered in a tent in Bismarck, and then the following year moved up to the Merry homestead at Painted Woods.

That was a legitimate homestead, but he had had to wait because the territory hadn't even been surveyed yet.

Lorenzo got his homestead in 1883.

Literally he had squatted on the land for 9 years before he got it.

♪ ♪ The folks who come to our particular region come literally from all over the Western Hemisphere-- Swedes, Norwegians, Germans, Germans from Russia, individuals from the eastern portion of the United States, individuals from English-speaking Canada.

They come with a variety of skills.

They come with a variety of talents with regard to homesteading the Great Plains.

Some of them have had agricultural experience.

Other folks come to North Dakota with very little sense of what it means to be a homesteader.

Some were prepared, some of the people who settled on the Great Plains were actual farmers.

Many, many were not.

They believed the literature at the time that farming on the Great Plains was easy, that all you basically had to do was throw seeds in the ground, and an Eden would sprout before your eyes.

In reality, as people who live there today know, farming on the Great Plains is a very, very difficult venture.

And so those who did not know how to farm were oftentimes the first to leave.

In the 1880's, significant numbers of Jewish individuals were recruited to come to North Dakota or what would become North Dakota, and many of them had lived in urban settings in Poland, in Russia, and had very, very little experience with regard to actually farming.

And some folks, of course, come from places where they farm successfully, but where they farm successfully where there's 40 inches of precipitation per year, and then, or course, always remember that individuals come with different financial levels, so that some of them have a team of oxen and some of them don't have a team of oxen.

Some of them have several children to help out, some of them don't have several children to help out, although most people do come in some type of community whether it's Norwegians coming from the same fishing village, whether it's a number of cousins or young relatives that decide to move together.

Most people at least had some type of social support when they got here.

Christoph and George Just came in a group of 5 families, all of them under 30 years of age, and Christoph and George decided they really missed the rest of their family so they brought their father and remaining siblings.

My ancestor, Jacob, was 14, and 10 years later he decided it was time to homestead.

There wasn't great land left in McIntosh County so he and his brother Frederick got on their bicycles, and they bicycled to McLean County north of Bismarck, 100 to 140 miles, to see what land was available.

They packed "heat," so to speak.

They took a pistol with them, camped out under the stars, and when they got there, they found what they thought was suitable land and proceeded to file for their homestead, and Jacob realized that there was a quarter of land not spoken for next to his quarter, and he was planning to marry the lovely Catharina Bossler.

So he came back to Wishek.

He suggested that Catharina should homestead the adjacent quarter, which she did, and a short time later, they made their way to the Wilton County Courthouse and married.

No one seemed to make an issue of it, however, questions were asked.

She proceeded to preempt on her land and get it paid for so that she wouldn't be at risk of losing it.

Homestead law dictated that you needed to live on your acreage and prove that.

Jacob and Catharina built their little house right on the quarter section line, and that's where they lived for many years.

Can't you just envision-- I'm guessing the bed was probably on the section line.

I'm not sure how they did it, but they did it, and what a great way to live the American dream.

(Kimberly Porter) I've heard it said there were no women homesteaders.

Not only do we know there were wives who were homesteaders, we also know that there were single women.

(harmonica & guitar play the blues) ♪ ♪ The original Homestead Act of 1862 as passes through Congress says that to claim your free piece of land, you must be the head of your household which generally means a man, but, of course, there is the opportunity for women if they are single, widowed, divorced to claim a piece of land.

Women did indeed homestead on their own.

(woman, as Georgia Townsend) "Dear Joan, I have arrived!

After many and diverse stages I am on my claim-- the Southwest quarter of Section 6, Township 145, Range 94, with a rice pudding boiling on the parlor cookstove.

Thursday we unloaded my goods from the train all day, and early Friday morning Ringling and his circus left the town.

I led on my bicycle.

Cass followed with his horse, Boxer, and my democrat wagon loaded with necessary leftovers.

Bill with my load of lumber and my portable house came next, and then Harland on the bandwagon and then Ringling himself in the top buggy.

After dinner we all pitched camp on my land.

Dirty!

You never saw such a dirty bunch!

But there is very little wind, and the mornings and evenings are beautiful.

The meadowlarks sings beautifully, and altogether it is fine and dandy.

I told Mother I didn't like to be my own trumpeter, but I didn't believe that Father need be ashamed that I was only a girl!

Love to all, George PS.

Forgot to say my nose is peeling!"

♪ ♪ (woman) Walter Prescott Webb in his really famous historical work characterized men and women as very, very different.

The men were enthusiastic, they were adventuresome, they were seeking adventure.

But women were reluctant, lonely, scared-- and those stereotypes really didn't pan out.

The reasons for homesteading, I didn't find were different for men and women.

Women sought adventure, just like men.

One of them mentioned they were simply curious.

They looked at this big map, and in the middle there wasn't very much, and they wondered what was out here!

I think one of the basic reasons was financial as it was for men.

They wanted this to be a successful economic venture.

(man) My grandmother was Tyra Schanche, and her claim was in Williams County just south of Tioga, just about to the Missouri River.

She married my grandfather Henric.

He had just gotten through with his residency so they emigrated to the United States and ended up in North Dakota.

He caught meningitis from one of his patients, and he died leaving Tyra and 3 small children.

She and Henric were very much in love, and that was a very hard thing on her that he died.

She had a strong will, and she didn't want to go back and be a burden on the family.

They had with them a nurse that they brought from Norway.

They were very close, and the two ladies decided to go out and claim the homestead, eventually get enough money, maybe sell the claim, and go back to Sweden.

Tyra claimed 320 acres.

The nurse was slightly less than that.

They had primarily cattle and horse that they raised.

Once she got out there, she really felt that that was a good thing for her, that it was healthy, that she liked working with the animals.

She just decided that she was gonna make this work.

She had 3 young girls.

She put them all through college.

I think on her will she made all that happen.

She makes reference to the fact that had she either gone back to Sweden or continued to live in the town, she would be agonizing over his death.

Whereas out on the homestead, she was so busy that she felt that it helped her get over the fact that the love of her life was gone.

♪ ♪ (narrator) The Homestead Act made it possible for many disenfranchised people to finally own land-- women, freed slaves, immigrants, urban poor, even eventually Confederate soldiers.

But one group was not permitted to file a homestead claim-- Native Americans.

(flute plays softly) (man, as Robert Little Bird) "In 1888, the government wanted us to quit living in tipis and to build log houses.

Up to this time, we were healthy, and strong but after that many became sick and weak.

The government gave each Indian family 5 to 10 head of cattle.

We got along nicely.

All the Indians had cattle and horses.

After the reservation was opened up to white people in 1915, the government and the white people soon forced us out of the cattle business.

The government encouraged us to lease or sell our cattle and horses.

We no longer did any work, and hard times came upon us."

♪ ♪ (narrator) Following the 1862 Dakota Conflict, starvation among the Dakota Indians on the Santee reservation in Nebraska led a determined group to force the government to examine that prohibition.

♪ ♪ Many of the Dakota were Christians.

So at one point, 24 families from Santee reservation, Christian families, just got up and moved along with their minister up to the area of what is now Flandreau, South Dakota, and they just settled there.

They said that they weren't gonna go back to Santee because people died there, and they were trying to become farmers, and they were trying to be civilized, they were trying to be good Christians.

And the question arose, can they homestead?

And there was a big debate that went back and forth in the Dakotas as well as in Congress and at the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and the issue was, Indians weren't people.

They had no standing in law so how could they possible file on a homestead?

Even though, of course, we would let foreigners do it.

Eventually somebody finally said why don't we just be logical?

We want them to assimilate, don't we?

And so they allowed them to take homesteads if they agreed to give up being Indian-- that they would have to renounce their tribalism.

So 23 or 24 people went to Yankton, which was then the capitol, and filed, agreeing to give up their Indian citizenship and to just be like other Americans.

They filed around Flandreau.

They became taxpayers, private property owners, so you had the curious thing of Indians taking advantage of the Act and the United States deciding that they were people.

One of the reasons they were allowed to do that was because some of the non Indians, the German Russians in the area who had been homesteading already, said they really wanted the Dakotah to be their neighbors.

They were good neighbors, in fact, they were way better than the Norwegians.

♪ ♪ (narrator) In order to "prove up" or gain final title to their land, homesteaders had to build a residence at least 12 x 14 feet and live on the land the required number of years, break a specified percentage of land, and plant a harvestable crop.

For some, starting out with very few resources, this could seem like an insurmountable task requiring unremitting labor.

My great grandfather left Russia.

He was secretly taken out.

My great grandmother had no say in the matter.

She followed to the United States with her two children in tow.

She was pregnant at the time.

When they finally arrived, and they got on the land, they saw it--my grandmother just fell to the ground and said, "It's all earth and sky."

Great grandma knew as most of the German Russian women knew that they had to supply all the stuff that was going to go between the earth and sky.

Great grandma knew the sheer panic that she had at that moment when she realized what they were up against.

♪ ♪ I always tell my students if their grandparents, great grandparents, whatever generation it needs to be, were homesteaders, that they come from some pretty fine, stern stuff-- they did something-- this is not for the faint of heart.

I am indeed as a Norwegian as you can get.

All my great grandparents came from Norway to the Flom area, around Faith, Fossum, the Mahnomen area.

They knew that land was available and free because of the Homestead Act, so they knew what they were aiming for.

I don't think they were expecting anything of what we might think about now.

They lived in sod houses until they could build log houses.

If they ran out of kerosene which they did regularly, they burned lard.

There was not many stores around so they always had livestock, so there was milking, and there was feeding, and crops, etc., in fact, I can't even imagine how hard that they worked back in those days, but you know, you pushed a plow, you didn't climb onto the tractor.

Growing up on a farm, you had chores very early in life, 3 or 4 or 5 years old, you fed the chickens or the pigs or something.

So imagine when you had nothing else.

Your entire livelihood depended upon that cow and that pig and those chickens.

They were well taken care of, and that was usually the children.

My mother used to tell me stories of how hard the work was and how it never stopped.

Her father was very stern.

There was no fooling around with him.

Normal farming life could be pretty serious.

If you cut yourself, you sewed it up or, you know, just used mud to shut it.

So it wasn't an easy living.

They all somehow made it through.

I knew most of them-- that's how long they lived!

I think they were very happy with what they had.

Because of their longevity and their cheerful demeanor, they did well for themselves.

In fact, one of the farms that they began is still in the family, and it's been in the family for roughly 130 years.

You get these images sometimes of the tremendous danger involved, and there was danger involved.

There's no doubt about it-- medical emergencies that could not be treated, if you throw in not only missing your home community or your family members, your religious background.

We hear of some of the Jewish homesteaders who had no rabbi for months if not years at a time and could not properly celebrate marriages, could not properly celebrate births, could not properly slaughter livestock.

♪ ♪ (man, as Ed) "April 10, 1885.

Dear Ev, About goin' west, if you can put up with any amount of inconveniences, hard grub, hard fare generally, work hard morning, noon, and night, stick too it and never let up.

Start on the ground floor and hold your grip, be ready to do anything that turns up, you can make a success of it in the west.

The west is no place for soft saps nor for faint hearts.

All she asks from those who come is to stick by her, and those who stick, win.

Love to Lizzie and Aff, Ed (narrator) Some homesteaders came to the Great Plains with enough money to start out with the comforts of home, others barely scraped by.

Most survived by working sunup to sundown and doing without.

(Cap Renner) The wife's relatives got here.

They knew that there was someone here to give 'em shelter for a little while until they found land that they could claim and where great grandfather thought he would want to settle.

They lived in a dugout thing with chickens, it was also the chicken coop.

He also worked laying brick in Dickinson, building Dickinson, so he'd walk.

They said how he would go to Dickinson and build for contractors up there, and then weekends he'd come home, and he'd carry a 50-pound sack of flour on his shoulder and bring the flour home that the wife and the kids could keep on baking while he was gone again-- that's what they survived on!

They had to work very hard, and my mother had to work right beside my grandpa.

In fact, my mother told me that they were out working in the fields, and grandma went into labor, and she went to the side of the field and gave birth.

She went to the house and handed the baby over to one of the older kids, and within hours, she was back in the fields again.

I can't imagine it.

(Kimberly Porter) It was hard work.

There's no doubt about it, very hard work.

We do have a certain image of what it means to be a homesteader, what it means to be a pioneer.

If you think about free land, which is what the Homestead Act promised you-- there's no such thing as free land.

There's no such thing as a free lunch.

You would end up spending a fair amount of money to claim this piece of free ground, whether it was the acquisition of horses, acquisition of oxen, buying boards for a barn, buying boards to line a well.

It's been estimated that free piece of land was probably going to cost you approximately $2000 to $2500, but still it is "free," and people took advantage of it; they moved west.

(narrator) That $2500 investment represented a terrible gamble for homesteaders given that the average annual income for an urban worker in the 1880's was only $250 per year.

After paying for their passage and buying basic farm necessities, many arrived on their homesteads with little cash left.

If their first crop failed, they risked losing everything.

(Margit Walstad) Poor people had to start from scratch, you know.

My dad and mother, they worked on a farm down by Haniford and I suppose saved up their money maybe and came up.

It was tough sometimes.

I can remember hearing a lot about mortgages.

(laughs) ♪ ♪ They didn't live as we do now.

They ate what they raised, and it was a good life.

They didn't grumble because they didn't have anything.

They just went about with what they had.

(narrator) Even given the huge investment and hard labor needed, the promise of free land continued to draw homesteaders, filling up the fertile tall-grass prairie and pushing settlement into the dry, marginal land of the high plains.

There were factors and a force out there convincing people that farming would be easy on the Great Plains.

The railroads had a vested interest in having people settle on the plains because it meant their ability to unload some of the free land that they were given.

It also meant that they could make money hauling freight out and crops back off the Great Plains.

State and regional and territorial promoters had an interest in seeing the region get settled, and so they would produce a lot of literature creating the impression that farming would be easy on the Great Plains.

Railroad promotional literature had come up with some pretty crazy things-- notions of the rain follows the plow.

If you just plow up the prairie grasses, the rain will follow.

Some theories held rain would follow railroads because you had 2 lines of steel going across the prairie, and it would set up some sort of electrical charge that would release the rain in the atmosphere.

You have to understand that it was 100 years ago or more, and people were much more gullible during the period, and they wanted to believe.

They wanted to believe that they could make it on the Great Plains.

They could be successful with their free farm.

(narrator) Reflecting these beliefs, Congress passed the Timber Culture Act of 1873 which allowed homesteaders to file a "tree claim" for an extra 160 acres of land if they planted 40 acres in trees with the expectation that trees would increase humidity and therefore cause more rainfall.

It was believed through different types of farming techniques of dryland farming that you could actually turn the semiarid parts of the northern plains into lush, very profitable parts of the world, and you could populate that in almost Midwestern density.

That movement led to a huge land rush into the western Dakotas, eastern Montana, eastern Iowa, the prairie provinces in Canada.

There were an enormous number of people that poured into that part of the world.

(man) My grandparents were Emil and Barbara Svihovec.

Emil was one of 7 brothers who all homesteaded in the very same spot together.

They each had adjoining quarters of land in the 1906, 1907 period.

Historians tell us it's likely the only case in the history of the American west where 7 brothers homesteaded side by side.

The 7 brothers came from a tiny village, population of no more than 100 in south of Bohemia in what is now the Czech Republic.

Over a period of a couple of years they came to America taking land near Renville in Minnesota.

Most of the land there they had to rent because the homestead land had all been gone, and so when the final chance for homesteading occurred in 1906, 1907, it was the last great opportunity to secure a free parcel of land, they made a rush for southwest North Dakota, homesteaded together on the Henniger and Adams county line.

When they came out, they caught a wagon and came down from Gladstone, North Dakota which was on the Northern Pacific mainline.

They didn't have much time, and it was a long trip so they quickly picked out land, each one saying, "I'll take that quarter, you take that quarter."

When they got done several years later, my grandfather Emil realized he'd gotten the worst quarter.

It was sort of stuck in a hollow and rocky.

He was always sort of bummed that he hadn't given it more thought.

(narrator) As the century came to an end, it seemed as if homesteaders were out of luck finding productive land.

Still, even at the end of the great land rush, some hit the jackpot.

(man) A homesteader, in this case my mother, Alma Thompson King.

She came from Elbow Lake, Minnesota, and she homesteaded in 1916.

It was kind of unusual because homesteading rush was in the early 1900's, and her claim is a school section.

For some reason, the powers that be said we're gonna open this section for homesteaders, and there were, of course, so many applicants that they had to have a lottery.

I'm sure my dad told her about the lottery, and so she signed up, and lo and behold she won!

He finally proposed.

I don't know if the homestead was the reason he proposed or not, but he did.

This was in 1916, and 1916 was a leap year.

And in those innocent days, the unwritten rule was that girls could ask the boys to marry them in leap year so my mother told my dad I will not marry you in 1916 because it's leap year; you have to wait.

They were finally married July 18, 1917.

Her trying to win the lottery was unusual, but she was a lucky lady-- she used to play bingo all the time--she always won.

(narrator) Even those fortunate enough to claim land found their luck ran out.

(woman, as Julia Gage Carpenter) "May 6, 1885.

This is awful country, and I want to live East.

Freezing cold-- milk froze in cupboard, water froze by our bedside-- we suffered with cold all day.

I sat with my feet in the oven most of the day and bowed over the stove.

Although we had a hot fire, the storm was so cold that my breath came out like smoke as is often seen out-of-doors on cold winter mornings.

Such is the life in a claim shanty of the far west.

Julia Carpenter."

♪ ♪ (narrator) Early reports and railroad promotion had described the climate as temperate and the winters mild, that rainfall would increase as more land was cultivated.

Nothing could have been further from the truth.

The first winter they nearly starved to death.

A prairie fire had arrived just before they got there and burned off everything from the Rainy Buttes of New England all the way to the Missouri River so there was no food at all for the livestock.

They ran out of food, were snowbound in.

My grandfather Emil and his brother took off to try to find food up near the railroad mainline and found a woman homesteader who had some food who provided them sausage, and they were so famished they ate the sausage in pretty much one gulp.

Sausage has a string tied onto it, and my great uncle ate the whole thing, and they had to pull the string back out of his stomach 'cause they were so famished, so it was awfully grim.

There's no question that homesteading was not easy.

The weather I think was the most significant factor here-- drought, wildfires, or having a crop totally hailed out.

Some of the reminisces are heart-wrenching.

You needed to have a crop make it, and there were periods when people for 2 or 3 years really had no crop.

(Steven Kinsella) My ancestors on my father's side were homesteaders.

They fled famine in Ireland and settled on small, successful farms in southeastern Minnesota.

Then at the turn of the century, the lure of free land on the Great Plains proved too much for them so they sold their highly successful small farms and took 160-acre homesteads in the Bowbells Northgate area in North Dakota.

They did well for a little while when it rained, when commodity prices were up, but then like a lot of homesteaders, they eventually lost their farms due to drought, due to The Great Depression, due to low commodity prices.

As I was growing up, I was always haunted by the existence of abandoned farmhouses on the Great Plains.

At the time in the '60's and 1970's, abandoned farmhouses were everywhere, and as we drove around, I often wondered if there'd been families like ours living in these houses, and if so, where they'd gone.

On top of it, every one of these houses to me as a child looked like their existence had been interrupted.

These weren't houses where people had moved to a bigger house down the road.

They were houses that had their existence interrupted due to factors beyond the control of those who lived there.

♪ ♪ (man, as Ola Nilsen) "January 2nd 1879.

Dear Parents and Siblings, It was a great sorrow to lose little Carl and then my dear sister left this world so suddenly.

The only consolation is knowing they are better off than we.

There has been much diphtheria, and several children have died.

I am afraid it will come into my house, but I hope God will let me keep the children I have left.

It is only my children that keep me going.

I suppose you are aware that my life is very heavy.

We have had 5 bad years, so the worry of feeding my family has weighed heavily on my mind.

I have considered selling.

I could get $1800 or $2000 which would pay off my debt with some remaining for a fresh start.

I could so gladly turn over all of this responsibility to God, but as long as He continues to give my fingers the needed strength, he must intend that I should carry on.

Greet all who wish to hear from me, and especially I greet you.

Big Ola and family."

(narrator) As homesteads failed and burgeoning prairie towns emptied, fingers pointed at the railroads.

(W. Thomas White) I think it'd be fair to say that the railroads in general and the homesteaders in general enjoyed a love-hate relationship.

The railroads were crucial for homesteaders to get their crops to market as well as to receive goods arriving from the East Coast.

They loved to have them.

They would move towns even to make sure they were close to the railroads.

It was absolutely crucial to have access to rail transportation, and, therefore, the national market.

That's the love aspect of this relationship.

But not so loving, the hateful part is, the railroads were seen as rapacious, as charging too much, as gouging, as a special interest in our terms, thereby were frowned upon.

They were seen as a grasping institution run by people who didn't work hard and opposed to those who tilled the earth.

(narrator) Whatever the railroad's faults, the fact is that it wasn't just the railroads that caused homesteaders to fail.

Blizzards killed livestock, drought dried up tree claims, hail destroyed crops, grasshoppers devoured what was left, and disease decimated families.

In the 74 years between the signing of the Homestead Act in 1862 until it effectively ended in 1936, more than 2 million claims had been filed.

Of those 2 million claims, fewer than 40% were successfully proved up.

(narrator) Despite adversity, the diaries and letters of even the most struggling homesteaders show dogged determination and the belief that if they could just hang on, things would look up for them.

♪ ♪ (woman, as Mary Carpenter) "July 10, 1873, Dear Aunt Martha, We arrived a week ago last Monday after a journey of 2 weeks.

We sacrificed considerably just to get here.

However, George feels better to be on his own place than where we were before.

But our circumstances now are very discouraging.

The grasshoppers have destroyed the gardens here so all we have are a few potatoes growing.

We have everything excepting our meat and potatoes to buy till we can raise something-- and not a bit of money.

Our appetites are good, which seems rather unfortunate.

I try to trust in God's promises, but we can't expect him to work miracles nowadays.

Nevertheless, all that is expected of us is to do the best we can, and that we shall certainly endeavor to do.

The first 2 years will be hard very probably.

If we struggle through them, we stand a chance to do pretty well, I think.

With love from the children and myself to all, your affectionate niece.

Mary E. L. Carpenter" (mandolin plays, bright in tone) (narrator) Despite the hardships, many homesteaders were able to pass on their legacy.

Today, throughout the Great Plains, thousands of farms are registered as Century Farms-- having been in continuous operation by a single family for more than 100 years.

♪ ♪ My name is Mark Opp, and we're on the family homestead here that was homesteaded by the early settlers in 1892.

When I was growing up and picking rocks, I wondered sometimes why they picked this land.

I think back, and I don't know how they did it.

I respect our older generation.

I think they, they didn't consider it work.

They considered it opportunity.

Land to me is, it's priceless.

I'm a 4th generation, and hopefully my son someday can be on this, and we can make it 5 generations.

I think that's a real treasure.

This is my place; this is my paradise.

(chuckles) ♪ ♪ (plectrum banjo plays "Oh Suzanna") (narrator) In the end, the Homestead Act achieved Jefferson's dream of settling the Great American Desert with the hardy descendents of yeoman farmers.

Horace Greely, Abraham Lincoln, and other architects of the Homestead Act foresaw the plains covered with family farms, schools and churches dotting the landscape, the fertile soil raising crops and livestock to feed the world.

But those homesteaders, in building a nation, also built the unique character of those who came after them.

Those of our predecessors who were successful in those years, we sometimes chastise them for their... optimism.

Elwyn Robinson, the great historian of North Dakota, says that these folks came in with the "too much" mistake.

They came in in large numbers, and they created too many schools, too many churches, too many levels of government, too many miles of railroad track.

I don't think it was the "too much" mistake.

I think it was a boisterous sense of optimism that these folks knew that they were on the cutting edge of what it meant to be an American, and they realized that this was going to be the last generation to have this opportunity to claim free land under the Homestead Act, and they grabbed a challenge.

I'm not certain I would've been up to the challenge, but I'm grateful that others were!

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ (woman) Production funding for "Homesteading" is provided by... North Dakota Humanities Council North Dakota Council on the Arts Minnesota Arts & Cultural Herita and the citizens of Minnesota