Editor's Note
This is the fourth in a series of guest posts by Andrew Klumpp, a PhD candidate in American religious history at Southern Methodist University. His research investigates rising rural-urban tensions in the nineteenth-century Midwest, focusing on rural understandings of religious liberty, racial strife, and reform movements. His work has been supported by grants from the State Historical Society of Iowa, the Van Raalte Institute, and the Joint Archives of Holland and has appeared in Methodist History and the 2016 volume The Bible in Political Debate. He also currently serves as the associate general editor of the Historical Series of the Reformed Church in America.
A picture of the family of Mordecai and Phebe Smith has been on my father’s desk for as long as I can remember. Taken in the early 1880s, the photograph includes eleven somber pioneers—Mordecai, Phebe and their nine surviving children. They represent the first of my ancestors to put down roots on the prairie. The picture is valuable heirloom in its own right, but on its reverse, it also contains a revealing glimpse of the first impressions my ancestors got of their new home. The note reads: “On the eleventh day of June 1869, Mordecai Smith landed in Afton Township, Cherokee County, Iowa, to take up his homestead claim. There was nothing there but tall grass, prairie, elk, and Indians.”
Other settlers who arrived in the area at the time provided more colorful descriptions than the Smith’s rather benign appraisal. Immigrant groups often wrote home about the paradise they had discovered, sending enthusiastic letters to friends and family announcing the bounty that awaited anyone who could make their way to these Midwestern prairies. Some, such as early Dutch settler, E. J. G. Bloemendaal complained about the lack of infrastructure but celebrated the agricultural promise and ample room for development offered by the prairies.[1]Conversely, Landon Taylor, an itinerant Methodist preacher charged with traversing the prairies regularly, described them as a perpetual test of human fortitude. He described them as “beset with dangers,” “isolated,” and “largely treeless, strewed by innumerable ponds… intersected by sluggish streams,” and prone to the “terrors of far ranging prairie fires… and the terrible blizzards of winter.”[2]
Whether in the matter-of-fact appraisal of the Smiths, the full-throated endorsement of immigrants like Bloemendaal, or the dire warnings of Taylor, each of these early accounts of the prairies captures their mystery, potential, and expansiveness. For new settlers, this terrain held both promise and peril.
Nearly 150 years later, the prairies described by these early settlers no longer exist. Cornfields, rural communities, and a relentlessly ordered grid of country roads now mark an environment where Native Americans once lived and six-foot tall prairie grasses and elk dominated the landscape. Despite this environmental transformation, the memory of the virgin prairies lingers.
In many rural Midwestern communities “the prairies” still exist as both a historic and contemporary shorthand for the ideals connected to the early challenges and opportunities the prairie offered the first white settlers. The prairies are not just a place. They are also a set of ideals that connote values, traits, and behaviors forged on the. In the 1860s and 70s, education and class meant very little if you happened to be living in a dugout and were preparing to battle the fickle and life-threatening whims of the weather on the prairie. The first settlers had to work hard in the face of adversity and band together with those around them.
The history of the prairie as synonymous with the ideals it cultivated traces its roots back to some of the first histories of the region. Writing in 1902, Iowan Benjamin Shambaugh described the prairie as a “great leveler” and argued, “The conditions of life there were such as to make men plain, common, unpretentious —genuine… It made men really democratic.”[3]Embracing the ideals of the prairie meant men and women worked hard, appreciated simplicity, and treated one another as equals. Many historians have written excellent studies of these ideals and their connection to the frontier, the West, or the prairie. They have expertly documented how homesteading, frontier living, and the hard life of settling on the prairie shaped men and women during these early years.
In a blog series about rural memory though, I want to conclude by highlighting not only the origin of these ideals but also how rural communities have perpetuated them and remained shaped by their memory. Homages to the native prairie still exist. Small plots of farmland dedicated growing native species pepper the landscape, though they may go unnoticed to an untrained eye. Like little unassuming prairie memorials, these modest nature preserves gesture toward the environment that predated the industrial agriculture that now dominates the landscape. They remind rural folks of the challenges that their ancestors faced and potentially assuage any guilt they might feel about the loss of this native prairie due, in part, to the industriousness and thrift inculcated by the legacy of prairie ideals.
Unlike Inkpaduta, the subject of my first post in this series, the stories of these early pioneers are well preserved even today. County historical societies restore old schoolhouses, county courthouses display wagon wheels from the pioneers, and the story of the hard work put in by ancestors on the prairie continues to motivate many prairie inhabitants whose roots go back generations. The prairie and the ideals it fostered in these first white settlers sits at the heart of historical memory of many of these communities.
In 2007, my grandmother wrote a note to accompany the photograph of Mordecai and Phebe Smith’s family. “To our ancestors,” she scribbled, “The principles they have lived by that have been passed down to us and we are passing on to our children are to live by the Golden Rule, work hard and be honest.” In a bit more simplistic form, these are the prairie ideals identified by Shambaugh in 1902, rooted in the historic stories of the prairies and the efforts settlers had to undertake to survive on them. Yet, rather than in an academic study or on monument, they appear in a note written by my grandmother—a daughter of the prairie. On a family heirloom, she connected her ideals to the first generation to arrive on the prairie, giving them historic context and weight. At the same time, she also communicated a desire to pass along to the next generation the memory of the prairie and the characteristics it cultivates.
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[1]E.J.G. Bloemendaal, My America (Pella: The Wright Place, 2009), 95
[2]Quoted in Lyle Johnston, The Sioux City District: A History(Sioux City, Iowa: Morningside College Printing Department, 1978), 5
[3]Benjamin Franklin Shambaugh, Constitutions of Iowa(Des Moines: The Historical Department of Iowa,1902), 28.
5 Thoughts on this Post
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I happen to be reading (rather slowly) S. Hahn’s _A Nation Without Borders_ (2016) and he has a sentence or two on the Homestead Act suggesting that it didn’t benefit ordinary pioneers as much as it did wealthy speculators. However, the story of your ancestors’ arrival on the prairie shows that it did benefit at least some non-wealthy people. I don’t know what the scholarly consensus is on this issue, or even if there is a consensus.
More to the central point of the post, I wonder how the ideal of hard work (presumably leading to or supporting some reasonable level of material comfort) gets reconciled with reality in those rural communities that have experienced economic decline. Or does the ideal in its “pioneer” form only resonate in those rural areas that have remained relatively prosperous?
Thanks for your comment, Louis. I agree that the Homestead Act did benefit many wealthy speculators; however, it might be that it did so to different extents in different areas of the country. It was a bit of a mixed bag in Western Iowa where my family settled. While there were plenty of homesteaders, within a year of my ancestors’ arrival, much of their county’s prime land had been claimed or purchased by speculators. I’ve also found that the Homestead Act could benefit well-organized immigrant groups. In a few instances, I know of groups that pooled their funds and coordinated with one another to claim quite a bit of land centered around a central spot that they hoped to develop into a small town.
Your second question is really intriguing to me. In some ways, it makes me think of some of the research that’s been done on the Midwestern Farm Crisis of the 1980s. In particular, historians have shown how the steep economic decline in many of these communities with pioneer roots led not only to despair but deep existential crises– depression, suicide, etc. In this case, individuals and communities that held to a belief that hard work should lead to improvements in material comfort faced persistent and devastating economic decline. This led to some deep existential crises for individuals, families, and communities, as well as an exodus of many rural folks who were forced to move in order to find work.
Additionally, and this is just a bit of speculation, I wonder if such hardship could lead to the feelings of resentment, bitterness or being forgotten that we often see in many rural communities faced with declining economies and/or populations today. I suspect that rather than abandoning central ideals tied to key historic community narratives some may blame outsiders for exploiting their hard work or overlooking their contributions.
Thanks for the comment and the interesting question. I appreciate it.
AK
Thanks for the reply, Andrew.
My great grandparents settled in southern Illinois in 1842, great grandfather serving as minister to a church founded by Covenanter Presbyterians who’d left SC because of slavery, a church which subsequently split over the issue of music with his supporters joining the United Presbyterians in 1870. But there are no relatives still living in the area, all the descendants have left for more opportunity elsewhere and to avoid the hard work of farming. I did so myself, leaving a small farm in upstate NY.
Hard times may push people off farms faster, but IMHO the cities have always had their attraction. And the country has always had its deficits: consider the lack of broadband today and the problems documented by TR’s Country Life Commission. Surges of consolidation, like those in the dairy industry now, help, and they certainly increase resentment. I found this book “The politics of resentment : rural consciousness in Wisconsin and the rise of Scott Walker” rang true.
William:
I think you’re absolutely right on the attraction of cities for some rural folks is another element of this story. I also think it certainly influences the resentment that might build up, especially as families see their children leave rural communities in favor of cities. That has happened historically and continues to happen today. I am but one example of such a move.
I also wonder if part of the disconnect that ultimately leads to increased resentment is a fundamentally different way of assessing attractions and deficits of rural/urban life. Many of those who stay in rural areas, even amid hard times, still see the attractions of rural life (open spaces, the lack of traffic, the perception of lower crime rates, and a perceived connection to traditional ways of living) as outweighing deficits. Furthermore, they may perceive the deficits of rural life very differently than urban dwellers. Because many who stay, rather than those who leave, see the benefits of rural life as outweighing the attraction of the city, I wonder if that different appraisal of rural/urban attractions/deficits increases feelings of resentment for places that seem to possess different values, dominate cultural and social life, and often lure their children away from home.