Farmers’ life issues in American history

American Story

Realizing the Dream: Living on the Great Plains

In 1873, Milton. Milton Leeper took his wife Hattie and their child Anna, got on a carriage piled with all their belongings, and set out for the land in Boone County, Nebraska. Once they arrived at the land they had rights to reclaim, the Leepers began to look confidently toward the future. Hattie wrote in a letter to her sister who lives in Iowa: "I love where we live so much that when we have a comfortable house and 100 acres of land to cultivate, I would not trade it for anything. !" However, Milton only cultivated 13 acres of land here before it was interrupted by natural disasters. Swarms of locusts swarmed the area, forcing the Leeper family to leave their land and seek refuge in the nearby town of Fremont.

The Leeper family spent two years in Fremont Township. Milton first worked in a store and later as a sharecropper. Hattie stayed with her employer, mending clothes, feeding chickens and herding cattle. Although the family struggled on the poverty line, they never gave up hope. Hatty admitted, "It is indeed very difficult, we have bad luck!", "But we will still retain the ownership of the land, no one wants to leave their home and wander around." In 1876, they successfully returned to their land and started a new life with only $27 left.

The locust plague was over, the rains were abundant, and the church was within half a mile. Like everyone else, the Leepers slowly became wealthy. In the comfortable thatched house, they added two more daughters, and the Leepers raised them in this thatched house that was shabby on the outside but warm inside. As Harty said, "The people who owned the land lived as decently as the people in Chicago."

However, the good times were short-lived. Hattie became pregnant again, but died in childbirth. Heartbroken, Milton buried his wife and unborn child and gave up the land he owned. Although Leeper tried this kind of life in at least four more places before his death in 1905, his last psychological defense had already been broken down at that moment.

In the same year that the Leepers acquired land in Boone County, another family of Danes settled 200 miles west of Omaha, Rasmus and Arnie Eyre. Ane Ebbesen and their 8-year-old son Peter's family came to the United States from Denmark in 1868 because they were attracted by the "enough free land available to those who wanted to cultivate it." By 1870, they had expanded their farming lands westward to Council Bluffs, Iowa. There they obtained the necessary funds to engage in farming. Rasmus built the railroad, Arnie worked as a cleaner at a local hotel, and little Peter delivered drinking water to the workers laying gas pipes in the town.

Like the Leepers, the Ebsens eagerly settled and began farming. Peter recalled that most of the problems they anticipated did not occur. Even the rumors about the Sioux were proven to be unfounded (in the eyes of the settlers, the Sioux Indians were "flying devils" who wreaked havoc everywhere). The real problems families encounter are the ones they don't expect, such as infestations of rattlesnakes, locusts, and prairie fires. The locust threat was similar to what the Leepers had faced, but unlike the Leepers, the Ebsens did not leave the land. Despite often suffering from hunger, they survived the locust plague that lasted for three years.

Over the next few years, things gradually improved for the Ebsen family. Ebsen cleared more than 80 acres of land and purchased another 80 acres along the railroad. Thatched huts were built one after another, and eventually there was even a two-story building, which Peter bought with the money he earned from teaching. When they are 50 years old they can proudly look at their crops growing lushly. However, natural disaster struck again: raging hail almost destroyed everything.

However, the Ebsen family was lucky.

A banker purchased all of their homestead, albeit for less than they imagined—$1,000 less than they estimated. But that’s enough to buy a “modest” house in town. Later, they bought an ordinary two-story house with nine rooms near the park.

Although the stories of the Leeper and Ebsen families are different in details and endings, they reflect the problems faced by rural America in the last quarter of the 19th century. As a mature industrial economy transformed agriculture and permanently shifted the center of economic power from farms to cities and factories, farmers realized that their traditional dreams of agricultural self-sufficiency and prosperity were out of reach. Even a bumper harvest doesn't guarantee a dream will come true. A farmer said: "Two years ago we were asked to grow food, and we did it. The weather was smooth and we got a bumper harvest, but what was the result? Cotton cost 8 cents per catty, buckwheat 10 cents, beef 2 cents, butter and eggs. It’s even less valuable, and that’s the result.” Native Americans also found that changes in rural life affected their values ??and dreams. As Sioux Indian Chief Red Cloud said to the prospectors in Wyoming: "We don't need you, you scared the buffalo away."

This chapter explores several basic principles of this book It examines the transformation of agriculture in the late 19th century, highlighting the ways in which rural America industrialized and how various groups, brown, white, yellow, and black, responded to new economic and social conditions. Against the background of the large-scale rise of agriculture, natural resource development, and the development of the Great Plains in the West, this chapter discusses the impact of white settlement on western tribes and analyzes how Indians were able to preserve their traditions and culture. Through the analysis of the South, a sharp contrast is presented between white people's efforts to establish a "New South" and the underlying reality of race and cotton issues. This chapter shows that racial discrimination and the economic system of labor compensation characterized black life in the South during this period, while also describing the rise of black resistance strategies and ideologies. Finally, this chapter highlights how agricultural issues in the late nineteenth century continued to shape much of the character of American agricultural life in the twentieth century and to transform American farmers into reformers.