On May 20, 1862, more than a year into the American Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act to secure homesteads to actual settlers on the public domain.

This piece of legislation and its promise of free land would trigger a Western migration that would alter the shape of the Great Plains and the American West.

A lot of ways the term homestead is used is it's the first place your ancestors lived in Kansas.

That was your homestead.

Well, not necessarily.

It might be in the first place your ancestors lived, but maybe they did not homestead it because homesteading was a government process where you had to live on the land.

You had to cultivate so many acres living on the land, you had to have a habitation and you had to live there for five years before you would get the land patent, which that is another term for the deed from the American government that you owned the land.

We like to think, well, it was just a bunch of individual farmers that decided to move out here and settle the West.

It didn't happen that way.

They were recruited.

You know, they didn't make that decision to come out here just because they wanted to go west.

There's the Homestead Act, there's the railroad lands, there's railroads promoting it.

It all fits together.

In 1862.

There's a lot of surplus land left in the United States, but the American Civil War was going on.

So at 1863, the law was enacted and then the homesteading came through.

The settlement by Euro-Americans in this area in western Kansas is all post-Civil War.

Now the county I'm in, Rooks County, a couple counties east, almost everything starts about 1875, those settlements and they peak is in the 1880s.

By the 1890s, most of the area settled.

And homesteading was very, very important on settling the west.

West of the Missouri River.

They planne on this prior to the Civil War, they went out to set surveyors out government surveyors, and they were supposed to do townships and ranges and they were also dividing into sections of land.

But townships and ranges were first.

And the township thing gets complicated because some townships are a geographic area and the other townships are political areas.

And you say, what's the difference?

Well, a township to the American government is an area six miles north and south and six miles east and west.

Why do we call them townships?

That was set up with the idea that it took 36 square miles to support a town.

And that's where you get the term township.

I mean, a 36 square miles.

That survey system was designed in 1795.

And was designed on settlement on the on the east.

In the east, yeah.

And then you would number the sections or the 640 acre tracts which are one mile by one mile within the township.

And that was a standardized deal.

It was all government controlled.

I mean, it was a statute set up.

So the government surveyors came out in parts of Kansas as early as the 1850s.

They were measuring it to find out how much was there instead of just estimating.

They were looking at the soils, they were looking at the natural resources as far as the surveyors would put in trees good for timber, which would be good for building houses or rock.

In Sheridan county they talked about a surplus of magnesium limestone, which is the yellow rock Now there were qualifications to do a homestead.

You were supposed to be at least 21 years of age or the head of a household, and these changed throughout time.

Or you could be a widow to get a homestead.

Another way that they had for a homestead was the soldier script.

And, you know, from the the homestead stuff that they were soldier lands were the amount served in the service, in the Union service, not the Confederate that they got credit.

Yeah.

So if those are we'll use the example of three years old had to do is live two years on their homestead to qualify for the five year minimum.

The number of Civil War veterans that came west of course at the close of the war, many of these people wondered what they were going to do.

But the Homestead Act stimulated, and I'm just amazed at how many Civil War veterans there are that came west.

But again, the government wanted to get rid of the land, get rid of the land, put people on it, taxes or there.

Commodities are grown.

And so it was just a development thing and how else to do it.

It gave everybody a chance, whether you were American born or not, because one of the qualifications is you were either an an American citizen or with the intention of becoming an American citizen.

So at the land office you signed a paper of intention that you were going to become an American citizen.

That's why a lot of people from Eastern and Western Europe came in because America and land speculators were doing a lot of advertising in Europe and saying how much free land was out here.

And you could get 160 acres, but the minimum was of the government units was 40 acres.

The thought of the time, which was kind of confusing in the eastern United States, you could make a living on 40 acres because the soil was better, that you didn't have the the extreme weather conditions that you have on the high plains and even the Kansas congressmen at the time, the senators and representatives said that doesn't work because in Kansas you can't make a living on 160 acres.

There were some of the senators of Kansas were proposing that a homestead would be one section or 640 acres.

That might be more feasible, but that didn't work.

So if a homesteader came out, he had the land and part of the homesteading law was to build a structure on it.

So a lot of people started with dugouts where there is a be a sloping bank and you would dig a hole.

No.

So here's a what is was probably used as a cellar, but this could have been the first habitation.

We have a kind of a curved wall here, but a straight wall over here, meaning that maybe there was a stove put in there.

But a lot of people lived in a cellar looking structure called the dugout.

In the early years, temporarily, it was shelter and it was an improvement on the place to comply with the homestead laws.

And later, a lot of times people built the house over the original dugout.

We're at the Prairie Museum of Art & History.

Here is a replicated sod house that was built in 1982 as a replica on the museum grounds.

And it's a very good example of the typical sod house.

The sod was available everywhere and it is from the native grass, the buffalo grass, the grama, the short grass prairie which we're in.

When you made a sod house you wanted the soil to be moist, because if it was very dry and you turned the sod over and tried to carry it and build a wall out of it, the dirt held in the roots would fall out just like transplanting any sort of plant today.

And so a sod plow was used in most cases and it was a plow that had a regular steel share on it.

But there was usually a kind of a guard that went out kind of an extension.

So as the animals, which might be oxen, mules or horses pulled the plow through on the ground and only 4 to 6 inches deep, and it picked up the sod and laid it over very gently on this big wing.

So then you'd have these strips, and if they held together, you would go and cut them.

So this appears that there's a joint here and a joint over here.

So we're talking to feet on this or cut every two feet and these walls originally were probably two feet thick.

So the desired way to build a sod house is to lay out two or three layers on the ground in one direction.

We'll call it this time, We'll do it this way.

And in the next two or three layers or maybe only one, you lay perpendicular to that the other way so that they tie into each other.

And all your joints are not the same, but they do errode.

I can stick my fingers back here.

And this on the east side has eroded three and a half to four inches since 1984.

But you can see the thickness of how deep they plowed by the grass lines.

This is a grass line.

It was on top.

A lot of times you can tell by the old photographs people got.

So from about the bottom three feet, they would kind of taper outward with the wall because this is where it errodes the most.

The windows, they are deep windows.

The window sill at the bottom is about two feet thick.

The windows in a sod house were very common because people had house plants and the window sills were big enough to put the plants in.

But you also need light because they're dark in there.

If not, it's like living in a cave.

They were espensive the glass is probably the most expensive element and also they were, you know, workable so you could get some extra ventilation in times that you needed.

Now, these houses are thick.

They do stay warm in the winter or warmer than a frame house and cooler in the summer.

Because it is hot day today and inside it is several degrees cooler.

The roof itself if it was sod covered.

If rained, it got very wet.

The sod up there wasn't enough to keep the moisture out.

So one of the methods was to put canvas ceiling in to catch that.

Now it was nice to have canvas ceiling in there because when it rained, a lot of the sod houses said that that's when all the insects came down, washed down, out through the roof and also snakes.

So you had a lot of critters coming in on these.

It might be one room such as this one where your bedroom, your kitchen, your work area and so-called living room were all in one spot.

So if you were particular, you kept everything neat and tidy because everybody saw everything you owned and if you weren't, you didn't care.

Furniture like a normal house, maybe a dresser with a mirror, maybe their grandmother's rocking chair, maybe a table that their parents started as their housekeeping that they brought from the East.

Other than that, it was pretty crude.

The bed steeds were a l ot of times very simple.

They might have been made of a few boards off the ground, but there were no springs in them.

You used rope and crisscrossed from one part of the frame to the other and then put your mattress or a heavy blanket on that.

These would probably last, as this one did, for at least 30 years.

But you could do some maintenance on them because there is patchwork in here where some of this dirt has eroded out more.

And you can tell the patchwork because they use more of an adobe mix with mud and dried grass or straw in here, and that stabilizes that, especially for a patch.

Now, did the Euro-American settlers that moved in here invent the side house?

No, they didn't.

The prehistoric Indian, such as a Pawnee and others, had been making sod houses for hundreds of years.

They knew how to do it.

And so a lot of historians say that, especially archeologists, that they should have talked to the experts and not the Euro-Americans that came in but talked to the Indians on how to how to do a sod house.

A lot of the homesteaders, not all of them, but most of them were young people.

Others sent people out.

It might be the father of the family or the head of the family would come out and try to settle land before he moved the other family out, which is a very smart thing to do to move them from the east that they can live with the parents.

And so it's good to come out early, file for your homestead and break up, cultivate a certain amount of land that showed improvement.

So that was part of the homestead law and a main one, But there's also the timber claim where in western Kansas you would plant timber and cultivate it for eight years.

Uh, have a thrifty growth as they used to call of trees.

After eight years, you could then get the patent or again the deed to do it.

And worth the timber claiming, the Timber Culture Act, of course, you didn't have to be a resident to apply for a timber claim.

But had to plant those trees.

You were supposed to.

In a way, it was scientific logic that just didn't pan out that in the eastern United States there were more trees.

With more trees, you had more humidity.

With more humidity, you had more rainfall.

With more rainfall, you grow new crops and people will come in and grow crops because the whole bottom line of the Homestead Act was to people, the plains, all this land with nobody out here.

The timber claims you claim that land, but you didn't have to be a resident.

You didn't have to live on it.

But the thing was, you had to plant ten acres of timber on a quarter section on the ground and cultivate it for eight years.

This is a remnant of a timber claim which we don't see a lot in western Kansas, recognizing this happens to be the timber claim of Thomas Pratt or Little Tom Pratt that he put the timber claim on this and it's north east of the Cottonwood Ranch and would have almost adjoined it at one time.

But a timber claim was where you could get another 160 acres or a quarter of a section of land.

by planting ten acres of timber on it, but the ten acres didn't have to be in one what would be called a woodlot.

They could be scattered out throughout.

But in John Fenton Pratt's ledgers, he orders a lot of trees and he was a middle man for the timber claims and he was ordering those out of nurseries, out of Salina and Concordia, Kansas.

There were Cottonwood, there was Ash, Green Ash, there was Box Elder, there was Mulberry, Black Lucas, Catalpa and Osage Orange, or what he would say was hedge trees.

So these are old trees.

And the mulberry.

There's no reason they would have grown up here.

Naturally, they had to be planted.

And you also see kind of here, there in a row.

Mulberries scattered by birds or other wild animals, wouldn't have happened this way If he got his patent, meaning the deed of the land and the timber claim in 1896.

So that means that these were probably planted, some of these as early as 1888.

Notice at the top of this little ravine there is a bank of rocks that is the Oglala so a stream, A spring probably came out here and that's why these are so successful in growing.

When I mentioned Catalpa in the timber claim.

This is a Catalpa.

These leaves will get a lot bigger as the summer goes on and they usually bloom a white color.

Mulberries were native to Kansas pre-historically, but the catalpa were not.

So this is one section of the timber claim.

But as I said, there was an accumulation of ten acres in the trees and behind me there is another cluster of trees down there and those happen to be cottonwood.

This is an a good example.

So you could scatter a cluster of trees in one place, another cluster of trees in another until you've got the ten acres.

And the trees seem somewhat randomly scattered now.

But to qualify for a timber claim, they recommended that the the trees be planted 12 feet apart, 12 feet between each tree and the rows, at least 12 feet apart.

And they just wanted to do that.

So the trees would be more in an area.

And also when a government inspector, if they ever inspect it, would see that it was meant to be a timber claim by the spacing of the trees.

And also that was for the trees growth.

This is an area where it's kind of hard to see, but the cottonwood trees down here were planted in a circle.

I do not know why people were doing picnicking a lot and also they're playing a lot of baseball.

Planting trees in a circle might have been an intentional thing to do a later picnic ground where people could socialize and get into the area and be shaded any time of the day somewhere around.

One reason that we don't find intact timber claims in western Kansas is because the trees have died.

But we didn't see any in the early days because you can get, as I say, 160 acres of a timber claim.

by cultivating in eight years, and out here, if the weather was good and the trees grew properly, you'd get a tree about this big around.

There was no wood out here for posts, so people would cut them down as posts and so destroy the timber claim.

Several decades ago I was out here with a state forester and we would see in the middle of a tree in a trunk where there's a small, all rotten stump about this big that had ax chop marks on it and that's where they took out the main trunk.

And this stuff was second growth going around the outside.

But that's a cut.

That's not a natural break.

And these are mulberry trees again.

But this kind of illustrates cutting out the core at the bottom.

And then the second growth coming up around them.

And that's why you really don't notice them because they were cut for posts and there isn't a lot of remnants left.

The Timber Claim Act didn't go all that well.

But they applied for a lot of them.

But it's just hard to grow timber out here.

Another way to do it was with a preemption.

A preemption you could go and sign up for a homestead, but you paid for it for a dollar and a quarter an acre, and you could have a homestead and then you could commute your homestead filing into a preemption.

So the preemption was a almost an immediate ownership, whereas the others you had had to work at those.

So actually you could get a preemption, a homestead and a timber claim.

One person could have all of those.

Abraham Pratt files for his homestead in Kirwen, Kansas.

He also bought land from the railroad The railroad land, the way it was set up with the government after the Civil War, the government was broke.

So they had all this surplus land.

So what the American government did, if they were building a transcontinental railroad that is going from coast to coast, or the companies were, the US government gave a land grant and it was... it consisted of every odd numbered section on 20 miles on each side of the railroad line, so you could buy railroad land.

And so the first part where the Cottonwood Ranch now sits is on railroad land.

Abraham Pratt came in 1880 and bought land from the Union Pacific Railroad, and he put himself and his two sons on that deed for the railroad, and they paid a $1.70 an acre for it.

They also, all three of them had timber claims.

So railroad, timber claim, they also all had homesteads and they also preempted.

We see that people are always finding the the way to find a loophole in the law.

or the statutes.

There's one story where there's this one really kind of honest people.

They had an 18 year old son and he went to the land office and they asked him if he was over 21.

And he said, yes, I am.

I am over 21.

Well, what his mother had decided is to get a piece of paper and put 21 on it, and so he could wear it in his shoe.

So when he went to file for the homestead and they asked him if he was over 21, well, technically, he was over 21 because he was standing on it.

There may be two brothers that came out.

And so you had to live on the land and build a habitation of some sort.

And so you might build a house on the quarter section line that would divide the 160 acres.

You would live on one side of the house and sleep there because you had to have it as residence and get your mail there.

And your brother was living and sleeping, but on the other side of the house, which is actually in another quarter of land.

So here you're building one structure that would qualify because it was big enough to people living in it and your residence was in two different deals.

So there was a lot of things going on and it was just driving these.

I can see these land offices mad.

There's so many things that you didn't have.

You didn't have photo IDs as we have now.

You had no driver's license.

You had no Social Security numbers.

So you could be Bill Smith in Sheridan County, you could be Jake Jones in Thomas County and Frank Brown in Sherman County.

And get all of these all this land on different names because there is no proof on it.

So that was one of the fraudulent things they did.

There's somebody trying to figure out a way everyplace.

Yeah, well, and that's what I tell too, that when a homestead is 160 acres or timber culture, it says 160 acres, but it doesn't say a half mile by a half mile.

It's surveyed that way, so we have the mental block that's half mile by a half mile.

Because John Fenton Pratt's timber claim was a half mile west of here and there's a spring fed stream.

And he went up on 30 feet on each side of the stream until he had 160 acres.

Several people may live on the same farmstead, but didn't follow through with the requirements to get the proof on it.

So a lot of people moved in and out even at that time.

The congressman, the federal government, a lot of people in there said what they were doing was betting that a person cannot live on a homestead for five years.

So the government was betting the land and the homesteader was betting his endurance.

So it was a big bet.

It was kind of a joke.

But, you know, they're putting out this land and betting you can't live on it.

A lot of them did not.

With your research, I'd ask, they said, that there's about 2.5 people applied for the homestead or had the homestead, before they ever got the patent.

Oh yeah.

I think that's pretty well because I see names of people moving in and out all the time and I've never heard the names.

Right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

The General Land Office track books, they list everybody that homesteads, when it was were usually, you know canceled and then the next homesteader.

A lot of times there will be four or five people that were on that land before somebody finally made the final certification.

So there was there was a turnover.

I ran across instances where one of them These settlers were neighbors.

And this guy went over to the other settler and said, I want to borrow a stamp from you.

And he needed a three cent stamp so you can mail a letter back East that he was telling his relatives back there he was coming home.

And the guy said, $0.03, he said, I'm not going to give it to you.

He said, I can't I can't afford to lose that $0.03.

And I mean, times were tough.

And the guy said, okay, I'll sign over my 160 acres to you for the three cent stamp.

So that's how important it was for him to go home.

And this guy for $0.03.

Yeah, he'd give him a stamp for another 160 acres of land.

So the land was free in a lot of cases.

If you could stand to stay on it.

The Homestead Act was very important to populate the High Plains, especially of western Kansas.

It was very important because this wouldn't have been settled.

This is a semi-arid area that if you didn't give away free land to start with, nobody would have stopped.

We remember of Zebulon Pike and people coming in in the in the early years and saying... calling this all over basically all the Great Plains the Great American desert.

And that stuck in and even during the gold rush years in the Rocky Mountains in the late 1850s, miners going across from eastern Kansas or the Missouri River, say Leavenworth and going across on the trails.

They didn't stop.

They went on and they talked about how bad the trails were and how how ferocious the wind and the sun was and the blizzards in the winter.

There is no time, good time to travel.

They were passing through, too, and it wasn't until later after it was surveyed and after the Civil War and the economic conditions had changed.

And so if it wasn't for the Homestead Act to get people here to start with and to get some roots into the soil, and that's human roots that it wouldn't have happened.