The Homesteaders Who Came and Left

For a brief and optimistic moment around nineteen ten to nineteen fifteen, the high plains around Wall seemed to be working. The rains were better than average. The price of wheat was rising because of demand from a Europe preparing for war.

The federal Homestead Act and its extensions were giving away quarter-sections of land to anyone willing to live on them. Settlers arrived from the Midwest and from Scandinavia and Germany, plowed the native grass under, and planted wheat. New towns appeared along the railroad lines, and photographs from those years show prosperous-looking farms on treeless plains with real houses and real families and real hope.

By the early nineteen thirties, the experiment was finished. The rains stopped. The price of wheat had collapsed after the First World War.

The fields, stripped of the deep-rooted native grass that had held the soil together for thousands of years, dried out and turned to dust. In some counties of western South Dakota, the population fell sharply during the nineteen thirties. Farms were abandoned with furniture inside, the doors left unlocked, the owners gone east.

The federal government bought millions of acres at low prices and retired them from cultivation. Much of what it bought became the Buffalo Gap National Grassland that surrounds this area today. The land has been slowly healing for nearly a century.

The grasses have come back in many places, but the abandoned foundations and the lone windmills standing in the open prairie are still there if you know where to look, monuments to an idea that the land refused.