The Montana ‘Honyockers’ — 1909, the Dryland Bust

Summary

Between roughly 1909 and 1918, tens of thousands of would-be farmers poured onto the dry eastern plains of Montana, lured by a perfect storm of new law, railroad salesmanship, and a run of unusually wet years. The Enlarged Homestead Act of 1909 doubled the size of a homestead claim on designated semi-arid land from 160 to 320 acres, and the railroads — above all James J. Hill's Great Northern, which ran its 'High Line' across the top of the state — flooded the Midwest and Europe with pamphlets promising that 'dry farming' could turn the high plains into a garden. The newcomers were nicknamed 'honyockers,' a dismissive term old-timers and cowmen used for the green, often immigrant sodbusters breaking the grass.

For a few years the gamble looked like genius. Rainfall in the early 1910s was well above the long-term average, wheat prices climbed and then soared with the First World War, and the new dryland farms produced real crops. Montana's homestead filings exploded — the state took in an enormous share of all U.S. homestead entries in this period, on the order of 80,000 entries — and brand-new towns, banks, and rail sidings sprang up across counties that had been open range a decade before. The pamphlets seemed vindicated, and more honyockers kept coming.

Then the rain stopped. A severe drought settled over eastern Montana beginning around 1917 and deepened through 1919 and into the 1920s, just as wartime wheat prices collapsed after 1920. The shallow, semi-arid soils that dry-farming theory had promised to make productive simply blew and baked; crops failed year after year; the banks that had financed the boom went under by the hundreds. Roughly half of Montana's homesteaders were starved out, abandoning their claims and their towns, in one of the largest and fastest busts of the entire homestead era.

The human cost was sober and large. By many accounts roughly 82,000 homesteaders came to Montana in the boom, and some 70,000 of them left before 1925; between 1921 and 1925 about half of all Montana farmers lost their farms. Between 1919 and 1925 some 11,000 farms — about a fifth of the state's total — were vacated, around two million acres passed out of production, roughly 20,000 mortgages were foreclosed, and 214 commercial banks (more than half the state's total) closed for good. Montana was the only state to lose population in the 1920s. The honyocker bust hollowed out whole counties along the High Line, left a landscape dotted with abandoned shacks and weathering false-front towns, and stands as the clearest case of the homestead promise running headlong into the hard limits of an arid land.

Timeline

The Claim

The claim that drew the honyockers was sold to them twice over — once by Congress and once by the railroads. The Enlarged Homestead Act, signed in February 1909, recognized that 160 acres of dry plains could not support a family and so doubled the allowable claim to 320 acres on land the government designated as semi-arid and non-irrigable, across Montana and other Western states. To get title, a settler had to live on the land and cultivate a portion of it, with no commutation to cash purchase, under a residence-and-improvement requirement on the homestead model. On paper it was a more honest offer than the old quarter-section; in the dry country it was still not nearly enough land.

The second, louder pitch came from the rails. James J. Hill's Great Northern Railway had built its main line — the 'High Line' — straight across northern Montana and needed settlers and freight to make it pay. The Great Northern and the other roads ran an enormous promotional campaign: pamphlets, exhibit trains, reduced 'immigrant' fares, and demonstration farms, all preaching the gospel of 'dry farming' — the claim that deep plowing and dust-mulch tillage could trap enough moisture to raise wheat without irrigation. The advertising reached deep into the Midwest, the South, and Europe, and it was relentless and optimistic to the point of dishonesty about how marginal the land really was.

The people who answered were a cross-section of the hopeful: Midwestern farm families looking to own land, immigrants from northern and eastern Europe, single women (who could file in their own right), clerks, and tradesmen with no farming experience at all. The cattlemen who had grazed the open range despised the newcomers and their fences and gave them the name 'honyocker' — a contemptuous label, of murky immigrant-slang origin, for the green sodbusters plowing up the grass. They came by the trainload between 1909 and the late 1910s, and Montana's homestead filings swelled into one of the great land rushes of the twentieth century.

Building In

Building in meant a claim shack and a walking plow turned loose on virgin sod. The first house was usually a one- or two-room frame shanty or a tarpaper shack, sometimes a soddy where lumber was scarce, set down on 320 acres of open prairie miles from a neighbor. The honyocker broke the tough native grass with horse-drawn plows, planted wheat and flax, and trusted the dry-farming methods the pamphlets and the demonstration trains had taught — leaving land fallow, packing the soil, raising a 'dust mulch' meant to hold the previous year's moisture. For a few seasons, in the wet early 1910s, it actually worked, and the wartime demand that pushed wheat toward record prices made the gamble look like sound business.

Around the farms a whole instant society went up. New towns platted themselves along the rail sidings every few miles; locally chartered banks opened to lend the settlers money for seed, equipment, and more land; county governments organized; churches, schools, and newspapers appeared. The boom counties along the High Line filled with people and optimism, and the rapid creation of new Montana counties in these years tracked the influx. The railroads got their freight and their townsites, the bankers got their loans out, and the honyockers got, for a while, the appearance of the prosperity the advertising had promised.

But the foundation was thin in every sense. The soils were shallow and the rainfall, even in the good years, was barely adequate and notoriously variable. Dry-farming theory had been oversold; on much of the land no tillage method could conjure a reliable crop from ten to fourteen inches of erratic annual rain. Many honyockers had arrived undercapitalized and inexperienced, having borrowed to get started, and 320 acres — generous by old homestead standards — was still too little to ride out a bad year in country that needed far larger holdings to be safe. The building-in years built a structure that depended entirely on the rain continuing.

Proving Up

Proving up, for the honyockers who managed it, followed the Enlarged Homestead Act's terms — residence on the claim, cultivation of a required share of the acreage, and the years of continuous improvement that earned a federal patent. In the wet seasons of the early 1910s a real number did prove up and gain title. But the drought that began around 1917 turned proving up into a trap: the law required the settler to keep living on and farming a claim that would no longer feed him, and many who 'succeeded' in getting their patent did so just in time to lose the land to debt, drought, or tax sale.

The bust came hard and fast. Beginning in 1917 and deepening through 1919 and into the early 1920s, rainfall collapsed across eastern Montana; crops failed in successive years, the soil blew, and the postwar crash in wheat prices after 1920 destroyed whatever margin remained. The chain of failure ran straight back through the boom: when the farms failed, the loans went bad; when the loans went bad, the local banks failed — by the hundreds; when the banks and farms failed, the towns emptied. Roughly half of all the homesteaders who had come to Montana were starved out, abandoning their claims, their shacks, and often the patents they had just earned.

The accounting, as Montana historians reconstructed it, is stark. Of roughly 82,000 homesteaders who came in the boom, about 70,000 had left before 1925, and an estimated 60,000 people left the state over the decade; between 1919 and 1925 some 11,000 farms — about a fifth of the state's total — were vacated, around two million acres went out of cultivation, roughly 20,000 mortgages were foreclosed, and 214 of the state's commercial banks (more than half) closed for good. Whole stretches of the High Line that had filled with people in a single decade emptied almost as fast, leaving weathering claim shacks and dying towns across the eastern plains. The honyocker era 'proved up' mainly as a cautionary lesson: that no homestead law and no advertising campaign could overrule the rainfall line, and that the dry plains would not be farmed the way the pamphlets promised.

What Decided It

What’s There Now

Drive the High Line today and the bust is still legible on the land: weathered claim shacks leaning in the wind, the false fronts of half-empty towns, and miles of country that returned to grass and grazing after the plows that broke it gave out. Many of the eastern Montana counties that filled in the 1910s have lost population in nearly every census since, and the region remains one of the most sparsely settled parts of the lower forty-eight — the demographic shadow of a boom that overshot what the land could hold.

The bust also taught the lessons that reshaped American land policy. The failure of small dryland homesteads helped discredit the 320-acre formula and informed the Stock-Raising Homestead Act of 1916, which offered 640 acres for grazing, and ultimately the Taylor Grazing Act of 1934, which closed most of the remaining public domain to homestead entry altogether. The exposed, plowed-up soils of the semi-arid plains were a direct prelude to the wind erosion and Dust Bowl conditions of the 1930s, and the New Deal's soil-conservation and land-retirement programs were in part an answer to exactly what the honyockers had done to the grass.

Montana absorbed the experience into its own self-understanding, most memorably through the writer Joseph Kinsey Howard, whose 1943 'Montana: High, Wide, and Handsome' rendered the honyocker boom and bust as the central drama of the state's settlement. The honyockers are remembered now without contempt and without romance: ordinary, hopeful people sold a beautiful lie by law and by railroad, who bet their families on rain that did not come. Their story is the clearest single answer to the question this site keeps asking — what the 'free land' promise looked like when the land itself said no.

Lessons

References

• Enlarged Homestead Act Wikipedia
• Montana: Homesteading and the Dryland Boom and Bust Wikipedia
• Joseph Kinsey Howard, 'Montana: High, Wide, and Handsome' (1943) Wikipedia
• The Homestead Act of 1862 U.S. National Archives