In the summer of 1877, twelve years after emancipation and one year after federal troops began withdrawing from the South, a handful of Black men in Kentucky put their names to a town company and aimed it at a treeless stretch of the high Kansas plains. They called the place Nicodemus, after the legend of an enslaved African who had purchased his own freedom — a name that announced, before a single sod was turned, exactly what the venture was about. Kansas was the chosen ground for a reason: it was John Brown’s old battlefield, a free state soaked in abolitionist memory, and for thousands of formerly enslaved people it shimmered as a kind of biblical promised land just over the western horizon.
The first colonists came up from Lexington and the Bluegrass counties in the autumn of 1877 and again in the spring of 1878, riding the rails to Ellis and then walking or wagoning the last thirty-odd miles north to the Solomon River valley. What they found was not the wooded, watered country the recruiting circulars had implied. It was open grass, hard wind, and almost no timber for building. The promoters’ handbills had promised more than the land could give, and the gap between the promise and the prairie nearly broke the colony in its first months. The newcomers dug into the earth itself — into dugouts and burrows scraped from the riverbanks and hillsides — and waited out a winter many of them barely believed they would survive.
Nicodemus is remembered today as the oldest and only remaining all-Black town west of the Mississippi from the Reconstruction era, and the centerpiece of the wider “Exoduster” migration of 1879–1880, when tens of thousands of African Americans fled the collapsing protections of the post-war South for Kansas. Other Black colonies were attempted across the plains; almost all of them faded. Nicodemus did not vanish, even after the railroad it had staked its future on chose to lay its tracks elsewhere. The town shrank, but it never quite died, held together by the descendants of the founders and by an annual homecoming that still gathers families home each summer.
Its story is at once a homestead story and something larger — a test of whether free land under the 1862 Homestead Act would extend, in fact and not only in law, to people who had themselves been held as property a dozen years before. The land office at Kirwin recorded their entries; the patents bear their names. What the diaries and reminiscences of Nicodemus preserve is not a triumphal frontier myth but the harder, truer record of people who arrived poor, were lied to about the country, nearly starved in their first winter, and stayed anyway.
In the summers of the mid-1870s the homesteaders of the Plains watched the worst disaster of the insect world descend on their fields. Vast swarms of the Rocky Mountain locust — a now-extinct migratory grasshopper that bred in the river valleys of the northern Rockies — boiled up out of the west and settled on the grain belt from Minnesota and Dakota Territory south through Nebraska, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, and into Texas. Witnesses described a glittering haze that dimmed the sun, a sound like hail or a distant train, and a living drift that piled inches deep on the ground and broke the limbs of trees with its weight.
What the locusts did to a homestead in an afternoon was total. They ate the standing wheat and corn to the dirt, then the garden, then the leaves off the trees, and when the leaves were gone they gnawed at fence rails, harness leather, the wool off live sheep, the handles of tools, the clothing on the line, and the curtains in the windows. A family that woke to a green, ripening claim could be staring at bare brown ground by nightfall, a year’s labor and the whole winter’s food simply gone. For families already living on the margin of a homestead claim, with no reserves and a mortgage to meet, it was ruin in a single day.
The scale of it strained belief, and one observation became famous. In 1875 a Nebraska physician and amateur scientist, Albert L. Child, used telegraph reports and the swarm’s own speed and dimensions to estimate that a single passing swarm — later dubbed ‘Albert’s Swarm’ — covered on the order of 198,000 square miles, an area larger than California. By that reckoning it may have contained trillions of insects and ranks as perhaps the largest congregation of animals ever recorded. Whether or not the arithmetic was exact, no one who lived through it doubted that the swarms were beyond any human scale.
The plague drove thousands of families off their claims, forced reluctant state and federal governments into emergency relief, and seared itself into Plains memory — Laura Ingalls Wilder would recreate the 1870s grasshopper years in ‘On the Banks of Plum Creek.’ And then came the strangest turn of all: within a generation the Rocky Mountain locust, an insect that had darkened the sky over a third of a continent, vanished entirely. The last living specimens were collected around the turn of the century — the last confirmed in 1902 — and the species is now considered extinct, the only major agricultural pest known to have gone extinct, and a mystery that scientists are still working to fully explain.
In 1874 thousands of German-speaking Mennonites began leaving their colonies on the Russian steppe and resettling on the open plains of central Kansas. They were fleeing the loss of an old privilege: after Russia’s defeat in the Crimean War, Tsar Alexander II had moved to revoke the exemption from military service their people had been promised generations earlier, with universal conscription taking effect in 1874. Pacifists by faith, the Mennonites would not serve. So they sold what they could and crossed an ocean and half a continent to a treeless prairie that, to their relief, looked and felt much like the steppe they had left.
They did not arrive empty-handed. Mennonite families carried seed of the hard red winter wheat they had grown in the Crimean and Molotschna country — a drought-tolerant, cold-hardy grain that came to be known in America as Turkey Red. Bred over decades for bitter winters, dry summers, and uncertain rain, it suited almost exactly the conditions that had ruined so many Kansas homesteaders sowing soft spring wheats and corn. Planted in the fall and harvested in early summer, Turkey Red could draw on the moisture of spring and dodge the killing droughts of late summer.
The land they settled was not, strictly, free homestead claims. Much of it was railroad land — sections the federal government had granted to the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway, which the railroad’s immigration agent C. B. Schmidt sold to the Mennonites in large compact blocks so they could rebuild their village communities intact. That land had reached the railroad and the settlers only because it had first been taken from Native nations: the Kaw (Kanza), forcibly removed from Kansas to Indian Territory in 1873, and the Osage, whose reserves were ceded and opened in the same period. The wheat that ‘saved the Plains’ grew on ground cleared of the people who had lived there.
What the Mennonites started, others scaled up. Promoted above all by the miller Bernhard Warkentin — who imported thousands of bushels of Turkey Red seed from Ukraine in the mid-1880s — and milled efficiently once the steel roller mill made hard wheat practical, Turkey Red spread across the Plains. Kansas wheat production climbed from a couple of million bushels in 1870 to roughly 80 million by 1900, and Turkey Red and its descendants made the state the heart of the American wheat belt. It is one of homesteading’s quietest, most decisive turning points: not a law or a land run, but a sack of seed.