The Montana ‘Honyockers’ — 1909, the Dryland Bust

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.