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.

The Kinkaiders of the Nebraska Sandhills — 1904, 640 Acres of Sand

By the turn of the twentieth century, the government had finally admitted what every settler on the Nebraska Sandhills already knew: 160 acres of grass-anchored sand dunes could not feed a family. The Kinkaid Act, championed by Congressman Moses P. Kinkaid of Nebraska’s vast sixth district and signed on April 28, 1904 (effective June 28, 1904), answered that hard fact by quadrupling the standard homestead in the region to a full section — 640 acres — across some three dozen counties of western and north-central Nebraska, most of it the Sandhills.

The people who took up the offer became the ‘Kinkaiders,’ and they poured in by the thousands when the act took effect, racing for claims much as the land-run crowds had farther south. The five-year proving-up terms were the familiar ones — residence and a required value of improvements — but the land was anything but familiar. The Sandhills are exactly what the name says: an immense sea of stabilized dunes, the largest such formation in the Western Hemisphere, held in place by a fragile skin of grass over porous sand and, beneath it, the vast Ogallala aquifer.

Most Kinkaiders came to farm and learned, often too late, that the ground would not be farmed. Plow off the grass and the dunes began to move; crops withered in the sand; and family after family proved up only to discover that even 640 acres could not be cropped into a living. Many sold out, gave up, or starved off, and the great sustaining business of the Sandhills turned out to be the one thing the grass was made for: grazing cattle.

The Kinkaid Act’s legacy is double-edged in a way peculiar to the Sandhills. It populated one of the last unclaimed corners of the Plains and seeded the region with families and place-names that remain. And by handing out whole sections that were too small to ranch but useless to farm, it set up the consolidations that turned the Sandhills into the wide-open cattle country — among the most productive ranchland in America — that it still is today.