At noon on April 22, 1889, a pistol shot and a bugle’s call sent an estimated fifty thousand people surging across a starting line into the heart of Indian Territory, racing on horseback, in wagons, on bicycles, and on foot to seize free homesteads on roughly two million acres of grassland that the federal government had just thrown open. It was the first and most famous of the Oklahoma land runs, and it remains one of the strangest settlement events in American history: an entire territory parceled out not by gradual migration but in a single frantic afternoon, with two substantial cities — Guthrie and Oklahoma City — springing into being between noon and sundown, complete with thousands of staked lots, makeshift streets, and tent-canvas storefronts.
The ground they raced for was not empty wilderness, and the honest telling of this story has to begin there. The “Unassigned Lands” at the center of Indian Territory had been taken from Native nations. After the Civil War, the United States used the Reconstruction Treaties of 1866 to compel the Creek (Muscogee) and Seminole nations — among others — to cede the central portion of the territory, ostensibly for the resettlement of other tribes and freedmen. A large block was never reassigned to any tribe, leaving the so-called Unassigned Lands, and it was this block, surrounded by the lands of relocated Native nations, that white settlers and promoters spent the 1880s agitating to open. The land run handed to homesteaders ground that had been stripped from Indigenous people a generation before.
The pressure to open it came from the “Boomers,” organized settlers led most prominently by David L. Payne and later W. L. Couch, who repeatedly invaded the territory in the early 1880s to plant illegal colonies and were repeatedly removed by U.S. cavalry. Their lobbying eventually prevailed. President Benjamin Harrison issued a proclamation in March 1889 declaring the Unassigned Lands open to homestead settlement at noon on April 22 under the terms of the Homestead Act — 160 acres to anyone who could reach a parcel, occupy it, and prove up over five years.
The run itself produced instant cities and instant scandal. Many of those who claimed the best lots had not waited for the gun: “Sooners” had slipped across the line early, hiding in ravines and timber to be in place when the legitimate runners arrived, and the resulting flood of contested claims and disputes clogged the land offices and courts for years. Oklahoma — the word adapted from Choctaw for “red people” — got its first taste of organized settlement in a single violent day, and the nickname “Sooner State” preserves, oddly proudly, the memory of the cheaters.
At noon on September 16, 1893, a line of soldiers fired their carbines and an estimated 100,000 people surged across the borders of the Cherokee Outlet — a strip of more than six million acres running west across northern Oklahoma — in the largest land run in American history. They came on horseback, in buggies and wagons, on bicycles and on foot, and they raced for some 42,000 quarter-section homesteads and town lots in a furnace of late-summer heat, choking dust, and prairie fires lit by sparks. By nightfall canvas towns of thousands stood where empty grass had been at dawn, and somewhere out on the burned-over flats lay the bodies of those who had not survived the day.
The land itself had a history the racers mostly chose not to know. The Cherokee Outlet — popularly the ‘Cherokee Strip’ — was a perpetual hunting and grazing corridor guaranteed to the Cherokee Nation by the treaties that followed their forced removal west on the Trail of Tears. For years the Cherokees had leased the grass to white cattlemen; then the federal government, through the Cherokee Commission (the so-called Jerome Commission), pressed the Nation to sell outright. After the government cut off the lucrative grazing leases and the Cherokees concluded they had little leverage left, the Nation agreed in December 1891 to cede the roughly eight-million-acre Outlet for $8,595,736.12 — well under the $3 an acre the Cherokees had sought, and a price widely regarded then and since as far below its worth. (In 1961 the Indian Claims Commission would award the Cherokee Nation a judgment for the undervaluation.) The strip was surveyed into homesteads, and the run was set for September 1893.
This run differed from the famous 1889 stampede in one cruel detail: the government, stung by the chaos and ‘Sooner’ fraud of earlier openings, required every prospective claimant to register beforehand at booths along the border and obtain a certificate. The booths could not handle the crush. Tens of thousands waited for days in stifling heat with little water and worse food, some collapsing in line; people died of heat and exhaustion before the run even began. When the guns finally fired, the registered and the unregistered alike poured in together, and the careful order the rules had promised dissolved within seconds.
The Cherokee Strip run was the high-water mark and the exhaustion of the land-run era. It opened the last great block of supposedly ‘surplus’ land in the territory, founded towns like Enid, Perry, Alva, Woodward, and Ponca City in an afternoon, and produced a wave of claims — many of which were abandoned within a few hard years. After 1893 the government largely gave up on runs as a method, switching to lotteries and sealed bids for the openings that remained. The Strip closed out an idea of free land won by speed, and left behind both new farm counties and a fresh accounting of what had been taken from the Cherokee Nation to make them.
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.
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.
Before he was the most important Black filmmaker of the silent era — before forty-some features, before the Walk of Fame star — Oscar Micheaux was a homesteader on the South Dakota prairie. Born January 2, 1884, near Metropolis, Illinois, the son of formerly enslaved parents, he worked his way north and west, put in years as a Pullman porter, saved his wages, and in 1905 bought a relinquishment and filed on land in Gregory County, on the recently opened Rosebud country. He was, as far as anyone has found, the only Black homesteader for many miles in any direction.
Micheaux did well at first. He broke the sod, brought in crops in the good years, and expanded his holdings across several claims in Gregory and the newly opened Tripp County until he was farming on a scale most settlers never reached. His ambition was openly to prove that a Black man could succeed at the white frontier’s own game. But the same forces that broke so many Plains homesteaders — drought, falling prices, debt — closed in on him in the 1910s, compounded by a disastrous marriage and a father-in-law who, in Micheaux’s telling, helped wreck the enterprise. By the late 1910s the homestead was gone.
What he salvaged from the failure was a story. In 1913 he published his first novel, ‘The Conquest: The Story of a Negro Pioneer,’ a thinly fictionalized account of his own homesteading years told through a character named Oscar Devereaux, and he sold it himself, door to door, across the farm country he knew. He wrote more books, rewrote the same material as ‘The Homesteader’ in 1917, and then, when a film company tried to buy that novel on terms he disliked, he decided to make the picture himself.
The homestead failed; the storyteller it produced did not. Out of a busted South Dakota claim came the man who would direct ‘Within Our Gates,’ ‘Body and Soul,’ and a body of independent ‘race films’ made by and for Black audiences across three decades — a career that began, quite literally, in the sod.
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.