“900 Miles From Nowhere: Voices From the Homestead Frontier,” by Steven R. Kinsella (Minnesota Historical Society, 216 pages, $29.95)
The decrepit farms along the highways crossing the Great Plains give off a sense of decay and lost dreams. You forget that, at one time, these old homesteads were places of hope and joy. The immigrants and Civil War veterans who filed for homesteads viewed the land as an economic windfall, and their early accounts of life on the prairie are often filled with grand plans for the future.
“How I wish that thousands of our poor but worthy people could be transferred here,” wrote a female Kansas homesteader in 1856. “The meadow larks sing beautifully and altogether it is fine and dandy,” a North Dakota homesteader observed in 1905.
Steven R. Kinsella, former press secretary to U.S. Sen. Tom Daschle, consulted numerous diaries, letters and firsthand accounts in compiling “900 Miles From Nowhere” – the title comes from a South Dakota bride in 1908. Kinsella combines the excerpts with his own narrative.
The first homestead act, the Pre-emption Act, was passed in 1841, allowing settlers to claim 160 acres for $1.25 per acre after living on the land just six months. By the Civil War, homesteaders received the land free, after living there five years – less time for Union veterans. Later, because the land was so inhospitable, the amount of free acreage doubled.
Thousands of people flocked West, many of them with little or no farming experience. That, along with the poor soil and infrequent rainfall, made homesteading marginal, and many of the accounts tell of hardship. “We have had a fearful hard winter. … I hope I will never see such a winter again as I was so unprepared and thousands the same,” a Dakota Territory man wrote his cousin in 1887.
“I can’t help but wish I had never seen Colorado. It is lonesome and desolate,” a Weld County woman confided.
“Walking in Two Worlds: Mixed-Blood Indian Women Seeking Their Path,” by Nancy M. Peterson (Caxton, 264 pages, $16.95)
Nancy M. Peterson, who has written about Indians in her many books on Colorado, turns her considerable storytelling talents to the lives of mixed-blood – or half-breed, as they used to be called – women. Using a narrative style, she concentrates on 10 women who made a difference, primarily to the Indian side of their families. All but one are the children or grandchildren of white men and Indian women.
The exception is probably the most interesting woman in the book – E. Pauline Johnson, whose father was a hereditary Mohawk chief. He spoke and dressed like an Englishman and built his Irish wife a fine house. Pauline grew up in the United States and England, learning the classics and oratory and eventually becoming a performer and writer.
Sandra Dallas is a Denver novelist who writes a monthly column on new regional nonfiction.
