Prairie Madness

Isolation drives people insane. This fact is well-known by now. There's a reason that Solitary Confinement is considered torture. The vast majority of people need people, even for just a little bit each day.

So it was that the proponents of the Homestead Act, back in 1862, didn't understand what they were sending people into. They thought they were being highly generous with (someone else's) land, they thought they were taking an opportunity to seed a vast erritory with yeoman farmers, they thought they were giving good red-blooded Americans a chance to become petty barons upon land they owned outright, in the same manner as white settlers had taken so much of North America already -- It was win-win! What could go wrong?

Well, the fact of the matter was that this was before the invention of the automobile, and before the invention of the telephone...and those 160-acre plots everyone was given were square plots. Not long strips. They were plots shaped just the same as what people had been buying back east, only a lot bigger. If they had been long strips, then everyone could have clustered their houses at the center of them, and made a village like any sensible group of people -- but these were white American settlers, doing things the white American settler way. Which meant that every farmer's house was at the center of that 160 acres.

And, again, this was before the invention of things that would have made daily contact with other people easy.

So imagine yourself in a house like that -- no electric lights, no electric heat, just a fireplace and some oil lamps. No sign of civilization, out there in the rolling hills. No one close or even visible, except your family, or not even them if your husband has gone to town for a few days. The sun has set. There's nothing visible through the window but stars. And the wind is moaning low over the plains. Whooooooooooooo.

I'd have gone nuts that very evening.

There were a lot of suicides, out on those plains. Plenty of people broke under the strain. You could say they weren't tough enough. But I say the whole business was madness. Trying to impose the shape of eastern life on a western landscape that didn't support it, didn't go well. Just like when they made water alottments for Lake Meade, or tried to plow up the Cimarron valley without doing dry-land techniques and created the Dust Bowl. The folks back east didn't know their ways wouldn't work everywhere.