Lone Prairie

Out on The Lone Prairie

Homebuilding In Dundy County

Dundy County homesteaders avoided one peril which brought so much grief to others in many parts of the western United States, in that settlement was made without the bloody feuds with ranchers that were long-lasting elsewhere. The bunkhouse and branding iron people peacefully melted away before the press of those whose interests leaned toward barbed wire and barn building. In spite of this favor, settling in the windswept middle of nowhere was a task that called for a great deal of courage and an even larger amount of plain old hard work.

The Homestead Act required a house to be built on the land claimed and the claimant had to live there at least six months out of the year. Another provision of the Act required at least five acres be plowed the first year. The second year another five acres had to be plowed and the first five had to be planted to some type of grain. The minimum requirements of the Homestead Act were only the beginning. From a practical standpoint, a farmer needed land fenced, both to keep livestock in and range cattle and horses out. A well had to be dug, vegetable gardens planted, out-buildings constructed, and, while doing all that and more, the homestead family needed to make a living.

Construction of some kind of dwelling usually was the first order of business and one of the most difficult. Wood and water were the two most precious commodities on the plains. The lack of timber naturally made lumber scarce and outrageously expensive. Lumber yards were among the first places of business in every town, selling a product harvested and sawed hundreds of miles from Dundy County. Considering freight cost on the Burlington and additional freight cost from town to the farm, lumber was too expensive for use except when absolutely necessary.

As Pioneers everywhere have always done, Dundy Countians made use of what was available, so for home construction raw material, they turned to the one product the plains offered in almost unlimited abundance--dirt. Almost every first house on Dundy County homesteads was either a below-ground dugout or above-ground structure of sod blocks. Both dugouts and soddies offered advantages and disadvantages, the choice usually being made on the basis of soil type on a particular homestead.

Blocks for sod houses could only be cut from good firm soil well laced with buffalo grass roots to hold it together. More than one early Dundy Countian toiled long and hard on a sod house only to find it a pile of melted mud when the first downpour came. The big advantages of a soddy were that it could have windows and wasn't quite so prone to flooding when heavy rains came. The big disadvantage was that most homesteaders didn't know how to build one properly, and in a short time, walls and roofs began to sag severely.
Dugouts were preferred in areas where sandy soil prevailed and good house building sod was not available. The inside walls of a dugout had to be shored up with something, a factor which usually limited the size of the home to one room. A dugout which wasn't located on a hillside with good drainage was often a mess after rain fell. Following a Southwest Nebraska thunderstorm, dugout owners could find their homes more suited to fish farming than use as residences for people. Improperly braced walls could also give way when the ground was wet. Even old Moses Collins, considered one of the most knowledgeable Pioneers in plains living, had a dugout cave in during the summer of 1885. Fortunately, no one was home at the time.

In either case--dugout or soddy--floors and roofs usually were made from the same material as the walls. It could not have been appealing to a new homestead wife, born and raised in a pretty frame cottage, to discover her new home had walls, floor and roof all constructed of good old Nebraska dirt.

Water: A Prairie Problem

Once people began to settle away from creeks and rivers, water became a prime consideration. Until a well could be dug, all water used had to be hauled in barrels from the nearest stream, which might be a distance of ten or fifteen miles. Tips for the High Plains homesteader published in early papers covered the ways water could be conserved and this information became essential for survival of both people and livestock.

Children were taught to pour water back in the bucket if they didn't empty the dipper when drinking. Wash and dish water were saved for livestock, sometimes being used for bath water in between.

A favorite saying among dryland homesteaders was, "I have all the fresh, pure water a person could ever want only 200 feet from my front door." That 200 feet, of course, was straight down and getting to it was something every Pioneer family wanted to accomplish as soon as possible.

No definite record exists to tell us who had the first well in Dundy County, but reading between the lines of early Benkelman newspapers indicates it must have been the Burlington Railroad. The town depended on the Republican River for water in the early years, the main reason Collinsville was initially located south of the present site of Benkelman. In an early 1885 edition of the Dundy County Pioneer, mention was made of railroad workers repairing the windmill that supplied pump power for the 42,000-gallon water tank at the rail yard.

At any rate, wells were being dug in both Benkelman and out on several homesteads in May of 1885, and the completion of each was a news item. On June 4, the paper reported the completion of the first well for a Benkelman resident. Located behind the Pioneer office, it was 20 feet deep and provided six feet of standing water. In the next few weeks several others were reported completed.

The best land in Dundy County was known to be along the Divide north of Indian Creek, but several early arrivals in the county were afraid to settle there because of the fear water would be too deep, or perhaps non-existent, under that part of the county. In mid-summer of 1885, a farmer on the Divide reported he had struck water at 207 feet and had an excellent flow. This information led to that part of the county being settled quickly.
The published procedure for putting down a well on a homestead was listed in three steps. Step one: pick a location. Step two: get a shovel. Step three: dig 'till your feet get wet. In truth, well digging was a tough and hazardous chore. Usually neighbors traded work on the project, and professional well-diggers were among the first people in the county in the spring of '85. Having a well professionally dug cost 50 cents a foot, however, making it too expensive for many families.

Once the well was too deep to allow dirt to be pitched out, a bucket and rope were used. Usually the rope was run through a pulley attached to some type of frame and the well digger was lowered to work and returned to the surface via the bucket. During digging, someone above was needed to pull up and empty the bucket. Bucket-pulling power was provided by a horse, a mule or an ox if one were available, by the wife and kids if not.
Working as a well digger for hire was one way of making a few dollars in Dundy County. Men with teams and plows could also hire out to break the five acres required to be plowed by the Homestead Act. Almost anything else that would bring in a little cash was eagerly accepted when offered. Families waiting for crops to grow could not afford to be choosy.

Bone-picking

A major occupation, much despised by all who worked at it, was called bone-picking, and had commenced as soon as the railroad began running on a regular schedule in 1882. Almost all early Dundy Countians were bone-pickers at least part-time and many made it a full time occupation for a while.

Ground bones were a prized ingredient in fertilizer in eastern states. As a result of the buffalo slaughter in pre-homestead days and the natural death of rangeland longhorns during cattle ranching days, Southwest Nebraska was a carpet of bleached bones. Buffalo bones brought $12 a ton delivered to the Burlington depot, and despised or not, Pioneers took full advantage of this source of income.

Since it might take a day to reach the depot and unload and another day to get back to the homestead, the man of the house, or an older boy, would make deliveries of bones. While he was gone the rest of the family, from toddlers to grandmas, would roam the prairie on foot, picking and piling bones for convenient loading when the wagon returned. In summer the work was hot, dirty and somewhat dangerous, since shade-hunting rattlesnakes were prone to curl up in skulls to escape the sun. Having a dry buffalo skull start to rattle in one's hand was an experience bone-pickers had only once before they learned to be very careful.
Amid the hustle of house building, well digging and trying to earn a living, day-to-day life continued. Coping with the trials of daily life was seldom easy. Food and finding some way to cook it were some of the biggest problems to be overcome.

Canned goods were available but expensive, so dried fruit and vegetables were far more common in prairie kitchens. Beans and potatoes headed the list, served with biscuits made without milk if the family didn't own a cow. The only meat available was usually salt pork. Fresh meat was being sold in Benkelman by July of 1885, but there was no way to keep it fresh in the home. With the beginning of winter, farmers might butcher if they had livestock, but during summer months it was salt pork or wild game. And wild game was already scarce by 1885.

"Prairie Steaks" and Cowchip Fuel

Two or three decades before the homestead boom began, Dundy County had abounded with game. Along with countless thousands of buffalo, there had been large herds of antelope, elk and deer. Very few were to be found by 1885, except in the remote northwest corner of the county where sandhills kept Pioneers away. Even there the numbers were low. There was, however, one native animal of the plains still available to meat-hungry homesteaders. Jack rabbits were in supply everywhere, if not especially in demand until the urge for fresh meat reached a high level.

"Prairie steak" the long-eared jacks were called. "Jack rabbit ain't bad when you get used to it," homesteaders said. “ Properly cooked it's not much tougher than fried harness leather and nearly as tasty as boiled owl."

Whatever was on the menu, finding fuel with which to cook it was a chore faced daily. No wood was available for cooking or heating fires, of course. Coal, both hard and soft, was sold in several Benkelman places of business at $6 a ton and up, depending on quality. Most families kept a small quantity of coal on hand for emergency use only, the price and transportation difficulties from town keeping use to a minimum. For fuel, homesteaders turned to the same product Plains Indians had used for hundreds of years.

Commonly called chips and often jokingly referred to as "prairie coal," the standard fuel in dugouts and soddies was dried cow manure. Well-dried chips burned long and well, producing an even heat that wives found better than wood once they got over thinking about what the fuel really was.

Chip gathering was a chore usually given to youngsters. During the summer months, children would take buckets and baskets out before cooking started to gather enough fuel to fill the Dundy County equivalent of the woodbox. Prairie kids became experts at recognizing the perfect cookstove cow chip, well dried and firm. Those not yet ripe were turned to speed drying for future use.
The cow chip bonanza was a legacy of the cattleman era, and the supply rapidly diminished as more and more farmers moved in on former range land. By the time the chip supply was depleted, however, crops were being harvested and prairie coal was replaced by corn cobs. Old timers, looking back at the good old days, generally agree green corn cobs were a poor substitute for cow chips.

As winter approached, chip gathering became a major family enterprise among smart homesteaders. Before the first snow, a prairie family needed enough chips to last through the season when fuel would be buried under snow, and would be too damp to burn when it could be found. As with bone picking, the wife and children were usually responsible for building chip piles to be picked up when the wagon was available. Early photographs taken during autumn months often show mounds of chips around homes far larger than the house itself. Chip piles were normally built on the north and west sides of the house. Until they were consumed by the family stove, stacks of cow chips made excellent windbreaks around the house.

Dugouts, being smaller than soddies and having the benefit of extra insulation from their underground construction, were easier to heat than the above-ground homes. Neither was suitable for winter time habitation without heat, and, too late, some people learned they had not properly prepared for western Nebraska winters. The first person buried in the Benkelman Cemetery was an elderly gentleman named Tupper who died by freezing to death. Tragically, Tupper was not the only one to misjudge the severity of prairieland winters. According to the Pioneer, during the winter of 1885-86, at least five people froze to death in Dundy County.

In spite of hardship, the first settlers in the county felt it was more than worth the effort to try making a home on the plains. Homesteaders were farmers first and foremost and Dundy County appeared to be the best farm land most of them had ever seen. Those who arrived early in the spring plowed and planted as many acres as they could and the results were outstanding. The year 1885 was a wet year; the soil was rich and growing conditions perfect. Beginning in June, the Pioneer began reporting excellent crop prospects from around the county.

Wheat-growing Begins

One of the most exciting of those reports came from a farm in the north part of the county. On July 16, the Pioneer told of a granger named Walter Kimsey who had visited the newspaper office the previous Saturday with a sheaf of wheat. Kimsey had planted an acre and a half of spring wheat "to see if that grain might be suitable to the soil and climate of Dundy County" the Pioneer stated. The results were astounding. Farmers from all over the country visited the Kimsey farm to look at the wheat and estimates were the mere acre and a half would produce nearly 50 bushels of grain. Apparently this was the first crop of wheat ever grown in Dundy County and predictions were it would soon become a major crop.
Two weeks later Kimsey stopped by again to talk about his other crops. Corn was eight feet high and still growing, he said. Hay measured three feet between joints. "And," Kimsey added "the chickens are plump enough to draw the attention of every preacher who sees them."

Not all the first-comers made it in the homestead business in 1885. Some came, looked around, then caught the first train back east. A few tried but gave up quickly when they came face-to-face with life in a dry, treeless, lonesome region for which past experience had not prepared them.

Most stayed, however, and even gained some measure of prosperity. The success stories of grangers on the farm and businessmen in town began to filter back east, causing more and more people to think about the possibility of heading west.

Those who came in 1885 were the true Pioneers of Dundy County. They were the ones who learned by trial and error, they remained to teach other newcomers who would follow in the last years of the 1880s. And follow they did.

As the first snow fell late in 1885, Dundy Countians were sure more people would be coming, although most were certain there could never be a flow of people into Southwest Nebraska such as there had been in preceding months. Nothing could match the great boom of 1885, people believed. They could not have been more wrong.

When the great drama of settlement which was played out on the Dundy County stage in the 1880s is viewed from the vantage point of hindsight, it can be seen that the fabulous boom of '85 was actually no more than a shallow, half-hearted rehearsal. Beginning with the spring of 1886, Dundy County would see the real thing.

Continued in VI. When The County Filled Up