|
|
Good Company
We had a motley array of
neighbors. On one side a German who could scarce speak English married
to a Bohemian who could speak little English and no German; on another
side a family of Swedes fresh from the old country; on an adjoining
farm a Scotsman with a Missouri wife; nearby a family from Iowa;
another family from Illinois; some old, some young; some illiterate,
some well educated; yet all engaged in the same enterprise. As more and more railroads expanded into the West, an intense competition began. Settlers were sought who would provide business for their freight trains, and buy the land the railroads had been given as government subsidies. "You can lay track to the garden of Eden," said the head of the Northern Pacific, "but what good is it if the only inhabitants are Adam and Eve." Western states also contended with one another for new residents. Since 1862, the Homestead Act had promised 160 acres of public land to any person who filed a claim, paid a ten-dollar fee, and agreed to work the property for five years.
|
||||||||||
 |
The Program | People | Places | Events | Resources | Lesson Plans | Quiz © 2001 THE WEST FILM PROJECT and WETA Credits |
In the 1870's, Kansas
grew by more than half a million people. Nebraska's population
quadrupled. Two hundred Scottish families settled on the
Kansas-Nebraska border. The Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society lured Jews
from eastern Europe to Oregon, Colorado, Kansas, the Dakotas.
German-Russian Mennonites; Swedish, Dutch, French, Bohemian, Irish, and
Norwegian families were soon scattered across the plains. 
"In the villages of Europe you might be only a few steps
away from your neighbors, certainly within hearing distance. You could
hear the village's church bells ringing on a Sunday morning. Suddenly,
here they were isolated many miles from neighbors and from villages
with long periods of time between any kind of interaction. They had
"wind sickness," they called it, from the constant blowing of the wind,
they planted trees around their houses not simply for the shade or for
the beauty, but to protect them from the immensity of the landscape." 
They started towns like Lindsborg
and Hoffnungsthal, New Alexanderwohl and Dannebrog -- some with the
same street plans as their old villages in Europe. And they planted
wheat they had brought along from as far away as Russia. It flourished
as no other domestic crop ever had before on the semi-arid Plains, and
would one day help make the United States the agricultural wonder of
the world. 
"The men had farmed in many cases most of their lives, but
they had to struggle against roots and rocks and all these things that
made farming difficult. They looked around them here, and there were
thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of acres without a
root or a rock. They could put their plow in the ground and go miles
and miles straight ahead without worrying about a hill. This was grass
ground, earth that had never been turned in all of history except by
maybe a buffalo's horn. They said the first time a plow went through
that ground, it sounded like the opening of a giant zipper from the
grass roots tearing as the plow went through it. To them, this was a
dream come true." 
"We seldom stop to think how desperately lonely it was.
One of the tales I like the best was about a woman who lived out in
West Texas. She seldom saw anybody up in the Panhandle. A cowboy came
through one time and brought her a sack that had three chickens in it.
And she could not bring herself to kill those chickens. She said, "You
will never know what good company they were." There was some core of
that woman that embraced this raw country. But you see it was her lot,
her husband goes off to round up the cattle, whatever adventure that he
might have been on, and it was her lot to keep the homestead, to run
the ranch, to care for his family. And so I think of that woman often
with those three chickens. And I bet they were good company."