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Show USE AND ABUSE OF SETTLEMENT LAWS, 1880-1904 479 what was a bitter indictment of events of the past: "It is a matter of historical record, is it not, that it has taken about three migrations everywhere in the western movement to bring about permanent settlement?" Seth Humphrey, who spent much of his life in Minnesota and Dakota Territory, in 1889 acted as agent for a Boston farm mortgage company which had been lending funds for some years on Dakota farms that were now in default. In the many thousands of miles he drove over the prairie searching for the farms in default he learned much about land entries in both Dakota and Nebraska. His observations are worthy of including here though they are somewhat jaundiced: On came the settlers by train and by prairie schooner from Minnesota, Wisconsin, and states farther east: bona fide farmers thrown together with ne'er-do-wells, forever shifting westward; renters tired of renting; others merely tired of the places they were leaving; and a heavy sprinkling bent only on 'proving up' their titles to quarter sections of land with the minimum of improvement required by law and selling out at a profit. In great numbers, too, came the pseudo-settlers ... who, though more or less sincere, never would be successful farmers-restless clerks, tired professors, schoolm'ams, and their like. Among them also were the chronic settlers-men who followed the taking up of government land as a habit. How did they manage to file on land in each of their several migrations, since the law allowed only one right to an individual? This disturbed them not at all. Bill Jones of the Wisconsin boom thought of himself as Hank Brown in Minnesota, then shifted to John Smith for his filing in Dakota. Aberdeen naturally took on the color of its adventurous population .... A few buildings ... housed the two banks, too many cheap lawyers, and swarms of land men whose free advice was the most expensive thing dispensed on the street. Loan sharks galore stood ready to finance the settler's outfit at three per cent a month. It was a great game, this settling of the new country, and as full of tricks as the frontier gambling house. Many a man working or clerking in town was 'holding down a claim' by going out to live in his little sod shack over Sunday. If it was too far away, he would go out even less often and take the risk of having his claim 'jumped' .... Humphrey maintained that "by far the greater number of landseekers took up government land with the intention of unloading it on somebody else, the loan companies offering themselves as the easiest possible marks." High interest obtainable in the West attracted farm loan companies which might be either western or eastern but in either case drew their funds from the East. On occasion there was a plethora of such funds and agents competing with each other in placing their funds, paying little attention to the actual improvements on the quarter-section or to the reliability of the settler who was almost sure to get a loan of $500 to $1,000. Here was another way to profit, this time at the expense of a "soulless" eastern financial institution, and many westerners had no compunction about taking the loan and skipping, leaving the abandoned tract to the mortgage company. Humphrey was speaking of the years following 1889 when there was a marked backward movement of population out of the Plains states occasioned by severe losses from drought, destructive winter storms, and low prices. Of a northern Nebraska county Humphrey reported that of the first 41 pieces of land he visited only three were occupied by the original mortgagors, three were occupied by squatters, and the remaining 35 "had not so much as a board to show that claim shacks had once adorned them." 51 51 Seth K. Humphrey, Following the Prairie Frontier (Minneopolis, 1931), pp. 79-84, 105-106, 132, 164. Hamlin Garland has much to say about the rush to homestead on land in the James River country of Dakota in the eighties. The excited rush of people including school teachers was drawn there not so much to farm as to gain ownership of a piece of land that was sure to rise in value. Garland, like many others has no intention of remaining on the land and was only concerned to sell as soon as buyers appeared. He called his entry a preemption claim and must have proved up on it (Cont. on p. 480.) |