Homesteader
Robbed in Toledo on Way to Kansas, 1877 by Alan Borer
In 1877, a young man named Howard Ruede [above] left his hometown
of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and resettled in Osborne, Kansas. Ruede, who was a printer by trade, built a
sod house, or “soddy” as they were sometimes called, and established a farm on
free land from the federal government.
Under the Homestead Act of 1862, settlers could stake legal claim to
unsettled land. Provided they lived on
the land, built a dwelling, and planted trees, a homesteader would in ten years
receive clear title to the property.
Millions of settlers from the East tried their luck at
homesteading, but results were mixed.
One of the reasons Ruede and a multitude of others had to dig down into
the soil for their habitation was that, owing to the nature of the Great
Plains, trees were scarce. Territories
and later states like Kansas, Nebraska, and Oklahoma were areas of low annual
rainfall, too low for forests and the building material they provided. No wonder that Ruede, when the time came to
write his memoirs, titled the book Sod-House Days.
Ruede, like many others, were not born farmers. The eastern states were rapidly filling up,
and Ruede, like many of his comrades, wanted title to land, more than any
specific agrarian vision. By the post
Civil War era, railroads provided easy, if not always inexpensive,
transportation west to the settlement line.
Sometimes, the nascent homesteader had as much trouble or bad luck
getting through the east to settle the West.
Ruede welcomed his father, Gottlieb Herman Ruede, to
Kansas the summer after he arrived there.
On the way, “Pa” Ruede had an encounter in Toledo, Ohio:
…..I
am glad you did not send that money with Pa.
He had $30 snatched from his hand at Toledo. A man asked him for change, and he got it
out, and just then the man grabbed it and jumped from the car. So that was gone. Now anybody who travels and has money ought
to keep it in his pocket, and not allow a stranger to make him get it out. Either. He has only 50 cents left.[i]
Americans moving
west were an idealistic lot. They
believed in progress. Some of them also
believed that the settle East was morally degenerate, and that the movement
from the wicked, settled cities to a pristine, virgin West was a cleansing act
for the settler.[ii] We have no idea if Gottlieb Ruede’s thoughts
on being robbed in Toledo followed this line of reasoning. It might be that his experience of Toledo,
however transitory, left a bad taste in his mouth.
[i] Howard Ruede, Sod-House Days: Letters from a Kansas
Homesteader 1877-78 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1983), p. 98.
[ii] Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1950), passim.
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