Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations - Kootenay Local Agricultural Society

land-hungry settlers. From 1878 to 1889 the U.S. Army forcibly ejected
white settlers who encroached on Indian lands. Commercial interests and
citizens eager to work the rich soil increasingly threatened treaty commitments
made to people who just decades before had ceded their ancestral
claim to the eastern seaboard in exchange for Oklahoma and the right to
be left alone. Eventually bowing to public pressure, the government
announced plans to open the territory to settlers in the spring of 1889.
From mid-March into April thousands of people flocked to Oklahoma’s
borders. Potential settlers were allowed to peruse Indian lands the day
before the district opened. The land grab began at noon on April 22 (now
celebrated as Earth Day) as the cavalry watched mobs race to stake out their
turf. “Sooners” who had slipped by the border guards began filing papers to
claim the best land for town sites and farms. By nightfall entire towns were
staked out; many homesteads had multiple claimants. Within a week,
Indian territory’s more than fifty thousand new residents accounted for the
majority of its population.
The following year, congressional aid prevented disaster when the settlers’
first crops withered. The average rainfall of just ten inches a year
could barely support the drought-adapted native grass, let alone crops. In
contrast to prairie grass, which weathered dry years and held the rich loess
soil in place, a sea of dead crops bared loose soil to high winds and thunderstorm
runoff.
Recognizing the potential for an agricultural catastrophe, Grand
Canyon explorer and director of the new U.S. Geological Survey Major
John Wesley Powell recommended that settlers in the semiarid West be
allowed to homestead twenty-five hundred acres of land, but be allotted
water to irrigate just twenty acres. He thought this would both prevent
overuse of water and conserve the region’s fragile soils. Instead, Congress
retained the allocation of one hundred and sixty acres of land to each
homesteader wherever they settled. That much land could yield a fortune
in California. On the plains, an industrious family could starve trying to
farm twice as much.
Undeterred by nay-saying pessimists, land boosters advertised the
unlimited agricultural potential of the plains, popularizing the notion that
“rain follows the plow.” It certainly helped their pitch that settlers started
plowing the Great Plains during a wet spell. Between 1870 and 1900,
American farmers brought as much virgin land into cultivation as they had
in the previous two centuries. Mostly crops were good at first. Then the
drought came.
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