Rain Follows the Plow: Homesteading in Hayes County, Nebraska

by Robert D. Clark

Diaries, family narratives, legal documents and newspapers are woven into this well documented story of why and how a family participated in what Nebraska historian Addison Sheldon called "the Great Immigration" of land seekers in the 1880s. In 1885 Warren and Ada Clark, New Yorkers who were financially unable to purchase a farm in their native state or in Iowa where they lived five years as tenant farmers, homesteaded on the Great Plains in Hayes County, Nebraska, in an area beyond the 100th Meridian referred to at the time as the Great American Desert .

326 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1996