Backcountry Ghosts: California Homesteaders and the Making of a Dubious Dream

by Josh Sides

California is an infamously tough place to be home to about half of the entire nation’s homeless population, burdened by staggering home prices and unsustainable rental rates, California is a state in crisis. But it wasn’t always that way, as prize-winning historian Josh Sides reveals in Backcountry Ghosts .

In 1862 President Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act, the most ambitious and sweeping social policy in the history of the United States. In the Golden State more than a hundred thousand people filed homesteading claims between 1863 and the late 1930s. More than sixty thousand Californians succeeded, claiming about ten million acres.

In Backcountry Ghosts Josh Sides tells the histories of these Californian homesteaders, their toil and enormous patience, successes and failures, doggedness in the face of natural elements and disasters, and resolve to defend hard-earned land for themselves and their children. While some of these homesteaders were fulfilling the American Dream—that all Americans should have the opportunity to own land regardless of their background or station—others used the Homestead Act to add to already vast landholdings or control water or mineral rights.

Sides recovers the fascinating stories of individual homesteaders in California, both those who succeeded and those who did not, and the ways they shaped the future of California and the American West. Backcountry Ghosts reveals the dangers of American dreaming in a state still reeling from the ambitions that led to the Great Recession.

 

Genres: History

248 pages, Hardcover

Published April 1, 2021

About the author

Josh Sides is a Professor of History and Director for the Center for Southern California Studies at the California State University Northridge.

Reviews

[Tascha Folsoi · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a solid read, and I would recommend it to anyone interested in California history or real property history. I will certainly keep my copy on hand to reference in the future. It is an easy read in the sense that the style of the writing could blend in nicely in any issue of The Atlantic magazine. The beginning had a lot of interesting information about the history of land and property in California , much of which I recounted to my retired judge parents, to which they in turn responded, "We were certainly never taught anything about this in our real property classes. We should have learned a lot more about the history of these land laws." I think that in and of itself is an important endorsement of the history in this book. If you know even the little bit that I have learned about land dispossession and how the East was won, you will see the very practiced version play out at warp speed by the time the Yankees made it to the West.

The last third of the book reads a bit more like a jaunty encyclopedia in that it doesn't facilitate the reader's building of a moral stance in the way the first part does. Still, the latter part provides interesting anecdotes and important names of people and legislative acts without, however, providing enough elaborative context for me to decide what I thought about certain goings on. Nonetheless, I am in a much better position to research those people and events further than I would be without this book.

In the end, he ties in people's unfeasible desire to own their own property in the time of the 2008 credit default swap induced collapse to an outdated Jeffersonian agrarian ideal in which every (white man) could own their own land. I would say people in our last housing crisis saw themselves as wanting to participate in a speculative economy more like a Federalist or Hamiltonian capitalist. I disagreed with certain aspects of author's world view. But again, I would like to read other books by him that give attention to this geographical area.