Great Plains Homesteaders Quotes

“Homesteading encouraged individuals to be resolute- to develop a kind of implacable acceptance or embrace of what needed to be done and then to go ahead and do it. It fostered steadfastness, which was seen as being the kind of person others could count on for the long haul. It valued pluck, the willingness to be bold in grabbing opportunity when it came along. It demanded keeping one's word and being honest, the kind of reflexive honesty which required no calculation or assessment of advantages.

Homesteaders admired insistent, dauntless optimism. They believed it was good to find the positives in any situation and act on them, and they believed that being positive was a personal choice.”
― Richard Edwards, Great Plains Homesteaders

“They came to a living prairie that was a marvelous and alien place, disorienting to newcomers in its vastness.”
― Richard Edwards, Great Plains Homesteaders

“Settlers flowed into all parts of Nebraska, Kansas, and eastern Dakota Territory- immigrants, native-born farmers grown tired of renting ground in Iowa or Indiana or who had failed in Virginia, people down on their luck, or dreamers from New York or Connecticut who just wanted a better chance at life than they had seen so far,”
― Richard Edwards, Great Plains Homesteaders

“As dramatically as homesteading reshaped the land, it transformed the homesteaders even more. Not all families that successfully earned homestead patents remined in farming. Some claimants and their descendants continued in farming, while others took up other professions. Regardless, future generations were shaped by the experiences of their homesteading ancestors. The Homestead Act provided the first run on the ladder of upward mobility.”
― Richard Edwards, Great Plains Homesteaders

“Homesteading created a society of small property holders that was much more egalitarian than our modern urban culture is, with its wide divisions between the rick and poor. It prompted neighbors to work together and make decisions together concerting matters that affected them all.”
― Richard Edwards, Great Plains Homesteaders

“The homesteading generation's belief in education created the same Hobson's choice that so many farm families had to face. Children educated to become nurses, teachers, lawyers, pharmacists, insurance agents, doctors or police officers do not in general return to carry the family farm into the future. To use their education, they have to leave home and farming. And to complete this bittersweet irony, their children's success in other occupations were exactly what the homesteader generation had hoped for them. In a phenomenon familiar in both white and Black communities, the farming generation's deep commitment to educating their children produces children who were not, for the most part, interested in farming.”
― Richard Edwards, Great Plains Homesteaders