The Homestead Act

(Library of Congress) President Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act on May 20, 1862. The act provided settlers with 160 acres of surveyed public land after payment of a filing fee and five years of continuous residence. Designed to spur Western migration, the Homestead Act culminated a twenty-year battle to distribute public lands to citizens willing to farm. Continued

Photo: My great-grandparents' homestead near Hudson (Rice Township), New Mexico.

1843: The first major wagon train sets out on the Oregon Trail

 

(Wikipedia) ... In what was dubbed "The Great Migration of 1843" or the "Wagon Train of 1843", an estimated 700 to 1,000 emigrants left for Oregon.
They were led initially by John Gantt, a former U.S. Army Captain and fur trader who was contracted to guide the train to Fort Hall for $1 per person. The winter before, Marcus Whitman had made a brutal mid-winter trip from Oregon to St. Louis to appeal a decision by his mission backers to abandon several of the Oregon missions. He joined the wagon train at the Platte River for the return trip.
When the pioneers were told at Fort Hall by agents from the Hudson's Bay Company that they should abandon their wagons there and use pack animals the rest of the way, Whitman disagreed and volunteered to lead the wagons to Oregon. He believed the wagon trains were large enough that they could build whatever road improvements they needed to make the trip with their wagons. Continued

1922: Albert Fall Gives Away the Store

Albert Fall: New Mexican
 politician and crook

(Wikipedia) The Teapot Dome Scandal was a bribery incident that took place in the United States from 1921 to 1922, during the administration of President Warren G. Harding.
Secretary of the Interior Albert Bacon Fall had leased Navy petroleum reserves at Teapot Dome in Wyoming and two other locations in California to private oil companies at low rates without competitive bidding.
In 1922 and 1923, the leases became the subject of a sensational investigation by Senator Thomas J. Walsh. Fall was later convicted of accepting bribes from the oil companies and became the first Cabinet member to go to prison. Continued

Want to Adopt a Wild Horse? The Government Will Pay You $1,000

Wild horses (Carol Highsmith/Library of Congress)

(NYTimes) It is like an online matchmaking service. Horse lovers who want to adopt a wild mustang from the western United States can browse dozens of headshots.

From drop-down menus, you can choose gender, color and age: a 4-year-old chestnut mare, for example, or a 9-year-old gray gelding. Some horses have no training, while others might be “gentled,” with experience being handled.

This is Wild Horses Online, part of the federal Bureau of Land Management’s online adoption service. Starting this month, the bureau is trying to make wild mustang adoptions more attractive by paying $1,000 to those who take in the animals, which are gathered up from public land in the western United States as part of efforts to manage the population. Continued

Wanted: More pastures for West’s overpopulated wild horses

(Library of Congress)

(SFNM) If you ever wished to gaze at a stomping, snorting, neighing panorama of Western heritage from your living room window, now could be your chance.

A classic image of the American West — wild horses stampeding across the landscape — not only has endured through the years but has multiplied past the point of range damage.

Through May 3, the U.S. government is seeking more private pastures for an overpopulation of wild horses. Continued

Samuel Pomeroy

Santa Fe R.R. streamliner, the "Super Chief," being serviced at the depot, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Servicing these diesel streamliners takes five minutes (Jack Delano, Library of Congress 1943)

(Wikipedia) Samuel Clarke Pomeroy (January 3, 1816 – August 27, 1891) was an United States Senator from Kansas in the mid-19th century, serving in the United States Senate during the American Civil War. Pomeroy served in the Massachusetts House of Representatives.
A Republican, he also was the mayor of Atchison, Kansas, from 1858 to 1859, the second president of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad and the first president to oversee any of the railroad's construction and operations. Pomeroy succeeded Cyrus K. Holliday as president of the railroad on January 13, 1864. Continued

Frank Steunenberg

(Wikipedia) Frank Steunenberg (August 8, 1861 – December 30, 1905) was the fourth Governor of the State of Idaho, serving from 1897 until 1901.
He is perhaps best known for his 1905 assassination by one-time union member Harry Orchard, who was also a paid informant for the Cripple Creek Mine Owners' Association.
Orchard attempted to implicate leaders of the radical Western Federation of Miners in the assassination.
The labor leaders were found not guilty in two trials, but Orchard spent the rest of his life in prison. Continued

The Great Die-Up: The winter of 1886-87 took the crown off king cattle

(Library of Congress)

(True West) ... The summer of 1886 was unusually hot and dry as a drought hit. More grass died. Brush fires burned off even more. Water sources dried up.

Other signs pointed to a tough winter ahead—geese going south earlier, cattle growing thicker fur, beaver stacking more wood for dens.

In November, the snow came. No place was safe—California got nearly four inches in San Francisco. North Texas and the Panhandle were inundated. Continued

Rural America Faces A Crisis In 'Adequate Housing'

Old House 119, Curry County, New Mexico (Sixgun Siding)

(NPR) Along the country roads that fan out from Ogallala, Neb., there are abandoned, weathered old farmhouses and collapsed barns, remnants of the hardscrabble settlers who first tapped the Ogallala aquifer and turned the dry, high plains into lush wheat and corn fields.
Like a lot of the Midwest, western Nebraska slowly emptied out over the years, which is why a lot of locals say the current housing shortage is nothing short of a paradox. Continued

Buckaroos & Cowpunchers

Roping, Ninety-Six Ranch, 1980 (Library of Congress)

(Western Horseman) Cowboy gear used in California and the Great Basin differs greatly from the trappings found in the Southwest.
Regardless of the region, equipment design has been shaped primarily by the landscape and unique methods of working cattle. Continued

Who Are The Westerners?

Cottonwood Mall,
Albuquerque, NM (AllenS)

(Wallace Stegner, American Heritage) ... Physically the West could only be itself. Its scale, its colors, its landforms, its plants and animals tell a traveler what country he is in and a native that he is at home. Even Western cities owe most of their distinctiveness to their physical setting. Albuquerque with its mud-colored houses spreading like clay banks along the valley of the Rio Grande could only be New Mexico. Denver’s ringworm suburbs on the apron of the Front Range could only be boom-time Colorado. Salt Lake City bracing back against the Wasatch and looking out toward the dead sea and the barren ranges could only be the Great Basin. But is anything except their setting distinctive? Continued

Bernard DeVoto

(Wikipedia) Bernard Augustine DeVoto (January 11, 1897 – November 13, 1955) was an American historian and author who specialized in the history of the American West.
... In DeVoto's later years, he gained fame for his popular histories of the West: The Year of Decision: 1846 (1943), Across the Wide Missouri (1947), The Course of Empire (1952), and a popular abridged edition of The Journals of Lewis and Clark (1953). Across the Wide Missouri won the Pulitzer Prize for History (1948 and The Course of Empire won the National Book Award for Nonfiction (1953). Continued

Frank Steunenberg

(Wikipedia) Frank Steunenberg (August 8, 1861 – December 30, 1905) was the fourth Governor of the State of Idaho, serving from 1897 until 1901.
He is perhaps best known for his 1905 assassination by one-time union member Harry Orchard, who was also a paid informant for the Cripple Creek Mine Owners' Association. Orchard attempted to implicate leaders of the radical Western Federation of Miners in the assassination.
The labor leaders were found not guilty in two trials, but Orchard spent the rest of his life in prison. Continued

1845: Journalist John L. O'Sullivan argues for "the right of our manifest destiny"

Painting by Alfred Jacob Miller

(Wikipedia) ... O'Sullivan's second use of the phrase became extremely influential. On December 27, 1845, in his newspaper the New York Morning News, O'Sullivan addressed the ongoing boundary dispute with Britain. O'Sullivan argued that the United States had the right to claim "the whole of Oregon":

And that claim is by the right of our manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federated self-government entrusted to us.

That is, O'Sullivan believed that Providence had given the United States a mission to spread republican democracy ("the great experiment of liberty"). Because Britain would not spread democracy, thought O'Sullivan, British claims to the territory should be overruled. O'Sullivan believed that manifest destiny was a moral ideal (a "higher law") that superseded other considerations. Continued

Lifeways of the Southern Athabaskans

Apache Chief James A. Garfield,
1899 (Library of Congress)

(Santa Fe New Mexican) "Athabaskan” is a word every New Mexican should know. Here’s why: Athabaskan is a family of languages spoken all around the state by its Apache- and Navajo-speaking tribal members.
Beyond the Southwest, the tribes who use the Athabaskan language stretch as far as the North Pole. Continued

Cowboy Rangers of the early U.S. Forest Service

"The Forest Ranger" by W. Herbert Dunton,
 c1913 (Library of Congress)

(True West) Today, a forest ranger may call to mind a friendly guide who leads nature walks and gives campfire talks. But 100 years ago, forest rangers who worked west of the Mississippi River were closer in spirit and appearance to cowboys.
During the early days of the U.S. Forest Service, these rangers rode horses, packed mules, and carried Colts and Winchesters. Their story is a little-told chapter in the history of the American West. Continued

Obar, New Mexico: Land of "Tropical Luxuriance"

Obar, New Mexico once sat along the Rock Island Railroad tracks, between Logan and Nara Visa, but nothing remains today. And I mean nothing, it's the most absent town I've found in these parts. Kenna, after being burned over a few years back, still has a few dwellings, along with a few inhabitants. Even Norton has a foundation or two to show for itself, but nothing remains of Obar proper.
This is all the more remarkable because Obar was heavily promoted by the New Mexico Land and Immigration Company, a fly-by-night developer based in Topeka, Kansas.
The NML&IC promised a land of milk and honey, and also to pave the roads and build a hotel. The land, of course, was as hardscrabble as the rest of the region, and the roads and hotel never materialized.
Obar made a go of it for a few years, attracting a couple of hundred settlers, all of whom moved on to better things, a little poorer and, one hopes, wiser for their trouble.
Sometime later, a little monument was erected by some thoughtful people to commemorate Obar, which you can see today, at the intersection of U.S. 54 and Quay Road K.


Obar

For the definitive history of Obar go to The Link Family Chronicles.

The Homestead Act

(Library of Congress) President Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act on May 20, 1862. The act provided settlers with 160 acres of surveyed public land after payment of a filing fee and five years of continuous residence. Designed to spur Western migration, the Homestead Act culminated a twenty-year battle to distribute public lands to citizens willing to farm. Continued

Photo: My great-grandparents' homestead near Tucumcari, New Mexico, circa 1905.

"Losing Eden: An Environmental History of the American West" by Sara Dant

(Santa Fe New Mexican) ... “Native peoples generally lived lightly on the land but sometimes pressed it beyond its carrying capacity,” she writes. “When Europeans and later Americans arrived, then, they were engaging not with undisturbed nature, as so many argued until the 1990s, but these immigrants nevertheless portrayed the West as an ‘Eden’ or Promised Land destined for them. … For some, the West fulfilled this divine ‘land of milk and honey’ vision, but for many, the region constituted a harsh and unforgiving desert of aridity and struggle.” Continued