Together. Im grateful to have been and katrina and all of you for this wonderful most really full program and worthy of the David Stockman tradition. Anyway, when i was growing up on small town montana, pretty rural and a community picnic, one time, the sole timer who was a homesteader. We back when was reminiscing about the family farm in wisconsin, and i asked how come he moved out to montana . And he said, well, there was free land out here and land was 20 an acre back in wisconsin. So he said he came out here for free land, which was the most expensive land he ever bought. So this panel was a dream of mine. Amy lauter is going to talk about the free land, socalled free land and i ive been looking for years and my search of 19th century illustrated stereotypes or stereotype ups of. And we have a panelist today who has figured out how to get a handle on that, which i never did. And so im excited about that as well. Hes our second presenter. The john coward our third presenter is the foremost authority on images of Indigenous People in the United States and we have that all tied up by somebody whos bringing the mythology to current films, by someone who is not only written and research movies, hes interviewed dozens of directors and so im really excited about this panel. Thank you all for being here. And amy is going to talk about freeland and shes an authority on the 19th century and foreign periodicals and women. And she has two books on the subject, at least. And take it away, amy. Thank you. I everybody. Thanks for having me on the panel, though. When you approached me about this particular idea, i immediately thought of rose wilder lane, one of my books is about her and her book, free land. Its titled free land and it was about how homesteading really wasnt what it was framed to be. So that led me to consider for this research how newspapers may have covered the homestead act in 1862 and how they may have covered homesteaders and homestead. So let me go ahead and share my screen. Everybody tell me if this is working properly. Everybody see it . Okay, great. And ill go ahead up here and start the show. So the paper is called the price for free land. This course about homesteading in the homestead act in 19th century newspapers. And as i said, i started out by kind of considering the work of roosevelt lane and actually the work of her mother, Laura Ingalls wilder, and how they talked about what it was like to be a homesteader and what it was like to to work a homestead and in roswell darlings 1938 novel free land, which was based on the story of her grandparents, caroline and charles ingalls. But for an adult audience, it actually appeared in the same decade as all the little house books, which were geared towards children. Her work was was as an adult. Work much more focused on the hardship part of being a homestead or in the end the thesis that she she ended up with the theme of the entire work is that the free land wasnt free. And this is a statement we hear now. Ive heard a couple of different places besides bills anecdotes, too, but the idea that even though the land was supposedly free, there was there was a higher cost than just cash that went with it. So a little bit of background. The 1862 homestead act was passed and may of 1862, and it was it was a proposal to allow United States citizens 160 acres of Government Land for five years. And all they had to do to claim the deed after five years was to work on it, to develop it, to improve it in some way. The idea was to provide people with a working farm. It had been debated for a number of years, but it didnt actually Pass Congress until after the south seceded. And i imagine there were a lot of questions and debate some of what i uncovered seems to suggest that part of the reason it didnt pass before then was struggles over. Well, which states would claim what land and whether theyd be slaves or whether theyd be free, and whether should be such a land give away. Not to mention, not sure about people who werent sure about clear title the land that the government was giving away. But it did pass in may of 1862, and these were the terms of the deal. Any u. S. Citizen could claim 160 acres of freely. And if they were over 21, settled on the land for five years and improved it and were willing and able to file the paperwork after five years with the payment of a 10 fee. So it sounds like a really good deal, right . Five years of living on the land. Ten bucks. And its yours. Its 160 acres. There are a lot of other provisions within the act that accounted for lands held in trust for Railroad Tracks and tree claims came into play and citizenship came into play later. But this was the original terms of the act that any settler could pay for the land in full before the end of the five year period. For 100 or one dollars and 0. 25 an acre. Pretty, pretty good bargain. One of the things that i uncovered when i was looking, digging into to the the. The secondary research about this was the concept of squatters. And i was familiar with this concept before, but it ended up it came up a lot in the in the first decade of coverage that i looked at. So its important to define it now in a squatter is anyone who has settled on land in the west to which they did not have legal title. And one of the things that the homestead act did was attempt put a put some sort of legality to those folks who went west without permission and were settling on land. There was a lot of legal dispute and it varied by state, but it comes into play as part of coverage. So i wanted to make sure that i defined that here. Okay. Was back. So this is a big topic. And one of the things i decided to do was look at it as a national topic rather than focusing only on local newspapers or only on east coast newspapers or urban newspapers, i decided to take a much broader view, and i looked at newspapers dot com, which is a digital digitized archive of thousands of newspapers globally. And the first thing that i tried to do to, to get a handle on the scope of this is i put in a search for the homestead act. From 1861 to 1899, just to see what popped up. And in the United States, there were more than a million matches and hits, 1 million, 705,000 matches. And and i and i realized suddenly that the scope of this was much larger than i expected it to be. But just that that sheer volume of mentions of the homestead act in that 40 year period made me realize, okay, this really was dominant discourse of the late 19th century, which is not a surprise. But it was nice to see some numbers to back it up. So in order to get a handle on this and the sheer volume of things that were out there, i decided to look more closely at the top 20 articles in the top three states identified by decade for things. And so i did this for each decade. So from for the decade of 1861 to 1870, 71 to 79, 81 to 89, or 81 to 290 and 91 to 99. And in each of those decades, i asked, you know, how do newspapers discuss the homestead act of 1862 . How did newspaper discuss homesteading . And how did newspapers discuss homesteaders . And so that was quite the volume there, but it was much more manageable in reading 1 million articles and so heres what emerged. 1861 to 1869. Most mentions of the phrase the homestead act popped up in california, pennsylvania and new york. And the articles at the time were largely informational. This act has been passed this is how it works. This is to whom it applies. There was an awful lot of boosterism and many of these articles. In fact, there was a what there was a there was an article written by the speaker of the house agro at the time that was highly in favor of this homestead act, urging people to take advantage of it. In fact, the phrase he used in his article was the long struggle for the land of the landless is at last consummated. And in this decade, as was passed and people were trying to figure out what it was, the term homesteader was rarely used. Rarely used, in fact, it didnt start to really show up until the next decade, which was 1872, 1879, when the talks states with the most coverage were kansas califor and pennsylvania. And what i found really interesting immediately was that the kansas newspaper sort of exploded by 1870. The coverage in kansas was more than twice what it was in the other top three states, and that kind of shows where things were moving. Ill get to that in a second. But again, theres a lot of informational pieces and some of it is still about how to claim your lands that you want to have, but some of it is also numbers of claims being being filed. Thats a title pardon acres of land that are held also the top 20 questions. Your ask at the Land Claims Office when you need to prove that youve developed your claim, these kinds of helpful informational things were in there and there is an uptick in the term in the times. This term homesteader and homesteading are used, especially in the midwest. And we see a lot of articles, especially in the mid seventies, about hardships for homesteaders. In fact in iowa, which is one of the papers that had a lot of form studying articles in it with. Others, a particular article that was a regular feature that was reprinted in kansas and california, in pennsylvania, donations for homesteaders. Homesteaders are having a tough time. Donations for clothing donation drives and in context, in the 1870s, there was there were a number of prairie fires and locust plagues. I kid you not spreading through the midwest. And those who were were trying to work that land were running into challenges that farmers in the east probably never even considered, that there was there was a lot of going on there in the 1880s. Again, weve got kansas, california and nebraska. Theres more informational things, debates in congress. But theres also now some International Press coverage, particularly preprint reprints of articles from ireland and new zealand where they were and where in new zealand they were in talks to figure out how they could do their own land giveaway. And in ireland it was from a labor perspective, how this this equity, the sharing of was maybe a first step for the working man towards some sort of upward mobility, but only the first step. There was more that needed to be done. Oh, the boosterism here centered a great deal on the International Labor press coverage, which was positive on Land Ownership. And i thought it was interesting. And it was its something id like to tease out a little bit more how often these articles equated Land Ownership with wealth and upward mobility. Im wondering if thats one of those things that is sort of an american take it for granted hegemonic thing, but its sort of just underscore as all of this, this coverage and when it comes to the terms almost better and homesteading suddenly these terms are everywhere. I mean, they were already increasing in number in the in the 1870s, but in the 18th eighties, these terms are everywhere. And theres big debates about whether the homestead should be repealed, whether they given up, the government had given away land there were some who said there was no need to help the homesteaders because they should be grateful for the free land. Theyve got. There were articles clapping back, saying homesteading was harder than it appears. Was it . Its clearly a really tumultuous time to be someone who was homesteading or to be a homesteader. And this is just one of the phrases that was reprinted in a couple of places. It takes grit and background, backbone and plenty of that to make homesteading a success. It is a safe and certain, but not royal road to fortune. In other words. Okay, yeah. The land is free, but it doesnt mean wealth. You know, its were not to get wealthy off of this land, essentially. And by the 1890s, again, top three, kansas, pennsylvania and nebraska california bowed out. Finally. The informational theme continues and now its most early debates in congress over over whether this this act should be repealed, whether provisions should be made for the act. Theres a side of Historical Context now, because were at were 30 years removed from the original acts passing. So theres always someone saying, and this is how it came about. Theres theres these kinds of articles, this is how it came about. Generally. The coverage is still largely supportive of the act, even in the debates over whether homesteading is is hard or whether land is free. Everybody generally agrees. Just giving away the land is a great plan still. And of course, the the the act was official through 1934. So to it was still in effect here. But now when we see mentions of homesteaders and homesteading, its homesteaders organizing by this point homesteaders are organizing politically and theyre sharing their stories about how working a homestead was challenging, noting that it takes more than just a single man or woman to be successful and proving up a claim and turning it into a farm that its really a an endeavor that requires a lot of people to make it work and just sort of starting to to highlight those stories in a way that positions homesteaders in a capacity to organize for their own political good and for their own social good. And i feel like im sort of touching on all of this and outline a little bit because in a way that database did give me some of that really broad outline of things, and i kind of want to tease out some more work from here. But here are some of the limitations is that i recognize, just as i was going through, first of all, search terms, the first search term i tried out was just homestead act and that yielded a ton of information and informational themes. I needed to dig in deeper if i wanted to get at what happened with homesteaders and homesteading. The other thing that i noted as i went through regional variances khalif, you kept popping up in that top with mentions of the homestead act. But california is issues vary quite dramatically from those of the folks in kansas and other places. Yes, they were covering the same kinds of information, but california was also digging into some legal cases about land grants versus the homestead act and who actually held title and how would land be divvied up in a divorce and could have mortgages and what would happen if you had a mortgage on land you didnt have title to lots of court cases that we didnt see. I didnt see repeated in coverage in the other states. So california was really focused in on some things that that that while certainly informational and falling into theme were uniquely california which made me think it might be beneficial to do the same kind of thing focusing tightly in on a region. But again, its not something i would have noticed if i hadnt done the broad search first. So broad and then narrow. I guess we go here. Things that i found that i wasnt expecting to see that im kind of fascinated by. One is the spread of coverage from initial publication. I found this particularly fascinating at the start with the notice of the homestead act that was prepared by the secretary or speaker of the house, jim crow, published in the east coast papers and how it spread fast. I mean, i found it in several different papers. It kept coming up. And how what those dates and labels it became really interesting to watch that go across the country with this database. I also found it fascinating to see how homesteader became a term in the cultural landscape. It didnt exist in 1862. It began to exist in 1871 or so, and then it became an identifier. It became an identity, it became a label with which homesteaders could work to organize politically. And i found that fascinating. And just to bring it back around from that original point of view here. I was starting out from this place where i was thinking about Ingalls Wilder and rose wilder lane and how they wrote about homesteading in their books and how they illustrated the challenge of homestead. And there is a character in little town on the prairie by Laura Ingalls wilder named mrs. Mckay, who is a seamstress. And she and her husband had taken a claim outside of desmet, south dakota, because they wanted the free land. But they didnt have the money for the tools and the implements and the livestock and everything that people needed in to work that land. And so they had to figure out a balance between working in town and, staying on a homestead, and their story is not unusual. This happened a lot and in the case of mrs. Mckay, she and her daughter stayed out on the claimed six months of the year just to tend the garden and listen to the wind blow in order to meet the the requirement that someone stays on the land for five years and tries to prove it up. And shes complaining in the book about how this was a stupid rule because dont they know, that those who can work a farm can buy a farm and they have the money already. And that kind of underscores that final thought, that the free land wasnt free, that there was a lot of effort that went into actually working that land, developing it and turning it into a successful business, something that was made even more challenging during an era of grasshopper plagues and prairie fires. Thank you. So we move on to jonathan next and then come back for questions. Kinsey had the questions that the conclusion of all the presentations well have time. Well, the next one, im very envious of jonathan for figuring all this out. And go ahead, take it away. Okay. Im going to share my oz powerpoint as well. Bear with me here. Okay. Hope you can see that. All right. Yep. All right. So thank you so much for inviting me to present. This has, as you mentioned, been kind of a recurring theme in some of my research over the last few years. That is vaudeville and its reflection or as a reflection on broader trends and happenings in the u. S. In the late 19th and early century. So my present edition is titled urban peddlers in the rural west a jewish cowboy myths the bonneville stage shalom your ark. So the question really that ive been teasing out or trying to figure out is how we get from the image on the left, sort of the standard, even stereotypical jewish peddler and the image on the right, which is kind of a farcical look at the rodeo clown, as it were, who of course, is dressed up as a cowboy. So peddling the selling of items, house to house and place to place was really the dominant for in europe and the americas during the 19th century, virtually no during this period was without a peddler in their immediate or extended family, and non viewed the occupation as distinctly jewish, even though there were, of course, other peddlers as well. But despite the familiar ity of peddling in the jewish experience, european from Eastern Europe who immigrated to new york city in the beginning in the late 19th century had difficulty imagining their peddlers, their brethren, as i