The Homestead Boom and the Railroad Land Promoters

By Editor

Eastern and Central Montana, 1900-1925

The pamphlet was printed on good paper, with illustrations.

It showed a farmhouse set in a broad, golden valley, with mountains in the background and a train in the middle distance, and it said that Montana was the finest agricultural country in the world, which was a thing the railroads had discovered around 1900 and felt strongly about until approximately 1919, at which point they discovered it somewhat less strongly, though by then the pamphlets had done their work.

The Northern Pacific, the Great Northern, and the Milwaukee Road spent millions of dollars between 1900 and 1915 promoting Montana to prospective settlers, primarily in the upper Midwest and in Europe, with particular attention to Germans and Scandinavians, who were understood to be hardworking and not too particular about the weather. The promotional literature described the Montana plains as a garden waiting to be cultivated. Some of it invoked the theory, popular at the time, that rainfall increases in proportion to the breaking of new ground, the idea being that plowing releases moisture into the atmosphere, which then falls back as rain. This theory was called "rain follows the plow," and it was the kind of scientific finding that is very useful to a railroad with land to sell.

For a homesteader who wanted to move his family and all his belongings from Saint Paul, Minnesota, to eastern Montana, the Great Northern would rent him a freight car for $22.50. This was a reasonable price for a new life, and tens of thousands of people paid it. Between 1900 and 1909, the state's population grew from 243,329 to 376,053. The aggregate number of farms doubled to 26,214. Dozens of new towns appeared on the plains: Wolf Point, Glasgow, Malta, Havre, Plentywood, Scobey, Jordan, Rudyard, Ryegate, Baker. They appeared, as one historian put it, out of thin, dry air like mirages on the rolling plains, which was a more accurate description than anyone appreciated at the time.

The Enlarged Homestead Act of 1909 doubled the free land available to settlers to 320 acres. Congress, in 1912, shortened the required waiting period from five years to three and allowed homesteaders to be absent from their claims five months of each year. Nearly 32 million acres of Montana land passed from public to private hands. The wheat harvest of 1909 reached 11 million bushels. The harvest of 1915, the miracle year, reached 42 million bushels. The war in Europe was driving grain prices to levels that had never been seen before, and the homesteaders who had arrived on the strength of a railroad pamphlet were, for a few years, vindicated.

Then it stopped raining.

The drought began in 1917 and continued through the early 1920s. In Musselshell County in 1919, wheat production dropped to an average of 2.9 bushels per acre, against the 25 to 30 bushels per acre that a homesteader needed to break even. Farms were foreclosed. Banks failed. By 1925, over half of Montana's commercial banks had gone out of business. Thousands of homesteaders left the state, abandoning their claims, their equipment, and in some cases their houses, which they could not sell because there was no one left to buy them.

The railroads, it should be said, did not invent the drought. They did not cause the war to end or grain prices to fall. They printed pamphlets and sold freight car rentals and built branch lines into country that turned out to be marginal farmland in dry years, and the dry years came. The theory about rain following the plow was not borne out by subsequent observation.

What the railroads did was sell a story. The story was that Montana's plains were a garden, that the rainfall was reliable, that a man with 320 acres and a good plow could build a prosperous life. The story was not entirely false. In wet years, on good ground, with favorable prices, it was true. The pamphlets simply did not mention the other kind of years, which in Montana are the majority.

The homesteaders who came on the strength of that story were not fools. They were people who wanted land and were offered it at a price they could afford, by organizations with impressive printing budgets and a financial interest in their arrival. The railroads needed settlers to generate freight traffic. The settlers needed land. The arrangement worked well for everyone until it didn't, which is the standard arrangement in the American West.

The branch lines the railroads built to serve the homestead country are mostly gone now. The towns that appeared out of thin, dry air have mostly thinned back out. The pamphlets are in archives, still printed on good paper, with the illustrations intact.

See also

• Enlarged Homestead Act, 1909
• Great Northern Railway (U.S.), James J. Hill's promotional campaigns
• Hi-Line (Montana), the railroad corridor that defined the settlement pattern