Homesteading Haxtun and the High Plains by Jean Gray

Author:Jean Gray
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing Inc.
Published: 2013-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Four

FARMING

Horses to the Age of Power

The first influx of homesteaders to northeastern Colorado found a welcoming land in which to develop farming, as the mid-1880s experienced an unusual amount of rainfall. Wild grapes, elderberries, currants, wild vegetables, native grasses and sagebrush covered the prairie. Land speculators, newspapers and the railroads sang the praises of this “prairie rain belt.” An 1887 railroad pamphlet declared, “So much rain now falls in the eastern portion of Colorado that it is no longer fit for a winter range for cattle.”

The High Plains presented challenges, but homesteaders met each with enthusiasm. Win Morris claimed he enjoyed plowing sod amid “cactus and rattlesnakes” and walking barefoot to carry water from the Platte River through land so barren and indistinguishable that he took all his belongings with him, fearing that he would not be able to find his way back to his homestead.

Farmers faced natural menaces like prairie fires, tornadoes, hail and grasshoppers. One settler described an 1887 invasion of grasshoppers that looked “like clouds, carrying destruction before them; silver winged, and in the sunlight appearing like silver dollars.”

Despite these obstacles, farming worked well until the rain stopped in 1890. Wilbur Kipp heard stories about those drought years, the worst in 1892. He said, “There was not one blade of grass out there.”

In 1894, only six inches of rain fell and the only other moisture came from snow driven by wind so strong that it destroyed farm buildings and killed livestock gathered for protection along barbwire fences. An April 1895 blizzard delayed a Union Pacific train traveling from Julesburg to Denver for eighteen hours. Adding to the adversity, a depression caused by the 1893 banking panic swept the nation, dropping the price of grain below the cost of production. The drought lingered for nearly ten years, and after the second and third season with no rain and low prices, many homesteaders gave up and left. Towns shrank in size, and county populations dwindled.

Those who stayed, either out of determination or necessity, found ways beyond farming to stave off starvation. The Logan County Ledger relates how Crook pioneer J.M. Lynch traveled to Haxtun in 1891 to trade antelope for corn, receiving ten bushels per animal. He also killed wolves, earning a bounty of two dollars for each from the county treasurer. Other homesteaders survived by finding work elsewhere.

Ruby (Riley) Heaston, whose mother—Alice Olson—came to the area in 1890 with her parents, John H. and Cynthia Olson, talked to me about her grandparents’ struggle to hold onto their farm during a 1990 interview: “I remember hearing stories about [how], one year, my grandfather walked to Greeley to work.” John Olson built the first grain elevator in Haxtun.

Many farmers survived through diversification. In 1892, local farmers sought markets for potatoes and cabbage. Talk of sugar beets began as early as 1898, when the State Herald announced that “every farmer in Phillips County who desires to plant eight acres of sugar beets could get two pounds of free seed.” A

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