Czech Farmers in Oklahoma

Abstract

P^T P HE ethnic farm groups or agricultural culture islands which are found scattered throughout the United States present a fruitful field for study which has by no means been neglected by students over a considerable period of years. In these times when we are so seriously concerned over the future of agriculture in this country studies of the more successful of these settlements have a special value, particularly when their setting is an area where the native American approach to agriculture has been less successful. In Lincoln County, Oklahoma, there is a Czech culture island in the vicinity of the town of Prague which the author made the subject of a study during a three-year period from 1938 to 1941. The county has through the familiar cotton belt cycle from virgin land to land abandonment, poverty, and high tenancy in the short span of a half century. The Czech group, on the contrary, has shown a much higher degree of stability than the native American population, although the principal cash crop of the group, like their neighbors, is cotton. The object of the study was to apply some measures to indicate the degree of difference in stability existing between the groups after a half century in the county and to discover to what these differences could be attributed. For this purpose, in addition to the Czech group to be considered three native American control groups were selected for the county, on a township basis. Two of these groups were entirely out of contact with the Czech group while the third consisted of the remaining farmers in the two townships in which the Czech group was located. For all groups climate, soils, vegetation, and topography were approximately the same. The period of settlement was the same for all, as all groups lay in the eastern half of the county on the land of the Sac and Fox Indian Reservation, settled by a run on a single day in 1891. Three major aspects of group stability were examined as quantitatively as possible: group mobility and tendency toward movement; group relationships with the land; and group social existence.