Making a Pioneer Landscape in the Oklahoma Territory

Abstract

In an incisive account of pioneering, Homestead and Community on the Middle Border, Carl Sauer lamented the lack of attention given to the rural landscape and its changes (Sauer 1963, 37). In a close-up study of four square miles of the western plains, I demonstrate how early settlers attached themselves to the land and, in the process, created a frontier rural landscape. I call this locality, some six miles northeast of Guthrie, Oklahoma Territory [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED], Mount Hope after the centrally situated Mount Hope Church and Mount Hope Cemetery. Mount Hope is in the northeastern part of nearly 2 million acres opened to non-Indian settlement in the first great land rush into Oklahoma Territory, which began at noon on 22 April 1889. Here was a chance to obtain land almost free from a rapidly dwindling supply. This microhistorical geography is intended to help in understanding pioneer settlement. I have some direct acquaintance with the land and with its pioneers: I am a son of Willis Hewes and was born on his Mount Hope homestead; I am also a grandson of Henry and Letitia Gifford, neighbors. WHENCE MOUNT HOPE Seventeen individuals - sixteen men and one woman - received homestead patents in the Mount Hope locality.(1) One man, Caldwell, who already held an 80-acre homestead in Minnesota (GLO, application no. 3031), filed on 80 acres, leaving another 80 acres unclaimed (Tract Books 1 and 2). Otherwise, homesteads were standard quarter sections of roughly 160 acres each [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 2 OMITTED]. A fairly even, dense settlement resulted. Homesteaders in the Mount Hope locality qualified as a random aggregation of strangers (Sauer 1963, 39). Their diverse origins and former places of residence make it almost certain that few of them were acquainted with each other prior to their arrival. Four of the homesteaders were born in Pennsylvania; three in Indiana; two each in Germany and Illinois; and one each in Kansas, Maine, Michigan, Missouri, New York, and West Virginia. Few of them came directly. Judging mainly by where their children were born, the largest number had sojourned in Kansas en route to Mount Hope. Also, at least one had lived on the way in Missouri, Illinois, Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska, Wisconsin, and Texas; and several had lived in two or three states. Little is known of the homesteaders' occupational backgrounds. Three had been farmers, and evidence indicates that another three were, also. Moreover, in the 1880s most Americans had rural backgrounds, and German immigrants commonly worked on farms on their way west (Roark 1979, 255). However, one homesteader had lived in the sizable town of Burlington, Iowa (CSM, Harry Whiteley). Most of the men were heads of families with up to seven children; families with two children were most common. Two men were unmarried, and one couple had no children. Two men married and had children after they filed claims. At least three had served in the Union Army in the Civil War, and one was the son of a Civil War casualty. One unmarried woman, who taught school in Guthrie, was accompanied by two younger sisters. All of the homesteaders were white. The oldest was sixty years old at the time of final filing, and four were in their fifties. The youngest at that time were twenty-eight, thirty, and thirty-one. The youngest of all, Hutsel, a deaf-mute man, apparently was only twenty-one when he first filed. At least two, Hutsel and Mattie Wagner, the teacher, had relatives in Guthrie, and Pope had a relative living on a claim just outside the Mount Hope locality. Although all could write, only two spelled the word prairie correctly on General Land Office records - but the register may have been responsible for some misspellings. The schoolteacher wrote farmland rather than prairie. THE LAND The land in the Mount Hope locality had been surveyed on the grid pattern of the U.S. Land Survey shortly after Indian titles were extinguished. …