US Land Policy and the Commodification of Arid Land (1862-1920)
In 1923 my paternal grandmother, Elise Saxe Krall, "proved up" (gained title) on a 160-acre homestead in southwestern Wyoming. My grandfather, William Krall, had taken out the claim in May of 1918, one month after the birth of my father. My grandmother was delayed in her ability to prove up because in the summer of 1920 my grandfather was shot in an altercation with his neighbor over water and subsequently died of gas gangrene from the wound. In part the problem for my grandfather was that he had access to the land but couldn't gain access to the water. My grandmother was ultimately given title to the land because she grazed two cows and hayed twenty acres. But the truth was she couldn't make a living on twenty acres of hay and two cows. She subsequently moved to town and started a boarding house. Twenty years later she sold the property to my grandfather's brother for $800.00, and the land became part of a much larger ranch. This story, while dramatizing the difficulties a homesteader might face, was not the exception but rather the rule insofar as most homesteaders west of the one hundredth meridian found that US government land policies were inadequately formulated to provide them any assurance of a decent livelihood on the land. The experience of my grandparents and of government land policy in the West cannot be understood unless one is clear about the underlying forces which disconnected the rhetoric or stated purpose of land policy, which was clearly agrarian (i.e., small independent farmers), from the outcome of that policy. Although historians of land policy have long recognized that the outcome of land policy differed from the stated purpose, their interpretation of this divergence has been ad hoc and inadequately formulated, leaving one unclear about the systematic forces at work. For