Farming On the plains

Homesteaders settle the plains

Drawn by  the Homestead Act’s promise to people of free land, and railroad access,  500,000 new families were drawn to the Plains by 1900 after the Transcontinental Railroad was built. They spread from Kansas and Nebraska, and west of that. Homesteaders had to build shelter and get water, but on the treeless plains they built dugouts or houses of sod. Prairie were called sodbusters because they often broke up the sod to plant crops.

People on a newly finished Transcontinental

Railroad.