On the Homestead (2)

[I missed a day because of the death of Henry Aaron. Last Friday, I summarized the story of a unimaginable hero, the woman who came to the region with her husband--she was less than half her age. Her incredible life and impossible character is celebrated by her son, a man named Ernest G. Bormann, in a little memoir of his own life, Homesteading in the South Dakota Badlands. On Friday, I promised a bit more. This is what I promised.]

Here are the Boermanns (for reasons he doesn't mention, he dropped the e in his parents' last name). 

Their daughter, Louisa, on her father's knee, died when she was 13, during the Children's Blizzard of 1888, when she and others left their schoolhouse on the prairie and took refuge under a haystack. Louisa was the only child from Coyote Center school who died in the storm.

Ernest Bormann followed his own "call of the wild," and went west on rumpled, bumpy paths in an old wagon he'd bought and reconditioned, drove it all the way out to the land he'd secured under the Homestead Act, 160 acres of parched prairie at the very edge of the Badlands. He knew there was a tar-paper shack standing (barely) out there awaiting him, the one at the top of the page. At least there was something. No immediate neighbors, nothing, really, for as far as he could see but the Badlands right there over his shoulder. 

The conditions of the Homestead Act were clear. The land was yours, if you could keep it--and keeping it meant "improving" it in one way or another. If you could show clearly that you were doing your best to make the land prosper, it was yours. 

Ernest Bormann's agenda was just as clear: live out there for a year, work at "improving" things so that the land, bad as it was, belonged to him, then sell it, just like that. If he could last a year out there by himself, if he could signal to the authorities that he was actually working at "provin' it up," it was his to do with as he pleased. He considered the land is job.

Most of his little book is about his time out there by himself. It wasn't easy. Even the Native people who were there long, long before white homesteaders called the region "bad land." While there once may well have been roaming buffalo around, no doleful cowboy or homesteader ever sat out beneath a prairie sky and sung the glories of the Badlands. 

He tried to break the ground--it had been attempted previously, but it didn't get accomplished.

Neither did Bormann succeed. Some things just can't be done, no matter how much sweat and tears could be invested. Rattlesnakes were part of the bargain, of course. He had to be careful where he walked. They were everywhere. And he "worked out" a lot--cultivating for ranchers miles away, putting up buildings for others, drilling wells where it was possible. It was 1912. He was alone on his claim, but hard work was not a chore for someone raised by his parents. 

Ernest Bormann's South Dakota homesteading experience was markedly different from that of his parents. From day one he never intended to stay or start a family. That would have been difficult, if not impossible. His hard work at the edge of the Badlands was all about money. He'd get that land for nothing, then, a year later, sell it. The Badlands would make him some bucks.

Ernest Bormann, an immigrant farm kid raised in poverty unlike anyone could find today, became the quintessential American business mogul, even though to call him "rich" would have to be only in comparison with his parents. The land his parents developed, "improved," provided a home for a family. The land he improved was just so much real estate.

What the original occupants of the land, the Lakota people, had all kinds of trouble understanding was that view of the earth beneath their feet--that it was just real estate, something on which to turn a buck. After a year of sleeping alone in the wide open country where he lived in that tarpaper shack, Ernest sold it, stuck whatever he made into his wallet, and moved on. That's what they didn't understand nor appreciate. 

Sometimes I can't help but think that pioneers like Ann Rubin Boermann were absolute marvels, heros, wonders. That she could do what she did for her family was truly heroic. Today, people like the Boermanns are largely forgotten, their stories buried beneath miles and miles of open land worked by farm machinery too big to drive on paved roads. Who really cares about the old stories? Is there a high school within 500 miles where students read Giants in the Earth, a place where they know something of their own origins by their stories? 

The stories we tell are the ones created by Ernest Bormann, who figured out he could turn a buck or two if he lived out there all by himself, did some work to improve his acres, then, turn it around and put it on the market--homesteading as a business. What he gets for what he'd done is something to line his wallet.

He was only doing the all-American thing, wasn't he?  You can't blame him. He grew up in poverty. He wanted more. 

That's basically the story we love to tell.