Posted by David Sherman on Thursday, August 09, 2007 at 15:34:46 :
In Reply to: The "Dust bowl after that... posted by Dana on Thursday, August 09, 2007 at 14:57:15 :
In Eastern Oregon, homesteaders from back east tried to farm the high desert as if it was Iowa or Nebraska. Some of the last homesteads were available in Eastern Oregon, as late as 1910. "Free" was a tempting price for land, especially to a factory or office worker who'd never had any. They'd spend all their money to build a cabin and dig a well, then they'd plow up the desert and plant something. Ironically, right around that time there were several years of unusually wet weather, so many of them did get some crops off of their homesteads, but then the weather went back to normal, the homesteads failed, nearby ranchers bought their places, and the plowed fields went back to dry grazing. There are a lot of ghost towns, or rather just names on the map nowadays, that were towns briefly during a decade or two of homesteading. In the desert you can't do anything with 160 acres, especially if you have to haul water.
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