Proving Up

Lisi Krall

Description

On July 9, 1920, William Krall, a coal miner in Wyoming, was shot by his neighbor in a dispute over water as he attempted to "prove up" and gain title to his homestead. Attempting to understand her grandfather's passion and determination for making his own 160 acres of land in dry, sagebrush country led Professor Lisi Krall on a unique journey through the interconnections of economy, culture, and land in the history of the United States. She tells the story of the domestication of land in the United States, a story that hinges on the market economy and the agrarian and wilderness ethos as foundational land institutions. Drawing on institutional or evolutionary economics, Proving Up explores in detail the rich and ever-changing intermingling of culture, economic, and material conditions through American history. Untangling the complicated history of Americans' experiences with nature, Krall provides a critical focus and a timely contribution to the current debate surrounding our relationship to land and nature.
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction

1. Thomas Jefferson's Agrarian Vision and the Changing Nature of Property

2. The Dialectics of Government Land Policies (1785–1862)

3. The Dialectics of Government Land Policies on Arid Land

4. Multidimensional Land

5. Wilderness

Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• USA
• United States of America
• 19th century
• Political economy
• History of the Americas
• Central
• États-Unis
• National
• Monument

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 24 mars 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438430805
• Langue: English

Extrait

Proving Up
Domesticating Land in U.S. History
LISI KRALL

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2010 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
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Production by Ryan Morris
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                       Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Krall, Lisi, 1954–
  Proving up : domesticating land in U.S. history / Lisi Krall.
      p. cm.
  Includes bibliographical references and index.
  ISBN 978-1-4384-3079-9 (hbk. : alk. paper)
  1. Land use, Rural—United States—History. 2. Land reform—United States—History. 3. Public lands—United States—History. I. Title.
  HD256.K73 2010
  333.760973—dc22
                                                                                         2009033234
                                            10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

I dedicate this book my father, Robert Wilhelm Krall; to my son, Francis Wilhelm Prus; and to the desolate and numinous land of Wyoming.

Preface

Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past.
—Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
E arly in my professional life I moved to central New York and away from southwestern Wyoming, a place that had been my home since birth. The contrast between these two places heightened in me an interest in the complex connection between people and the land. However, had it not been for the dramatic story of my paternal grandparents, this inclination would not have taken the path that it did. The story of my grandparents provided the seed for a broader inquiry into the interplay of economic change and dominant cultural attitudes about land. Here is their story.
On July 9, 1920, my paternal grandfather, William Krall, was shot by his neighbor, Steve Lasich, in an altercation over water on his homestead on the sagebrush steppe of southwestern Wyoming. Two days later he died of “gas gangrene” from the wound. He was thirty years old, and he left his wife, Elise, my grandmother, and a son, my father, who was two years old at the time.
The precursor to the story of my grandparents was written during the Cretaceous when dinosaurs stalked their prey behind cycads, and Wyoming was lush and verdant. Cretaceous conditions made for the formation of massive coal deposits, which eons later, in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, powered trains, heated homes, fueled the production of electricity and, in the end, created a modicum of economic opportunity for men like my grandfather in an otherwise economically inhospitable land.
My grandfather was born in Germany in 1890 and immigrated to New Haven, Connecticut in 1913. Initially he found work as a baker. Several years later he placed a newspaper ad for a wife, which my grandmother answered. She was a pragmatic German woman who had come to the United States in 1914 and was working as a domestic for a Jewish family in New York City. She must have assessed her circumstances and decided that her chances for a fulfilling life were more promising with my grandfather. She answered his solicitation, and they married in the spring and headed west in 1917. Fortunately, looking back was not something my grandmother was inclined to do.
William followed his older brother, Robert, to southwestern Wyoming where he had gone to work in the Sublette Coal Mine in 1912. The descent into the pockets of coal deep in the earth, day after day, may have caused my grandfather to imagine economic redemption of another kind, coming from the land above. Land acquisition in southwestern Wyoming at the time was not restricted to those with the capital to buy coal mines. Those with modest means but with the will to work hard had the opportunity to file on homesteads and secure land.
The Homestead Act proved very accommodating to the exigencies of wage labor and to those without money capital. First passed in 1862, it was revised numerous times and once again on June 6, 1912 to allow people, such as my grandfather and his brother, to live on their homesteads during the summer months, carrying out the activities of “proving up,” and return to the coal mine during the remainder of the year where they could earn enough money to cover the costs of improvements. Because the demand for coal was slack during the summer months and high in the winter, this plan synchronized coal mining and homesteading in a seamless economic orchestration—or so it appeared.
William Krall renounced his past and swore allegiance to his “new” country, thereby being considered worthy of immigration and naturalization. On May 16, 1918 the Government Land Office (GLO) in Evanston, Wyoming, received a copy of his naturalization papers, which opened the way for him to make a homestead entry—S ½ NE ¼ Section 7 and S ½ NW ¼ Section 8, Township 25 N, Range 115 W of the 6th PM—in the Fontenelle Basin for which he paid sixteen dollars. My father was five days old at the time. The 160 acres of sagebrush/bunchgrass biome, at an elevation of about 8,000 feet, had a growing season of thirty-five days and received less than twelve inches of rainfall per year. This high, arid land was no agrarian utopia. Nonetheless, I can understand why my grandfather lived with some sense of hope, fueled by the possibility of avoiding the other alternative: a subterranean existence mining coal. I imagine that as long as he kept his eyes fixed on the map and the property description he could muster a modicum of optimism that his plan for a better life might actually work out.
I am also convinced that William Krall was not dissociated from the reality of the land. Nor was he stupid. He did, after all, look out the window when the train pulled into Kemmerer, the center of mining activities in the region. I imagine he read the land correctly and understood full well that it would be impossible to make a living on a 160-acre ranch in this country: The property description read differently than the reality of the land. But he also must have been aware of the possibilities and economic opportunities offered by land ownership itself. The 160 acres might well be worth the struggle for several reasons: He might eventually acquire more land, and piece together an economically viable ranch. Or he might sell the land to one of the many other immigrant ranchers in the basin, make some money on the sale, and become a “petty capitalist,” a small business entrepreneur. He signed his homestead application, which meant that regardless of his intent for the land in the long run he would be required to prove up, on it in the short term. And proving up, gaining a title to the land by fulfilling necessary requirements, had to be reconciled with the land, not as an abstraction but in a real, physical sense.
Immediately after he was granted his homestead claim, he filed an application to the GLO for permission to harvest timber. He requested to cut two-hundred house logs, five-hundred posts, and one-hundred poles that he would procure himself. The first summer on the homestead in 1918 was spent cutting timber and building a cabin, barn, storehouse, and corral. During that summer he and my grandmother also cleared three acres of sagebrush land and seeded it with clover, timothy, and red top, which in the future would be harvested for winterfeed for the two milk cows they had purchased.
William also applied to the state of Wyoming for water rights in June of that year, barely a month after his homestead application had been approved. Without water he could neither prove up on the land nor capitalize on its value. Hay cannot be grown in southwestern Wyoming without irrigation, and hay is essential to a sound ranching operation. Once the water rights were adjudicated they would be permanently attached to the land and conveyed with the land when and if the homestead was sold, thereby further increasing its value.
During summer 1918, William Newbrough, the licensed water engineer working for the state of Wyoming, arrived in the Fontenelle Basin to survey the land and determine where the irrigation ditch would be dug. As a result of his survey, the “Wm Krall Ditch” was a