Hello friends,
A decade ago, on my first and most recent visit to Nebraska, I stopped briefly in the town of Beatrice. It's one of those places you have to make an effort to visit. It's nowhere near an Interstate highway or a major population center. But it is home to a small national historical park that commemorates the Homestead Act of 1862, the federal law that gave nearly free government land to settlers willing to live on it and to make improvements. I was researching the life of my great-grandmother, who claimed her own 160-acre homestead 800 miles to the northeast in North Dakota. So I made the effort to visit Beatrice, the site of the first homestead granted in 1863, to a man named Daniel Freeman.
Last week, I returned. I'm in Nebraska for a three-week artist residency in a town about an hour-and-a-half drive northeast of Beatrice. I wasn't planning to go back, not until a few days ago, when I saw a sign on the main highway for the exit for the two-lane road leading to Homestead National Historical Park. Ah yes, I thought. Bee-AT-tris. Because I’ve been there, and that’s how it’s pronounced.
The downtown was as sleepy as I remembered. Over lunch at a café on Court Street, I re-read my chapter on Beatrice. It had been some time since I'd revisited this chapter of Windfall, which is about a road trip I took with my husband, Chris, from Washington, D.C. to Bismarck, North Dakota. The chapter serves a specific purpose in the book. It introduces readers more thoroughly to Chris, a character in the narrative. It also connects our quest to be parents to the larger story of the search for happiness, wealth and satisfaction that the Homestead Act represented to so many Americans.
I will write that word—satisfaction—several times in this dispatch, because it struck me back in 2014 and it gnaws at me still.
Sometimes our old projects follow us around for a while. Windfall is still very much present with me. I have unfinished business connected to the project, something that may take years to resolve. This is fine, and I'll tell you more about it when the time is right. For now, know that not everything concludes neatly. Old projects seep into the new ones, if only to demonstrate the interconnected nature of ideas and the universe. So if what I learned while working on Windfall led to the monument project I'm working on now, well, then I suppose what I'm doing now will flow into some future project, too. I appreciate an easeful transition. It's good to know I'll always have something to do.
Back in 2014 when I first went to Beatrice, I was a year into what I called "the prairie project." I was uncertain I would achieve my goal—and in fact, it would take seven more years from that moment at the historical park to sell Windfall, and all told, a full decade of on-again, off-again work to see it in print.
The outcome of my current project on monuments is less precarious than Windfall was when I first visited Beatrice, yes. But one year into it, my current project is no sure thing, either. I suspect I am destined to work on ideas that arrive in my brain seamlessly but don't emerge easily into final forms. I can be at peace with that even as I struggle with living with the uncertainty of their outcome. So perhaps I wanted to return to Beatrice to remind myself that hard things take time. It's also possible I wanted to go to avoid tedious work back at my temporary studio at the arts center in Nebraska City. (Organizing photos and assembling a documentary pitch deck.) Never underestimate the capacity of a writer to procrastinate!
Regardless of my motivation, I went back to Beatrice, this time alone.
The town of 12,000 sits in rolling prairie country. The horizon is flat, but within the terrain are endless rolling hills. It's mostly cultivated in row crops such as corn, various varieties of wheat and soybeans. This time of year, it's a tan expanse of undulating dips and rises, contoured by the tracks left behind by harvesting machinery.
On my first visit, I laughed out loud at a line in the interpretive signage in an exhibit about how few homesteaders made a success of their land claims. People didn't get rich, but they felt "rich with satisfaction," the exhibit read. "They felt a glow of achievement in having land to pass on to their children." I thought it was an overly optimistic assessment of human nature shaped by American capitalism. Didn't everyone go West in search of riches? I also knew, even then, that the odds weren't great I'd have a child to pass anything on to.
The interpretive signage has evolved in a decade, mostly for the better, and now there's a far more detailed explanation of how the Homestead Act displaced Indigenous people or outright swindled tribes out of land allotments, with official government sanction.
And yet the words about feeling rich with satisfaction have stayed mostly the same:
"A bulging wallet isn't the only way to measure success. Few homesteaders grew rich. But many felt rich with satisfaction."
People took pride in the communities they had built. They felt a glow of achievement in having land to pass on to their children. And for the 40 percent who ultimately gained ownership of their homesteads, there was the personal reward of knowing that they had beaten the odds."
I am not an easily satisfied person. I don't mean in terms of appetite or money or status—I'm not greedy, but I also don't believe there's much glory in knowing you've beaten the odds. What I mean is that I have a journalist's critical eye for how things could be better for everyone, and it often makes me impatient with the shoddiness of the status quo. I also inherited a restlessness from my great-grandmother, Anna, the woman at the heart of Windfall. One hundred and twenty years ago, Anna was looking for something on the prairies. She died in an asylum before finding it, leaving it to her descendants—me in particular—to resolve the mystery.
Like me, an estimated 93 million current Americans are descended from homesteaders. I wrote Windfall in part because I wanted people to understand how so many Americans alive right now are the beneficiaries of one of the greatest wealth transfers the world has ever known. This wealth transfer lifted countless people from poverty but it had a cost, one that the exhibit explains nationally, and then more specifically, by telling the story of the Otoe-Missouria tribe's displacement from Nebraska to Oklahoma by homesteading: "The land, long inhabited by indigenous cultures, changed forever," the exhibit reads.
The changes are visible outside, where the Park Service has restored 100 acres of tallgrass prairie. That restoration work began in 1939 when Freeman's homestead became a national monument. Even then, the government knew what homesteading had wrought.
In Daniel Freeman's time, his homestead was a 160-acre dot of cultivated land in a sea of prairie. Now, the restored prairie at the historical park is a mere dot in a sea of cultivation.
The restored grasslands are the centerpiece of an otherwise quiet, unremarkable national park. Here you can experience the prairie as it once was. Not as a commodity, but as a community, as one of the interpretive signs puts it. You can walk through the prairie, getting a true sense for how tall the grass really is. You can see how it's crowded with life—insects, birds and more. You can, like I did, stop and listen to the sound of wind in the cottonwoods. Far away, it may look like a brown grass monolith, faded tan on its way to winter. Up close, it's a marvel of biodiversity.
Beatrice was just a quick stop in 2014. Chris and I were en route to Badlands National Park in South Dakota. We had a long drive across the Sandhills ahead of us that day, through a dramatic thunderstorm. I remember wanting to stay a little longer in the prairie at the historical park, imagining my great-grandmother's brief time as a homesteader on similar prairies, before her husband sent her to an asylum.
A decade later, I did linger, this time considering my relationship to satisfaction and the ever-present itch of my ambition colliding with time. In 2014, I could see over the horizon. I knew I was on the cusp of another stage of adulthood, one that might not include motherhood or success.
I can't see that far ahead right now. I don't think I'm meant to; I don't think I want to. I will have to learn, once again, what it means to be satisfied with the inquiry, not its outcome.
From the prairies,
Erika
THE NEWS
All the links…
Speaking of revisiting the past….a delightful Washington Post article by the daughter of the photographer who captured the image of an elegant picnic on the National Mall 50 years ago.
And speaking of native prairie grasses…how farmers in Midwest states are cultivating native prairie strips between active croplands.
Your first electric car could be a vintage Ford Bronco. If you have a bulging wallet, that is.
Oregon renames two creeks with racist names.
A perfect explanation of how artists bring vitality to local economies, including Asheville, North Carolina, and how natural disasters hit them hard. May I suggest donating to CERF+ which gives direct recovery cash to craft artists? I’ve been donating to CERF+ nearly every year since my mother died in 2010; she was a big supporter and I want to continue her legacy. Not only does CERF+ give out emergency money to craft artists in need, but they also offer resiliency grants to help artists prepare their studios for climate disasters. Please consider matching my $100 donation. Here is the link to donate.
Finally: Just in case you missed it, here are the first three installments from my multi-state journey. Going Away to Come Back Home Again, Just Passing Through, and Plain States.
Beautiful essay Erika!