Prairie
Bachelor: The Story of a Kansas Homesteader and the Populist Movement
by Lynda Beck Fenwick.
https://www.amazon.com/Prairie-Bachelor-Homesteader-Populist-Movement/dp/0700630279
Isaac Beckley Werner, the prairie bachelor, was born into a well-to-do family in Pennsylvania in 1844. His formal education extended well past the norm for his time, and he never stopped educating himself. He owned a drugstore and then a mill in Illinois before taking up a homestead in Kansas in 1878. As a homesteader he experimented in cropping practices, promoted agricultural education, supported his neighbours, and was an active participant in local politics. After a lengthy illness, which gradually left him entirely incapacitated, he died at the age of 51 in 1895 and his estate was wound up by 1898.
Prairie
Bachelor covers the
20 years between 1878 and 1898, known as the Gilded Age, which it was, for the
rich, powerful, and politically connected, and for the American Middle Class.
However, it was a time of terrible hardship for small southern and western
farmers and ranchers, miners and lumber workers, factory and railway labourers,
Immigrants, Black Americans, and First Nations, the poor and the destitute. The
banding together of these groups, to fight for their rights and very
survival, sparked the Populist Movement, and from it, the People’s Party, the
most successful third party in American history.
The author with Isaac's journal |
On a
personal note, I will refer to the author as Lyn, since I have followed her
blog about writing Prairie Bachelor at lynfenwick.blogspot.com for 11 years and we have become what was known
in the old days as pen-pals. I will refer to Isaac B Werner as Isaac because as
I read, I began to feel I knew him. I could feel his pride, his frustrations,
his illness, his loneliness, his defeats, and his successes.
Lyn’s
connections to Isaac go back four generations. Two sets of great grandparents
were neighbours and friends of Isaac’s. A third set were not close neighbours
but knew Isaac. Lyn (with her husband Larry) is the fourth generation of
Becks to live in that house from which she could see the site of Isaac’s
homestead a mile away.
Lyn spent a
year transcribing Isaac’s journal, then went to work to fill in the gaps using
her talents as a teacher, lawyer, and writer to research every bit of
information she could find about Isaac, his neighbours, Stafford county, the
hardships, and the politics of his time. Prairie Bachelor has an incredibly
detailed set of footnotes and a lengthy bibliography, which will satisfy both a
pleasure reader like me, and any academic historian who wishes to follow up.
Under the
Homestead Act of 1862, Isaac could claim, at no cost, 160 acres which he had to
prove up over five years by living on the property and by breaking a certain
number of acres to get title. He also took a ‘Timber Claim’, another 160 acres
on which, if he grew 10 acres of trees over 8 years, he could also get title.
Not many homesteaders, including Isaac, had the money to acquire livestock and
tools necessary to build a farm. As I read about the hardships the homesteaders
endured, I understood why no more than 40% were able to prove up on their
claims.
For eight
years, Isaac farmed without a horse. He traded his labour for use of horse and
plow or horse and wagon but could never get money enough ahead to buy a horse
without going into debt. Nor would his brother in Pennsylvania advance him the
money. Finally, in 1886, he mortgaged his farm, borrowing enough to buy Dolly,
a little grey mare, and some implements to expand production, later borrowing
more money to buy a second horse and a wagon. By then it was too late. Other
homesteaders across the west were doing the same. Increased production forced
prices down and freight prices up. Rains did not come. Isaac was in debt until
just before he died, to banks, merchants, friends, and family. He was able to
hang on, but many homesteaders lost their farms to foreclosure.
Isaac’s main
crops were corn and potatoes, and eventually wheat. Potatoes were his main crop as
they grew well in the sandy loam soil and were famous for their quality. He
stored them in his home over winter and sold many of them as seed potatoes in
the spring. Colorado potato beetles were the bane of his existence. He kept
them at bay with Paris Green, a highly toxic mixture of copper acetate and
arsenic trioxide.
Isaac never
married and, although he had an eye for a pretty girl, he was mainly attracted
to strong, well-spoken, independent women. Though he was often lonely, he also
enjoyed solitude. He had watched as homestead wives worked themselves into an
early grave, died in childbirth or saw their children die or starve and was
glad he had no one to worry about, especially as his health deteriorated.
Isaac cared
about people, as humanity and as individuals. If he saw a need, he was there,
whether sitting with a sick child, taking extra fuel to a neighbour in a cold
winter, fixing the local school, or organizing relief for families with little
or no food. He returned borrowed tools and implements in better condition that
he received them and cared for his farm the same way.
Isaac had an
insatiable thirst for knowledge. Beginning in Illinois, he built up a sizable
library of significant titles. In Kansas, he continued to buy books he felt
were beneficial to improving farming practices, even when he was short of
money. He continually trying different varieties, row spacings, depth of
planting etc., all faithfully recorded in his journal. Isaac was in constant
touch with Professor
E. M. Shelton, who in 1874 became the Farm Superintendent at the Kansas State
Agricultural College.
He succeeded
in forming the Stafford County Agricultural Society with township chapters,
including his own Albano township, to meet and discuss better farming methods
based on their soil type and overall environment. He created a library of his
farm practices books at the local school where the Agricultural Society met. At
his estate sale, his books were the big draw.
He was
greatly frustrated by farmers who did not want to learn, who just came to the
meetings to visit or did not bother to come at all. Isaac did not understand
that he was one of a small percentage of farmers, an innovator, constantly
experimenting. His best friend, Will Campbell, good farmer, pillar of the
community, respected politician, along with a very few of Isaac’s other
friends, were part of a somewhat larger group, anxious to quickly adopt new
technologies that appeared to work. The majority
of farmers might come to the meetings and eventually pick up on better farming
methods, while some never changed their ways. It would not be until 19 years
after Isaac’s death, that the Smith Lever Act would create the Cooperative Extension
Service and its County Agents, building on all the Agricultural Clubs and
Societies over the decades from the early 1800s, including Isaac’s.
Isaac’s
world was not all farming and farm politics. There were several incidents which
involved people Isaac knew well: a cold blooded murder, a gunfight, a train
robbery, livestock theft rings, and bank embezzlements. There were even a
couple of “Old West” bank robberies. In 1884, the bank in Medicine Lodge, two
counties south of Isaac, was held up by four men, including two peace officers.
In 1892, the Dalton Gang was shot to ribbons in Coffeyville, several counties
east of Isaac.
Today’s
America has a great deal in common with the Gilded Age of Isaac’s time, with
some events almost parallel. The Republicans were no longer the party of
Lincoln but were owned by the “Robber Barons”. The [Southern] Democrats, having
survived Reconstruction, were busy disenfranchising Black Americans with Jim
Crow laws and the KKK, and opposed public spending on the grounds that it was
taking money from hard working [white] Americans and giving it to lazy,
ignorant [Black] loafers who just wanted free stuff. They called this
Socialism. Both parties did not hesitate to use the military to put down strikes
Dr. Heather Cox Richardson in West from Appomattox: The Reconstruction of America after the Civil War and How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy,
Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America describes
how the Northern Democrats, the Middle Class of the industrialized North, was
more than happy to apply the label Socialist to immigrants, union workers, any
labourers who dared to organize against their bosses or any group that
organized for better treatment from the government. Grover Cleveland,
Democratic President from 1884 to 1888 and again from 1892-1896, vetoed any and
all pension bills for Veterans, for example, on the grounds that “the people
should support the government, the government should not support the people”.
The Populist
Movement began as people began to organize, fighting back against the railways,
banks, and industrialists. Prairie Bachelor details the convoluted path
that led from the Farmers Alliance in Texas to the formation of the Peoples
Party as a national third party in 1892. Several other parties were started and
dropped in favour of a larger vision. Kansas was at the forefront of several of
them and Isaac was an active participant. His friend, Will Campbell, was
elected to the Kansas legislature twice under two different parties, the last
being the People’s Party, which took the Kansas Governorship and the State
Senate in 1892. The Republicans, not willing to lose everything, fraudulently
claimed to have won enough seats to control the House and refused to accept the
findings of a neutral commission. An armed mob attacked the Legislature and
smashed down the doors with hammers. The state militia refused to disperse
them.
The People’s
Party, with its progressive platform, polled over a million votes for their
presidential candidate in the 1892 election, and several members were elected
to the Senate and House, mainly from the south and west. However, in 1896, the
People’s Party decided to also nominate the Democratic nominee for president,
William Jennings Bryan and run a campaign solely on bi-metalism,
insisting that using both silver and gold as the basis for money was superior
to gold alone. Choosing to ignore the progressive planks in the platform split
the party and the Republicans swept the field.
By 1898, the economy was looking
better. The discovery of gold in the Yukon eased the monetary supply. Republicans
and Democrats adopted some of the ideas of the Populists. One of the ideas
eventually found its way, in one form or another, into Farm Support Programs
beginning under FDR’s New Deal. Proposed in 1890 by Texas Agricultural Economist, Charles Macune, the Sub-Treasury Plan called for the establishment of a
network of government warehouses for the storage of agricultural commodities,
Farmers making use of the facilities could then draw low-interest loans of up
to 80% of the value of their goods held in storage, payable in U.S. Treasury
notes. This would release farmers from being forced to sell their grain in the
fall at low prices to pay debts. Being free to pick the time of marketing would
put more money in their pockets. The People’s Party having disintegrated, disappeared
Writing a
review of Prairie Bachelor has been a challenge. What I knew about
Kansas, I learned mainly from histories of the cattle industry and from western
novels. And I knew nothing about the Populist Movement whatsoever. So, it took
a good bit of digging to get my head around it. I give the book 5 stars. It was
highly readable, it made me work and taught me things I did not know before.
Because
Isaac B Werner was extremely sick the last two years of his short life and out
of the public eye, he did not get the obituary he deserved for his farming
accomplishments or his community service. Prairie Bachelor, published
125 years after his death, is both obituary and eulogy to an incredible
individual.