Prairie Bachelor: The Story of a Kansas Homesteader and the Populist Movement , a book review

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

Lynda Beck Fenwick’s interest in Isaac began when she obtained his journal from the Stafford County museum. Isaac wrote his autobiography in a massive 480 page ledger-size journal in close script with no waste space. Begun in 1870-71 then lapsed for 13 years, he kept meticulous notes beginning again in 1884 until 1891 when he ran out of space and could not afford another 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.