Growing Vegetables Took Grit in the Old West

By Jerry Schleicher
Published on March 28, 2013
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The Ganson Farm in 1906 in Buffalo County, Nebraska.
The Ganson Farm in 1906 in Buffalo County, Nebraska.
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The John Gilliard family in their garden, 1889, in Custer County, Nebraska.
The John Gilliard family in their garden, 1889, in Custer County, Nebraska.
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A family stands in their garden in 1907 in Miller, Nebraska.
A family stands in their garden in 1907 in Miller, Nebraska.

You and I both know that raising a vegetable garden isn’t a task for weaklings. There’s a considerable amount of labor involved in preparing the seedbed and bending, stooping and kneeling to plant the seeds and seedlings. More stoop labor required to check your plants for signs of disease and insect feeding, and to drag the hoses around. And that doesn’t count the work invested in digging beets and potatoes, picking beans and peas, and searching for the cucumbers that always hide under the vines, just out of reach.

But if you think gardening is tough today, imagine yourself back in the frontier West 150 years ago.

In the days before supermarkets and farmers’ markets, the only way to supply your family with fresh produce was to raise it yourself. If you were a settler moving west to claim a homestead, you likely brought along precious portions of vegetable seeds sewn into the hem of a dress or lining of a coat: turnips, corn, beans, squash, beet and carrot seed, perhaps tomato or melon seeds. Once you’d dug a well and built a home, the next step was to raise enough food to feed yourself and your family. That meant breaking the sod, planting your little hoard of seeds, and carrying water to them in a bucket.

If you were industrious — and lucky — your garden might furnish sufficient produce to supplement a frontier diet largely dependent on wild game and beef from a butchered cow or oxen. Maybe there were nearby patches of wild chokecherries, elderberries, currants, or wild grapes or plums that you could put up as preserves. If, on the other hand, luck was against you, hordes of locusts or grasshoppers might devour your garden, a sudden hail storm might flatten it, or a prairie fire might destroy everything in its path. Free-ranging cattle might even trample your garden.

That’s right, cattle. In the spring of 1886, before ranches were fenced, homesteaders along western Nebraska’s North Platte River Valley grew incensed at the damages caused to their crops and gardens by cattle belonging to the free-range cattle companies. Several of the settlers rounded up about 500 head of cattle belonging to the Bay State Cattle Co., and sent word to the ranch foreman that his herd would be held until damages of $1,500 were paid. The ranch foreman, in no mood to be dictated to by the angry nesters, quickly sent for two trusted men and ordered them to recover the cattle, at the point of a gun if necessary. While the settlers never did get paid for their ruined crops, Nebraska voters enacted a herd law the following year, making cattle owners responsible for damages to crops and gardens.

Those who didn’t have a garden often went months without vegetables. The diets of the soldiers assigned to frontier Army posts in the 1850s and 1860s consisted primarily of salt pork, bacon, flour, beans and coffee, occasionally supplemented by buffalo, deer, antelope or other game.

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