Peter D and Sarah’s Farm 5

This post has no grand organizing theme or significant question to explore. Its only goal is to share an interesting (at least to me) fact discovered during the research for this series: Peter D was the only Buller who homesteaded land in Nebraska. Other states reported a number of Buller homesteaders. For example, South Dakota reported sixteen, North Dakota six, and Colorado four. However, Peter D was the only Buller to receive Nebraska farmland via the Homestead Act. 

Equally surprising is the fact that, although many Bullers settled in Kansas, not one received a homestead grant. One wonders why the Bullers of Nebraska and Kansas, compared to the Bullers of the Dakotas, had such a low level of participation in the homesteading program. 

Location may have played some role; that is, perhaps the more desirable farmland of Kansas and Nebraska had already been claimed before the Russian Mennonite emigration of the 1870s (recall that Peter D arrived in 1879), whereas the land of the Dakotas remained available for a decade or more after that. This hypothesis finds some support from the observation that all South Dakota Buller homestead claims were filed between 1882 and 1895, and the earliest North Dakota claim was in 1901.

This gives the impression that claims were made when land was available, which might imply, conversely, that a low number of claims indicates a lack of available land. Without detailed research of the homestead records, this explanation is nothing more than a hypothesis. The one thing we do know is that our ancestor Peter D was the only Buller who received a grant of land via the 1862 Homestead Act.