City of Rocks Historic Resources Study

Beginning about 1908, settlers by the hundreds flocked into the areas surrounding the Minidoka Forest homesteading anything which could possibly be considered tillable Many settlers made a success of dry-farming for a few years due to very favorable rainfall conditions and good wheat prices. . . . Then, beginning about 1920, years of normal or subnormal rainfall occurred and this, together with the abrupt drop in wheat prices in 1920 and 192], finished the dry-farming boom. Hundreds of thousands of acres of land were abandoned. [171]

Without irrigation, the successful growing of crops [in Cassia County] generally has proved impossible. [172]

With the exception of Circle Creek bottomlands, City of Rocks lay beyond the fertile pale of the area creeks and protected valleys. Throughout the first wave of settlement, it remained public domain, utilized as upper-elevation spring and summer range by those farming the valley bottoms (Figure 13). The earliest settlers disdained this land as uncultivable; when the valley bottoms had been claimed (ca. 1900), Thomas King advised his eldest son to go to Alberta, Canada, where the land was "still new." [173] This view of the City changed dramatically with Idaho's inclusion in the 1909 Enlarged Homestead Act (June 17, 1910) and the arrival of the dryland farmers.

Figure 13. Pre-1910 Homestead and Desert Land claims within the City of Rocks National Reserve. (click on image for an enlargement in a new window)

Cultivation of the arid lands west of the 100th meridian demanded crop varieties and farming methods foreign to emigrants from the well-watered fields of eastern America and northern Europe. Yet to the booster and the optimistic farmer, what the arid American West lacked in rainfall, it compensated for in abundant acreage available to the landless through a variety of public land laws. When the 160 acres allowable under the Homestead Act of 1862 proved insufficient for successful cultivation or stockraising in the arid West, the figure was adjusted to allow for claims of 320 cultivable acres — the Enlarged Homestead Act of 1909.

This act inspired and sustained the dry-farm movement of the early twentieth century. By means of alternate cropping and fallowing, increased mulch, use of suitable grain strains, and modified plow methods, agricultural scientists believed (and tax-hungry western boosters proselytized) that non-irrigated lands receiving between 12 and 16 inches of rainfall per year could be made to yield profitable harvests. Agricultural Experiment Stations established on the plains circa 1905 "proved" the West's suitability to this farming method; the Enlarged Homestead Act simply provided the minimum acreage necessary for alternate cropping and fallowing, bringing overgrazed range land "into productivity in [a] new form." [174]

The dry farm movement also corresponded roughly with passage of the Forest Homestead Act of June 11, 1906. Designed to combat hostility toward the creation of National Forests, the act allowed 160-acre homestead claims on National Forest land with "agricultural possibilities." Between 1906 and 1915, 18,000 western settlers claimed 1,900,000 acres under the Forest Homestead Act. [175]

Years of plentiful rainfall sustained both the crops and the optimism of the agricultural scientists and the settlers. "The government land [was] nearly all . . . taken up, crops [were] sown and harvested, the once raw country [became] homelike, and the 'smile that won't come off' [found] its place on the countenances of 'dry land farmers.'" The project failed when drought hit the central plains circa 1918; at Oakley, annual precipitation fell from 16.07 inches in 1912 to 8.57 inches in 1919. By 1922, the U.S. Department of Agriculture warned that 320 acres were inadequate "except under the most favorable circumstances and expert management." [176]

Of the 27 patented tracts within the City of Rocks National Reserve, 19 were dryland farms claimed between 1910 and 1919 — an era initiated by Idaho's inclusion in the Enlarged Homestead Act and terminated by the drought of the 1920s (Figure 14). The City's dryland farmers were joined by Charles Freckelton and Thomas Fairchild, who joined the rush for "anything that could be considered tillable" when they each claimed 160 acres under the Forest Homestead Act of 1906; their claims were only two of the eighty filed for Minidoka National Forest lands between 1908 and 1917. [177]

Figure 14. Patented Homestead Claims within the City of Rocks National Reserve, 1888-1929. (click on image for an enlargement in a new window)

By 1910, the Junction Valley school (southwest of the City of Rocks) "buldged [sic] with [new] students. . . . [Their parents] were going to dry farm. Already hundreds of acres had been plowed and plants. Roads were being fenced off. People would now have to drive on section lines." [178] By 1917, Junction Valley had become "a very industrious common wealth" with a store, a post office and two schools. [179]

Virtually without exception, these Enlarged Homestead and Forest Homestead claims were marginal enterprises centered on marginal land foresworn by the first wave of settlers. Claimants described their land as rough, rocky, and mountainous. After being grubbed of sage and cleared of stone, acreage was most often planted in the traditional dryland crops of winter wheat, flax, or barley; these crops were supplemented with small spring-irrigated subsistence gardens and oat fields (Figure 15). Patent records for the City of Rocks indicate that planted acreage was small, rarely exceeding 100 acres and more often totaling less than 30. Yet much of the land not planted was fenced, thereby dramatically altering neighboring ranchers' access to what had been spring range. [180]

Crops were tended and harvested between May and November, at which time the majority of area settlers reported that they returned to more-permanent homes in neighboring towns so that their children could attend school and they could seek wage employment. In their final testimony to the General Land Office, patentees repeated the litany: "I went each time to get money to go ahead each summer." [181] Presumably, the chickens, pigs, milk cows, horses, and range stock followed, to the urban "barn yards" that historically characterized Mormon towns. [182]

By any standard, the reserve would have been difficult to occupy during the winter months. Walter Mooso explained his predicament in a 1973 interview. For three difficult winters "we stayed there, right there, and I put up this rye hay." By winter four, Mooso moved his wife and two children "down every fall . . . because the snow's awful deep and [not] too much feed there and I had no work only the trapping." In testimony to the difficulty of making a living from dryland farming, Mooso abandoned his homestead shortly after proving up, for a "good job" in the Burley sugar factory. His son Lyonal remembers "Dad left because it was pretty hard picking for him. I don't ever recall dad saying that it was any good." [183]

Thomas Shomaker reported to General Land Office agents that "very bad brush and some rocks to be cleared m[ade] the cost of putting in cultivation around 11 dollars an acre including harrowing, leveling and other operations." From this toil, area dryland farmers hoped for "20-odd" bushels to the acre from the half of their already-limited acreage not left fallow. [184] Twenty-bushel yields, sufficient feed to winter limited stock, and a profit were occasionally realized through 1918, when annual rainfalls hovered near 13 inches and when wheat prices escalated in response to World War I shortages. By 1922, drought would reduce these yields to as little as two bushels per acre or to "failure." [185]

Figure 15. Sagegrubber (Idaho State Historical Society photograph #72-221.822/b). First the trees and brush were cleared from a desirable spot... This was a back tiring and tedious job. The brush to be grubbled, piled and burned. The ground was plowed with hand plows pulled by horses. After plowing the ground was worked with hand made harrows... After the ground was harrowed it was leveled. The clods were broken and smoothed down. The remaining were removed. The holes and ditches were filled with what was called a leveler. This was built simply of boards nailed together in a square. A heavy weight was placed on the top and it was pulled over the harrowed ground... The grain was then hand sown. (Ward, "History of Almo, Idaho," pp. 12-13.)

Crops were also vulnerable to cyclical overpopulation of rabbits and ground squirrels: rodents took Thomas Fairchild's 12 acres of grain in 1913, John Flower's 40 acres of barley in 1914 and 1915, and James Eames' 20 acres of barley in 1915 and 1916. Those crops not devastated by the rodents or the heat of August were vulnerable to the occasional heavy frosts of September and heavy snows of October. [186]

And drought affected the springs upon which City of Rocks residents relied for domestic water, subsistence gardens, and limited irrigation. Alta Mooso Weldon, daughter of homesteaders Walter and Helen Mooso, remembered that "suddenly, the underground water disappeared in 1920 ... One by one, ... settlers [Sparks, Moon, Osterhout, Wilcox, Mikesell and Mooso] abandoned their land, took their stock and household goods, moved out of the City of Rocks and took up new residences in Almo and down in Burley." [187]

The drought — and the exodus — continued through the depression of the 1930s. Despite the promises of the land agents and the optimism of early settlers, land within the boundaries of the City of Rocks is once again valued primarily as uncultivated, unirrigated range land, as the functional and geographic extreme of a system of land use centered in the home ranches and Mormon communities of the irrigated lowland valleys. Despite the concentrated historic settlement, vestiges of agricultural endeavor and of habitation in the reserve are now limited to artifact scatters, foundation stone, and the faint outlines of differential land use.

One has only to travel through the foothills or mountains of [this] country to discover abandoned homesteads. Sometimes there will be a cabin, its door ajar or missing. More often one finds only an orderly arrangement of flat rocks . . . There may be a yellow rose bush, a few dead or dying fruit trees or a scattering of wild strawberry plants beside a almost dry creek bed where once a mountain stream overflowed. [188]

These vestiges — rather than the sustainable enterprises — may well be the most important and compelling reminder of the homestead era in the semi-arid West. The vast majority of all Desert Land claims were never irrigated, cultivated, or permanently inhabited, but were instead used as range land. More than two-thirds of all dryland claims were relinquished before going to patent; half of the West's patented Enlarged Homestead claims were ultimately abandoned. [189]

Within the City of Rocks, the list of relinquished claims dramatically exceeds the list of patented claims, with some parcels inhabited by three or more families before final proof was made or before the land reverted to the public domain or to the county; [190] presumably each claimant bequeathed at least minimal improvements to subsequent inhabitants, creating layers of cultural resources and of land use. Cassia Creek settlers Frederick, Hans, and Henry Ottley twice walked away from grubbed fields and shallow ditches; Tory Campbell abandoned a one-room frame house, 50 cleared acres, and 240 rods offence on the eastern edge of the City of Rocks upon conceding that all but 60 acres of his 320-acre claim were "rocky and unfit for cultivation." [191]

On the patented claims, there is every evidence of construction, seasonal habitation, and cultivation — of substantial (albeit fleeting) settlement where residents could see the lights of their neighbors' farms, where houses, corrals, windmills, chicken coops, and fence lines dotted the landscape (Appendix B). The crumbling foundations and scatters of domestic debris are fitting reminders of this failed endeavor.