An Overland Journey

Horace Greeley

[An excerpt from An Overland Journey, 1860]

Horace Greeley, founder of the New York Tribune, is most famous for popularizing the phrase, "Go west, young man." He did not originate it, but Greeley's version resonated particularly well with immigrants working in sweatshops. "Go west, young man, before you are fit only for the factory." He was an opponent of selling federal lands wholesale to large speculators, and an advocate of instead selling or giving homestead plots to actual settlers. However, when he made a trip west himself, chronicled in "An Overland Journey," he was appalled to find that the settlers were themselves speculators. His observations undermine the notion, popular among anarcho- capitalists, that land titles can be based on occupancy and use, rendering land value tax unnecessary. Here is a passage to that effect from "An Overland Journey," written in 1859 and published in 1860. [Dan Sullivan]

There are too many idle, shiftless people in Kansas. I speak not here of lawyers, gentlemen speculators, and other non-producers, who are in excess here as elsewhere; I allude directly to those who call themselves settlers, and who would be farmers if they were anything. To see a man squatted on a quarter-section in a cabin which would make a fair hog-pen, but is unfit for a human habitation, and there living from hand to mouth by a little of this and a little of that, with hardly an acre of prairie broken (sometimes without a fence up), with no garden, no fruit-trees, “no nothing”—waiting for some one to come along and buy out his “claim” and let him move on to repeat the operation somewhere else—this is enough to give a cheerful man the horrors. Ask the squatter what he means, and he can give you a hundred good excuses for his miserable condition: he has no breaking-team; he has little or no good rail-timber; he has had the “shakes;” his family have been sick; he lost two years and some stock by the border-ruffians, etc., etc. But all this don’t overbear the facts that, if he has no good timber, some of his neighbors have it in abundance, and would be very glad to have him work part of it into rails on shares at a fair rate; and if he has no breaking-team, he can hire out in haying and harvest, and get nearly or quite two acres broken next month for every faithful week’s work he chooses to give at that busy season. The poorest man ought thus to be able to get ten acres broken, fenced, and into crop, each year. For poor men gradually hew farms out of heavy timber, where every fenced and cultivated acre has cost twice to thrice the work it does here.

And it is sad to note that hardly half the settlers make any sort of provision for wintering their cattle, even by cutting a stack of prairie- hay, when every good day’s work will put up a ton of it. If he has a corn-field, the squatter’s cattle are welcome to pick at that all winter; if he has none, they must go into the bottoms and browse through as best they can. Hence his calves are miserable affairs; his cows unfit to make butter from till the best of the season is over; his oxen, should he have a pair, must be recruiting from their winter’s famine just when he most urgently needs their work. And this exposing cattle all winter to these fierce prairie-winds, is alike inhuman and wasteful. I asked a settler the other day how he could do it? “I had no time to make a shelter for them.” “But had you no Sundays?—did you not have these at your disposal?” “O, yes? I don’t work Sundays.” “Well, you should have worked every one of them, rather than let your cattle shiver in the cold blasts all winter—it would have been a work of humanity and mercy to cut and haul logs, get up a cattle-stall, and cover it with prairie-hay, which I will warrant to be more religious than any thing you did on those Sundays.” But the squatter was of a different opinion.

How a man located in a little squalid cabin on one of these rich “claims” can sleep moonlit nlights under the average circumstances of his class, passes my comprehension. I should want to work moderately but resolutely, at least fourteen hours of each secular day, until I had made myself comfortable, with a fence around at least eighty acres, a quarter of this partitioned off for my working cattle, a decent, warm shelter to cover them in cold or stormy weather, a tolerable habitation for my family, at least forty acres in crop, and a young orchard growing. For one commencing with next to nothing, I estimate this as the work of five years; after which, he might take things more easily, awaiting the fruit from his orchard and the coming up of his boys to help him. But for the first four or five years, the poor pioneer should work every hour that he does not absolutely need for rest. Every hour’s work then will save him many hours in after life...

As to the infernal spirit of land speculation and monopoly, I think no state ever suffered from it more severely than this. The speculators in broadcloth are not one whit more rapacious or pernicious than the speculators in rags, while the latter are forty times the more numerous. Land speculation here is about the only business in which a man can embark with no other capital than an easy conscience. For example: I rode up the bluffs back of Atchison, and out three or four miles on the high rolling prairie, so as to have some fifteen to twenty square miles in view at one glance. On all this inviting area, there were perhaps half a dozen poor or middling habitations, while not one acre in each hundred was fenced or broken. My friend informed me that every rood I saw was “preëmpted,” and held at thirty up to a hundred dollars or more per acre. “Preëmpted!” I exclaimed; how preëmpted? by living or lying?” “Well,” he responded, “they live a little and lie a little.” I could see abundant evidence of the lying, none at all of the living. To obtain a preëmption, the squatter must swear that he actually resides on the quarter-section he applies for, has built a habitation and made other improvements there, and wants the land for his own use and that of his family. The squatters who took possession of these lands must every one have committed gross perjury in obtaining preëmption—and so it is all over the territory, wherever a lot is supposed likely to sell soon for more than the minimum price. I hoard of one case in which a squatter carried a martin-box on to a quarter-section, and on the strength of that martin- box, swore that he had a house there “eighteen by twenty“—he left the officer to presume the feet. So it is all over; the wretched little slab shanty which has sufficed to swear by on one “claim,” is now moved off and serves to swear by on another, when the first swearing is done. I am confident there is not at this hour any kind of a house or other sign of improvement on one-fourth of the quarter-sections throughout Kansas which have been secured by preëmption. The squatter who thus establishes a “claim” sells it out, so soon as practicable, to some speculator, who follows in his wake, getting from $50 to $300 for that which the future bonafide settler will be required to pay $250 to $1,500 for. Such, in practical operation, is the system designed and ostensibly calculated to shield the poor and industrious settlers from rapacity and extortion; but which, in fact, operates to oppress and plunder the real settler—to pay a premium on perjury—to foster and extend speculation —to demoralize the people, paralyze industry and impoverish the country.