Skip to main content

The Plow And The Fence

March 2023
1min read


Meanwhile the “little two-by-four farmers,” encouraged by the Homestead Act of 1862 and its later liberalizations, were crowding into the Great Plains, plowing up the grass and fencing in the pasturelands. “Now there is so much land taken up and fenced in that the trail for most of the way is little better than a crooked lane,” a trail driver lamented, “and we have hard lines to find enough range to feed on. These fellows from Ohio, Indiana, and other northern and western states—the ‘bone and sinew of the country’ as politicians call them—have made farms, enclosed pastures, and fenced in water holes until you can’t rest; and I say, D—n such bone and sinew! They are the ruin of the country, and have everlastingly, eternally, now and forever, destroyed the best grazing-land in the world.” Grasslands that should never have been plowed dried up when cycles of drought rolled around; in 1874, to add to the farmer’s woes, came a plague of grasshoppers (“Thirty acres of wheat which looked beautiful and green in the morning is eaten up,” said a Kansas homesteader sorrowfully). The final reckoning was delayed, but eventually it would come.

In the early 1930’s, unusually severe droughts occurred, followed by dust storms such as the Plains had never experienced. “Little by little,” wrote John Steinbeck in The Crapes of Wrath , “the sky was darkened by the mixing dust, and the wind felt over the earth, loosened the dust, and carried it away. … The dawn came, but no day.” When at length the day did come, its light revealed a terrible desolation (overleaf) that is still visible in parts of the Plains.

We hope you enjoy our work.

Please support this 72-year tradition of trusted historical writing and the volunteers that sustain it with a donation to American Heritage.

Donate

Stories published from "April 1968"

Authored by: Thomas Fleming

Hardly had the dust settled at Monmouth when a major general was court-martialled for misbehavior in action. And something else was at stake: George Washington’s prestige

Authored by: Andrew C. Nahne

Our first Korean war, in 1871, was fought to open the Hermit Kingdom to Western trade. But the hermits wanted very much to be left alone

Authored by: Richard Schickel

Some Americans may have trouble listing the fifty united states. Some may be vague about who represents them in Congress. But it’s a sure bet that every one of us—over the age of three— can identify the nation’s most prominent rodent

Authored by: William Cotter Murray

The wheels of westering settlers moved through an ocean of grass. It was a rich natural heritage, but within a century we almost destroyed it

Authored by: Francis Russell

For nearly fifty years, in one way or another, Ben Butler courted the favor of his state and the nation. He way not have been a bona fide Beauty, but there were times when his traditional nickname did not seem quite fair either

Authored by: John H. Ackerman

Tourists who ride the famous cog railway up the precipitous slopes of Mount Washington often feel the sky itself is their destination. Overcoming many obstacles—including a recent serious accident—the little locomotives with their tilted boilers have been huffing and puffing people to New England’s highest summit for nearly a century

Authored by: Janet Stevenson

Fanny Kemble should have known that a beautiful, brilliant, vivacious British actress never, never marries the Butler—especially an American slaveholding Butler with a narrow vision of a wife’s role

Authored by: Virginia Van Der Veer

President Roosevelt had failed to “pack” a hostile Supreme Court, and now the first New Dealer he named to that high bench stood accused of being a lifetime member of the infamous Ku Klux Klan

Authored by: David Lavender

In the mining country of the Old West some men struck it rich without touching a shovel. All it took was a little legerdemain—and a sucker
bitten by the gold bug

Featured Articles

Rarely has the full story been told how a famed botanist, a pioneering female journalist, and First Lady Helen Taft battled reluctant bureaucrats to bring Japanese cherry trees to Washington. 

Why have thousands of U.S. banks failed over the years? The answers are in our history and politics.

Often thought to have been a weak President, Carter was strong-willed in doing what he thought was right, regardless of expediency or political fallout.

In his Second Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln embodied leading in a time of polarization, political disagreement, and differing understandings of reality.

Native American peoples and the lands they possessed loomed large for Washington, from his first trips westward as a surveyor to his years as President.

A hundred years ago, America was rocked by riots, repression, and racial violence.

During Pres. Washington’s first term, an epidemic killed one tenth of all the inhabitants of Philadelphia, then the capital of the young United States.

Now a popular state park, the unassuming geological feature along the Illinois River has served as the site of centuries of human habitation and discovery.  

The recent discovery of the hull of the battleship Nevada recalls her dramatic action at Pearl Harbor and ultimate revenge on D-Day as the first ship to fire on the Nazis.

Our research reveals that 19 artworks in the U.S. Capitol honor men who were Confederate officers or officials. What many of them said, and did, is truly despicable.

Here is probably the most wide-ranging look at Presidential misbehavior ever published in a magazine.

When Germany unleashed its blitzkreig in 1939, the U.S. Army was only the 17th largest in the world. FDR and Marshall had to build a fighting force able to take on the Nazis, against the wishes of many in Congress.