American Land Rush: “A Lonely Homesteader” Searches for Security in the Montana Homestead Boom

Abstract

This Virtual Exhibition features one of the millions of small stories of homesteading in the US West. Lily Bell Murray Stearns Schuld Lampp overcame early tragedy in Illinois that left her an orphan, moving through Saskatchewan and Iowa before she arrived in Montana to claim 320 acres (129.5 hectares) of “free land” under the terms of the 1909 Enlarged Homestead Act. Stearns’s saga captures both the risks and the opportunities of the Great Plains during the early twentieth century. Stearns was one of 14,891 homesteaders who successfully proved up in Montana in 1917, the year of greatest homestead success during the long homestead era (1863–1986), but her experiences evoke how the erratic fortunes of farm life reflected the abundant economic, political, and personal whims of the era.

This exhibit is derived from research conducted for a book project, Little Piece of Earth: The Hidden History of the Homestead Era, that uses microhistorical methods to excavate the multiple histories of areas that achieved high rates of homesteading success, reclaiming the histories of the land and peoples on which these land claims were sited. Lily Stearns’s story, placed within the largest successful homestead rush in history, foregrounds the personal saga of one woman who struggled to find security and a sense of pace within the sweeping demographic and geopolitical changes of her day.