Life For Homesteaders

Question 1

What were homesteaders problems about house work?

Answer 1

• there were no shops to buy soap and candles
• a typical house had only two buckets and some crockery and one cracked cup
• women had to collect buffalo chip for fuel

Question 2

Why was it so isolated for homesteaders?

Answer 2

• no doctor or midwifes
• no social life because of the distance between houses
• the families were sit in for winter
• people had to make the most of those trip to the nearest town

Question 3

What were problems homesteader about houses and dirt and disease?

Answer 3

• building a house - there was little wood so they had to build sod houses which was earth
• dirt and disease - the Sod houses leaked and there were fleas and bed bugs and there were open wells and outdoor toilets

Question 4

What was a women’s role as a homesteader?

Answer 4

• trying to clean the house
• keep clothes clean despite the lack of wood for fuel
• teaching children as no schools
• helping their husbands with gathering the harvest

Question 5

Why did some women go mad?

Answer 5

Due to their loneliness and there husbands being gone when hunting for weeks

Question 6

Why did homesteaders have problems with farming?

Answer 6

-hard crust on the soil made it hard to farm
-farmers could afford ploughs
-there weren’t enough workers
Team of sodbusters uses steel ploughs did the first ploughing
-after 1880 thresher teams travelled around following the harvest. Farmers could hire them for for just a few days

Question 7

What problem did homesteaders face with droughts?

Answer 7

• there were only 38cm of rainfall in year and hot summers evaporated dampness from the land. In the 1860s there were terrible droughts
• the well driller and wind pump allowed deep wells to be dug which gave water

Question 8

What problems did homesteaders face with food?

Answer 8

• farmers could grow enough food on their farms to feed a family
• the government realised that 160 acres wasn’t enough for a family so hey introduced the timber and culture act

Question 9

What problems did homesteaders face with fences?

Answer 9

• lack of wood meant farmers couldn’t keep cattle off their crops
• barbed wire in 1874 sorted this problem

Question 10

What problems did homesteaders face with insects and pests?

Answer 10

-in 1870s grasshoppers plagues stripped the cornstalks and sent women insane
-Colorado beetle destroyed potato crops
Settlers tried to harvest the crops before the grasshoppers came and tried to kill them but it wasn’t successful

Question 11

What were new technology methods?

Answer 11

New crops - Russian immigrates brought Turkey red wheat with them to the USA
Breyer machinery - a strong plough to turn heavy prairie soil also know as the sod buster