Three Ways to Settle a Prairie

Greeley County, Octagon City, and Bon Homme Colony

In Bon Homme County, South Dakota, on the bluffs above the Missouri River, a colony founded in 1874 still operates as it did then. Property is held in common. Meals are taken in a communal kitchen. The children speak a Tyrolean German dialect at home and learn English at the colony school. The seven daily prayers of the Anabaptist tradition mark the rhythm of work. Bon Homme Hutterite Colony has weathered 152 years of drought, grasshopper plagues, war, conscription, two pandemics, and the steady commercial pressure of American agriculture. It branched into daughter colonies repeatedly from the late nineteenth century onward. Its direct descendants now number in the dozens, scattered across the Dakotas, Manitoba, and beyond.

In Greeley County, Kansas, organized in 1888 and named for Horace Greeley, the man who counseled westward movement, the federal census of 1890 counted 1,264 residents. The federal census of 1900 counted 493. The intervening decade saw a 61 percent population collapse. Homestead Act claims filed in Greeley County during the boom years of 1885 to 1889 were abandoned at rates exceeding 70 percent in the western townships. The land returned, often through tax sale, to speculators who had fronted seed money and to the railroad land grant companies that had promoted the settlement. The 2020 census of Greeley County returned a population near the 1890 figure, after 130 years of repeated boom and collapse.

In Allen County, Kansas, on the Neosho River near present-day Humboldt, the Vegetarian Settlement Company laid out Octagon City in the spring of 1856. The plan called for radial streets converging on an octagonal central park, with quarter-section homesteads arranged in geometric harmony. Henry S. Clubb, a journalist and Fourierist born in Colchester, England, in 1827 and resident in New York since 1853, recruited approximately 100 settlers from the Eastern states under the promise of a meatless agricultural cooperative. By autumn of 1856 the settlement had collapsed. The cause of death was cholera, malaria, Border Ruffian violence, inadequate shelter, and a depth of unpreparedness that surviving accounts treat as almost theatrical in scale.

These three settlements occupy the same biome and roughly the same historical moment. The Homestead Act took effect on January 1, 1863. Octagon City preceded it by seven years but operated on the same federal expectation that prairie land could be converted to private freehold by labor alone. Bon Homme arrived eleven years after the Homestead Act under a different premise. The contrast among the three reveals what the prairie required of those who proposed to remain on it, and what most American settlement theory misunderstood.

The Homestead Failure

Standard historical treatments of the Homestead Act of 1862 emphasize its democratic intent. A claim of 160 acres, made by any head of household over twenty-one, could be perfected through five years of residence and improvement at a fee of eighteen dollars. Between 1863 and 1900 approximately 1.4 million claims were filed under the act and its amendments.

Success was geographically conditional. The act produced stable farm communities in Iowa, eastern Kansas, eastern Nebraska, and eastern Dakota Territory, where annual precipitation exceeds 25 inches and the 160-acre unit suffices for a diversified family operation. West of the 100th meridian, where rainfall drops below 20 inches and high evaporation rates compound moisture stress, the act failed at scale. The case under examination here is the western failure zone, where federal policy ran into geophysical limits.

Gilbert Fite, in The Farmers’ Frontier, 1865-1900, calculated the proving-up rate at roughly 50 percent nationwide. In the trans-Missouri counties, the rate was substantially worse. Paul Wallace Gates, in History of Public Land Law Development (1968), documented county-level abandonment patterns in western Kansas and Nebraska running from 60 to 85 percent in the drought corridor west of the 100th meridian.

Greeley County, Kansas, sits squarely in that corridor. Annual precipitation averages 17 inches, with high year-to-year variability. The growing season is short. Soil is fertile but moisture-limited. The county was opened to homestead claims in the mid-1880s during a wet cycle that misled both the settlers and the railroad promoters who advertised the land. Drought beginning in 1887 and intensifying through 1894 destroyed wheat and corn yields for seven consecutive seasons. The 1890 census enumerated 1,264 residents. By 1895 state census records showed under 600. By 1900 the federal count stood at 493. A subset of original homestead claims remained, often consolidated into multi-quarter operations as departed neighbors sold or abandoned their land. The 160-acre unit, designed by Congress in 1862 for the conditions of Illinois and Iowa, was insufficient for the conditions of western Kansas. Survival arithmetic required at least 640 acres and a moisture-tolerant crop. Settlers who could not consolidate could not stay.

County records preserve the evidence of effort: sod houses, cisterns, windmills, fence lines that still scar the prairie. Structural arithmetic defeated the effort regardless of how much work the settlers gave. Federal policy assumed the yeoman household as the optimal unit of settlement. The prairie itself recognized no such unit. It rewarded scale, mutual aid, and the capacity to absorb shocks across multiple growing seasons. The isolated household had none of these capacities.

The Vegetarian Catastrophe

Henry S. Clubb is one of the more peculiar figures in the American utopian record. He was a vegetarian, a Fourierist, an abolitionist, and a temperance advocate. In 1855 he organized the Vegetarian Settlement Company on a stock subscription of one dollar per share. His goal was to establish a colony on the Kansas frontier where members would farm cooperatively, abstain from meat, alcohol, and tobacco, and prove that diet and association could regenerate American life.

A site on the Neosho River in present-day Allen County was selected. Clubb and the architect Orson Squire Fowler drew the plan together: a central octagonal park surrounded by radiating streets, with quarter-section homesteads laid out in geometric harmony. First families arrived in May 1856.

Nothing had been prepared. No gristmill stood on the site. No sawmill stood on the site. Housing consisted of tents, a single log cabin, and improvised lean-tos. The water of the Neosho carried fevers. The summer of 1856 brought temperatures above 100 degrees and a malarial outbreak that killed several settlers within weeks. Border Ruffian raiders, active in southeastern Kansas during the proxy war that gave the territory the name Bleeding Kansas, made night travel hazardous. Miriam Davis Colt, a settler from upstate New York whose 1862 memoir Went to Kansas remains the principal eyewitness source, recorded the death of her husband and son to fever in autumn 1856 and her own departure with surviving children in October.

By the close of 1856 the settlement was effectively over. Clubb left for Philadelphia, where he later founded the Vegetarian Society of America and lived to 1921. Fowler returned to architectural promotion and the octagon-house movement. The land reverted to ordinary frontier farms held by settlers who ate what was available.

This collapse rewards close study because the causes were internal. The year was wet, so weather is no part of the explanation. The organization itself produced the catastrophe: the gap between the prospectus and the preparation, the assumption that ideology could substitute for capital and labor, the recruitment of a population without farming experience, the absence of any institutional mechanism to enforce the cooperative obligations the prospectus described. Members who arrived expecting infrastructure found none and had no contractual remedy. Sick settlers had no covenant requiring others to nurse them. Dietary discipline held into the first month. The communal infrastructure that should have supported the ill and apportioned labor never coalesced.

The Hutterite Endurance

The Hutterite Brethren trace to the Anabaptist radical reformation of the 1520s in Tyrol and Moravia. Jakob Hutter was burned at the stake in Innsbruck in 1536. The community he organized practiced Gütergemeinschaft, the community of goods, derived from Acts 2 and Acts 4 of the Christian scriptures. Hutterite theology treats private property as a consequence of the Fall and communal property as the sign of redeemed life. The colonies practice this literally. They hold all assets in common: land, livestock, machinery, buildings, vehicles, and the income from agricultural production. Members receive housing, food, clothing, education, and medical care from the colony. They do not receive cash wages.

After three centuries of migration through Slovakia, Transylvania, Wallachia, and Russia, the surviving Hutterite communities emigrated to Dakota Territory between 1874 and 1879 to escape Russian conscription policies. Three groups arrived under three leaders: Michael Waldner, the Schmiedeleut, named for Waldner’s blacksmith trade; Darius Walter, the Dariusleut; and Jakob Wipf, the Lehrerleut, named for Wipf’s role as teacher. The first colony, Bon Homme, was established in August 1874 by the Schmiedeleut on land purchased near Yankton in present-day Bon Homme County.

The colony engages with the modern American economy on the production side. Wheat, soybeans, hogs, dairy, eggs, and increasingly manufactured goods are sold into commercial markets through colony-owned corporations. Hutterite agriculture uses contemporary machinery, follows current breed and seed practices, and competes commercially with neighboring industrial farms. What is communal is the receipt of income, the consumption of goods, the holding of capital, and the apportionment of labor. Engagement with the broader economy is not at issue. Property structure within the colony is.

The colony has operated continuously since. It branches periodically. Hutterite practice when a colony reaches roughly 130 to 150 members is to divide, with half the population moving to a new site purchased and prepared in advance. Bon Homme’s daughter colonies number in the dozens. The total Hutterite population in North America in 2026 stands at approximately 50,000 across roughly 500 colonies in South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana, Minnesota, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and British Columbia. John Hostetler, in Hutterite Society (Johns Hopkins, 1974, revised 1997), calculated the Hutterite population doubling rate at approximately seventeen years, one of the highest sustained natural increase rates of any documented human population.

The Bon Homme settlers in 1874 faced the same prairie that destroyed Octagon City and emptied Greeley County. Grasshopper plagues swept the colony in 1875 and 1876. Drought followed in the early 1890s. The First World War brought wartime confiscations: South Dakota authorities seized colony cattle and harassed the German-speaking pacifists to such an extent that nearly all Hutterite colonies relocated to Canada between 1918 and 1920. The Depression contracted the colony economy. Agricultural consolidation in the late twentieth century pressured smaller colonies. None of these pressures broke the form.

The reasons for the endurance are theological and structural in equal measure. The colony absorbs individual shocks because no individual carries the loss alone. A bad harvest, a widowing, a sick child: all are borne by the whole. The 160-acre arithmetic that destroyed Greeley County means nothing to a colony farming 5,000 to 10,000 acres with shared machinery and a multi-generational labor force. Octagon City’s recruitment problem dissolves where membership reproduces through high birthrates and intensive religious education within German-speaking schools. As for the covenant gap that left Clubb’s settlers without remedy, 500 years of liturgical and disciplinary tradition bind every Hutterite member, and leaving the colony means leaving the language, the religion, the family network, and the common purse simultaneously.

What the Contrast Shows

The instinctive American reading of these three cases treats the Hutterite endurance as exceptional and the homestead and Octagon City failures as the norm. That description matches the surface frequency. Underneath the frequency, the structural pattern runs in the opposite direction. The Hutterite colony represents what successful prairie settlement looks like when measured against the actual demands of the land. Both alternatives stand as the unusual cases.

Homestead Act failure traces directly to federal policy. Congress in 1862 imposed an Eastern agricultural unit on a Western landscape that could not support it, and then declined to revise the unit when the evidence came in. Major John Wesley Powell’s Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States (1878) documented the failure and proposed 2,560-acre pasturage units with cooperative water rights for the country west of the 100th meridian. Congress ignored him. Drought in the 1890s destroyed the Kansas and Nebraska homestead frontier on schedule. Dust storms in the 1930s destroyed the second wave of settlement on the same logic. American settlers spent 130 years arguing with land that had already announced what it would carry.

Octagon City represents a private organizational failure compounded by ideological self-flattery. Settlers believed that diet and good intention could substitute for capital, infrastructure, and binding obligation. The frontier punished the substitution within months. This pattern recurs throughout the secular utopian record of the nineteenth century. Bethel Colony in Missouri (1844) and Aurora Colony in Oregon (1856), founded by William Keil under religious authority, lasted decades. Icarian colonies at Nauvoo and Corning, founded under Étienne Cabet’s secular socialism, fragmented through internal litigation. Communal life on the prairie required either thick theology or thick coercion. The colonies that tried to operate on enlightened reason alone did not last.

The Mennonite migration to Kansas in 1874, contemporaneous with the Hutterite migration to Dakota Territory and arising from the same Russian conscription pressure, settled thousands of Russian Mennonite farmers across central Kansas in tight religious networks of private family farms supported by communal worship and mutual aid. Their settlements held. Marion, Harvey, and McPherson Counties retained their Mennonite character into the twenty-first century, and the Turkey Red wheat the Mennonites brought transformed Kansas agriculture. This case occupies a middle position between Homestead atomization and Hutterite communal property: private title held within thick theological community, with mutual aid functioning as a partial substitute for shared ownership. What failed on the prairie was the category lacking either property scale or theological depth.

Hutterite endurance was a function of three things working at once: a religious covenant old enough to have absorbed every form of pressure the modern state could apply, an economic unit large enough to match the scale of the prairie, and a reproductive demography that maintained membership without recruitment. Any one factor alone would not have sufficed. Religious covenant without economic scale produced the small Hutterite communities of the 1530s, repeatedly destroyed by Habsburg authorities. Economic scale without covenant produced the great wheat estates of the late nineteenth century, collapsed in the 1890s and 1930s. Demography without either produced the Mormon settlement of Utah, which succeeded under different conditions but required a state-building effort the Hutterites never attempted.

The prairie was never neutral land waiting for industry. It operated as a system with its own requirements, and it kept what met those requirements. Federal policy proposed the 160-acre yeoman household; Greeley County emptied. Private utopians proposed the vegetarian cooperative town; Octagon City vanished within months. Anabaptist refugees proposed the communal colony; Bon Homme remains, and so do its daughter colonies across the northern plains.

Conclusion

The instinctive lesson Americans draw from the homestead century is the lesson of individual perseverance: the broken plow, the windmill that finally pumped, the family that held on through the bad years. This lesson is sentimental, and inaccurate to the record. The families that held on in Greeley County, Kansas, were the families that consolidated land and married into other consolidated households. Families that did not consolidate left. Successful units operated as networks rather than as households.

The Hutterites understood this from the moment of arrival. Land was bought collectively. Barns were built collectively. A colony divided before it grew too large to feed itself. Children were taught in the colony language. Obligations passed across generations through liturgy and discipline. This produced a continuous prairie settlement on the original land grant, from the original migration cohort, with the original property arrangement intact in 2026.

That same record embarrasses the American story. Frontier mythology has no comfortable place for an Anabaptist colony that succeeded by refusing the premises of American property law. Standard textbooks treat the Hutterites as a curiosity, Octagon City as a footnote, and Greeley County as a generic failure. The actual history reads in reverse: the curiosity is the success, the footnote is the warning, and the generic failure is the pattern. Settlements that endured on the prairie endured because they matched the structure of the prairie. The settlements that vanished left their foundations buried in the soil while their inhabitants scattered into the cities, the next frontier, or the historical record.

Sources

Colt, Miriam Davis. Went to Kansas: Being a Thrilling Account of an Ill-Fated Expedition to that Fairy Land, and Its Sad Results. Watertown, NY: L. Ingalls, 1862.

Fite, Gilbert C. The Farmers’ Frontier, 1865-1900. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966.

Gates, Paul Wallace. History of Public Land Law Development. Washington: Public Land Law Review Commission, 1968.

Hickman, Russell K. “The Vegetarian and Octagon Settlement Companies.” Kansas Historical Quarterly 2.4 (November 1933): 377-385.

Hostetler, John A. Hutterite Society. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974; revised edition 1997.

Powell, John Wesley. Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States. Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1878.

United States Census Bureau. Decennial Census of Population, 1880-2020.