Hot summers,
cold winters, dirt, bugs, mice, and snakes were an everyday part of living on
the prairie during the expansion of our United States. Pioneers moving to the Great
Plains soon realized that a log cabin was not going to be built on their
homestead. Buffalo grass, a thick grass with heavily matted roots was to the
prairie as trees were to the forest. Buffalo grass was the raw material
available to build shelters for the new settlers.
Many pioneers
began their life on the prairie in a dugout cut into a hillside later to be expanded
on several sides with sod to create a “cozy,” if not very clean, home. As time
went on, the settlers would build an actual sod house with a door and windows. The
laborious job of cutting sod with a spade was soon replaced with the use of the
grasshopper plow that greatly eased the work of building a soddy. Strips cut approximately
six inches deep and one foot wide by two feet long were used to build the
walls. Laying the sod, grass side down and two to three rows wide, created a
wall about three feet thick. A space was left for the door and windows were
framed. Every few rows, the direction of the sod was changed to increase the
strength of the wall. The roof was made in several ways most commonly by
creating a wooden frame, sometimes covered with tar paper or straw, with a
thinner layer of sod on top. Eventually, the roof might sprout a spring flower
garden. Inside the house, the homeowner might hang cheese cloth from the
ceiling to catch the bugs and grass that would drop down on the evening meal.
The sod
house was cool in the summer and warm in the winter although susceptible to
heavy rain. They lasted a long time, frequently becoming a storage room or barn
when a newer home was built. Wood was sparse so most of the soddies were heated
with buffalo or cow chips. Eventually the family got used to the smell. Water
was precious and hard to come by. Fortunate settlers settled near a spring or
stream otherwise it was necessary to dig a well, a chancy and dangerous
activity. Winter brought long days of loneliness with the nearest neighbor
miles away.
We might
think that this life was unimaginable and wonder why anyone would choose to
live in this way, but although failure was high, the sodbusters brought
settlement to the Great Plains by the early twentieth century thereby helping
to expand the United States.
Sources:
“There are
no renters here,” Homesteading a Sod House.
Women of the West Museum. http://theautry.org/explore/exhibit/sod/daily.html.
(accessed 15 June 2014).
Vick Fite
and Nancy Hendrickson, Frontier Traveler, The Kansas Soddy, http://www.frontiertraveler.com/kansas/the-kansas-soddy/.
(accessed 15 June 2014).
Sod house.
n.d. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sod_house (accessed 15 June 2014).
Homestead
Act: The Challenges of Living on the Plains. Nebraskastudies.org, , http://www.nebraskastudies.org/0500/frameset_reset.html?http://www.nebraskastudies.org/0500/stories/0501_0108.html
(accessed 15 June 2014).
Homestead
National Monument of America. National Park Service. http://www.nps.gov/home/index.htm
(accessed 15 June 2014).
