Prairie Bachelor: The Story of a Kansas Homesteader and the Populist Movement by Lynda Beck Fenwick (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Prairie Bachelor: The Story of a Kansas Homesteader and the Populist Movement by Lynda Beck Fenwick Michael J. Hightower Prairie Bachelor: The Story of a Kansas Homesteader and the Populist Movement By Lynda Beck Fenwick. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2020. vii + 247 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. $29.95 paper. Sometime in the late 1870s, Isaac Werner left his job as a druggist in Rossville, Illinois, and made the trek to western Kansas to claim a homestead. In most respects, he was no different from countless others who relied on the Homestead Act of 1862 to carve out a slice of the American Dream, with two caveats: he lived alone, meaning that he had no dependents to help him prove up his claim, and he kept a diary that survives as a portal into the challenges of Great Plains homesteading. That diary—all 480 pages of it—became Lynda Beck Fenwick's source for a detailed and often poignant account of Werner's life between 1884 and the year he died, 1895. In her telling, historical markers are revealed in the context of Werner's day-to-day activities, from the big die-up of 1886 to 1887 (worst blizzard in seven years), ongoing expansion of the AT&SF Railway, the suffragist movement, and the Panic of 1893. Werner was clearly on the right side of history in supporting women's rights. Thanks to a copious book collection that belies stereotypes of the plodding yeoman farmer, Werner kept up with, and thought deeply about, the issues of his day. Arguably, the most important issue of Werner's day was the rise of prairie populism, a movement with striking parallels in our own time, spawned by the chasm between the haves and the have-nots. Attending speeches by populist luminaries and delivering a few of his own, Werner heeded Mary Lease's call to raise less corn and more hell and joined the bandwagon. In what might be loosely defined as spare time, Werner complemented his political activism with devising machinery aimed at alleviating his and his neighbors' backbreaking work. Werner's connections extended to Kansas State College, the first federal land-grant college created by the Morrill Act. In a letter to professors W. S. Morgan and E. M. Shelton, he suggested using local Farmers' Alliances to collect soil samples, supply data on crops, and gather weather statistics to help experiment stations in their mission to improve agricultural output. Prairie Bachelor is illuminating both as a sociology of Great Plains settlement and a history, told from the bottom up, of the populist movement. At its center is a bachelor who spent his Christmases, alone and cold, on his homestead, mourning the passing of faraway relatives and tending to his beloved cats. Death came at the age of fifty-one, leaving his neighbors to remember a kind and generous homesteader who did what many of us fail to do and live to regret: keep a diary for posterity to know what we did, and why. [End Page 248] Michael J. Hightower Independent Historian and Biographer Charlottesville and Oklahoma City Copyright © 2023 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln