Caldwell County MO Archives History .....HOME STEADING IN KANSAS 
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Karen Walker khw4@yahoo.com September 3, 2008, 6:46 pm

HOME STEADING IN KANSAS
	Narrator:  Albert Bolen, 73, of Hamiton, Missouri

     Mr. Bolen was born in 1861 in Vinton County, Ohio, ten miles north.  In 
1885 he and his wife left Ohio for Kansas to grow up with the country; as so 
many have said.  There was a whole train-coach of Ohio emigrants on that trip.
     Mr. Bolen went to Kansas in the boom years of the 80's when covered 
wagons went through Missouri towns with big signs "Kansas or Bust."  A year or 
two afterwards, the same wagons might return with the sign "Kansas and We 
Busted."  Perhaps one half of the homesteaders did not stay to prove up their 
claims, for lack of moisture and bugs spoiled the corn crops which most of 
them planted.  On getting to Kansas, at first Mr. Bolen rented; then desiring 
a home of his own, he and his wife took up a homestead in Stephens County 
which was not yet organized.  Everything was very new.  Prairie grass was 
everywhere - as were the bones of buffalo, which men collected and sent off to 
factories for fertilizer.  Not a tree could be seen.  Not a bird was seen or 
heard of that first year.  They had hundreds of jack rabbits, coyotes, 
rattlesnakes, wild horses and some antelopes as late as 1886.
     They were far from any stream, hence the homesteaders dug wells.  Mr. 
Bolen's well was one hundred fifty feet deep and it took seventeen days to dig 
it with spade and shovel.  He paid twenty-five cents a foot for the work.  One 
Joe Vinton, also of Vinton County, Ohio, who was a regular ground-mole when it 
came to digging deep wells, did the work.
     Their fuel was "buffalo chips" with which the ground was covered.  Mrs. 
Bolen also said she had baked bread in a sheet iron stove with dry weeds as 
fuel.
    The terms of getting a homestead was to stay five years; then the farmer 
got one hundred sixty acres.  Of course there was the tree-claim which some 
people used to get their land.  They had to plant ten acres of trees and get 
their quarter section (160 acres).  Mr. Bolen was not able to raise enough on 
his place to keep his family, so he became a freighter and hauled lumber and 
goods from the railroad station at Hartlin.  He hauled lumber for his own home 
near Woodsdale forty miles.  Although he had a wood house, many people had sod 
houses.  Buffalo sod was cut into strips twenty-eight inches long, fourteen 
inches broad and four inches thick.  They were laid to gether in brick fashion 
and stuck of their own power.  they were cool in summer and hot in winter.
     Mr. Bolen came to Caldwell County thirty-eight years ago and bought land 
in the Mill Creek district - the farm now owned by John Potts.
     Interviewed  July 1934.


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