Mechanization, Land Use, and Ownership:
Oklahoma in the Early Twentieth Century
by
Bonnie Lynn-Sherow
LTC Paper 155
Land Tenure Center
University of Wisconsin-Madison
June 1996
Copyright © 1996 by Bonnie Lynn-Sherow. All rights reserved.
Readers may make verbatim copies of this document for noncommercial purposes by any means, provided that this copyright notice appears on all such copies.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
MACHINE AGE
LANGSTON AND ANTELOPE TOWNSHIP
CONCLUSION
ENDNOTES
REFERENCES
All views, interpretations, recommendations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are those of the author and not necessarily those of the supporting or cooperating institutions.
Mechanization, Land Use, and Ownership:
Oklahoma in the Early Twentieth Century
by
Bonnie Lynn-Sherow*
Are not our inventors absolutely
ushering in the very dawn
of the millennium?
[Report on improved hay-maker,
Scientific American, 1860.]
Introduction
In 1969, Leo Marx observed that "Americans have seized upon the machine as their birthright" (Marx 1969, p. 205). Certainly it is difficult to envision a Plains farmer in the twentieth century without her trusty John Deere nearby. Indeed, mechanization was accepted by farmers more rapidly and more thoroughly on the Great Plains than anywhere else in the United States. In early twentieth-century Oklahoma territory, progress and machinery were virtually synonymous. Access to agricultural technology, however, was not universal and not all farmers benefited equally. Farmers who were able to utilize the new technology had an advantage over those who could not. In some cases, access to the latest equipment was determined by factors other than economics. Preliminary investigation into agricultural practices in west-central Oklahoma at the turn of this century suggests that Euro-American farmers made it more difficult for their African-American neighbors to utilize agricultural technology by excluding them from their machinery-sharing network. To maintain themselves as independent owner-operators, black farm families turned to nonmechanized production, creating a distinct pattern of land tenure.
From our late twentieth-century vantage point, the primary relationship between mechanization and land tenure appears ruthlessly economic. The logic of western capitalism tells us that farmers who invested in machinery were able to harvest their crops more efficiently and profitably than those without machines. Successful farmers could then afford to invest in more land and equipment. While this progressive story makes the consolidation of farm units in the West comprehensible, neither the people nor the environment of the Oklahoma territory were so accommodatingly predictable. Economic interpretations are one measure of what happened, but they do little to explain why farmers invested their capital in different ways, how environmental conditions either accelerated or retarded agricultural development, and how certain individuals and groups sidestepped this process altogether. As in any historical analysis of resource use, early twentieth-century patterns of land use and ownership were products of a complex interaction of the society, the physical environment, and the larger economy. This interaction is most clearly revealed through study of representative individuals living and working out their lives in ecologically discrete places like west-central Oklahoma.
The technological development of agriculture in this century, has made "American farmers the most mechanized and productive agriculturalists in the world" (Hurt 1991). The mechanical harvesting of wheat, corn, oats, alfalfa, and other crops did not, of course, leap from hand sickle to gasoline-powered combine overnight. Between 1890 and 1920, Oklahoma farmers did not individually invest in self-powered machinery to any significant extent. Instead, they relied on a combination of purchased and homemade, horse-drawn implements: plows, mechanical reapers, seed drills, binders, headers, and threshers at home, and the hired services of steam-powered and then gasoline-powered "custom" sod breakers and harvesting outfits seasonally.
Tractors, or "gasoline traction engines," which eventually displaced both horses and many custom cutting units, were slow to catch on with the average American farmer. The first gasoline traction engines in America were produced in Illinois in 1889—the same year that Oklahoma territory was opened for white settlement. This tractor, however, weighed more than 9,000 pounds and tended to become mired in the soil by its own weight. Although inventors and engineers made dozens of different improvements to the farm tractor aimed to make it more maneuverable, tractors numbered only 1 per every 10,000 farms in the United States in 1907. High prices, design problems, and lack of capital put tractors out of the economic reach of most farmers in the first half of the twentieth century. During World War II, high farm product prices and a lack of labor led to an increase in tractor sales. Even so, only 30 percent of American farmers owned a tractor in 1945 and tractors did not outnumber draft animals until 1955 (Hurt 1991, p. 24).
Farmers on the Great Plains and in Oklahoma, however, owned tractors in quantities far above the national average. The relatively flat or rolling landscape forgave earlier models’ lack of maneuverability and the drier climate favored mechanically harvested crops such as wheat. The two biggest obstacles to tractor ownership before 1926 were price and problems associated with adapting implements (headers, binders, threshers) originally designed for horse teams to the tractor. Both of these problems were largely solved by the mid-1920s. High grain prices during World War I netted many farmers enough cash and credit to purchase tractors. At the same time, International Harvester Company patented the power takeoff, or PTO, which allowed the tractor engine to drive the motorized parts of different implements, such as binders and corn pickers. This increased the tractor’s versatility and was a preliminary step in the development of the combine. Other improvements, such as the power lift, pneumatic tires, and a three-point hitch system for maintaining plow or cultivator height, also increased the tractor’s usefulness on the Great Plains (Hurt 1991, p. 20).
In the early years of Oklahoma settlement, or before World War I, agricultural technology did not mean "tractors." Instead, most cash-crop farmers relied on the services of custom cutters at harvesttime. According to Thomas Isern (1981), a historian of agricultural folklife, custom threshing on the Great Plains progressed in three stages. Beginning in the 1870s in settled states like Kansas, farmers relied on the header to harvest their wheat crop. The header had a sickle, a reel, and a table for the cut grain to be collected upon and sent by conveyor up to a wagon pulled alongside. Horses provided all of the power for pushing the header and pulling the wagon. Once the grain was collected, it was threshed or separated by flailing or by draft animals, which tread on it to separate the kernels from the chaff. Mechanical harvesting required several "hands" to operate the machinery, drive animal teams, and pitch grain onto wagonbeds.
This system was displaced in the 1890s with the invention of the steam-powered separator. In some cases, successful farmers pooled their resources to acquire the thresher for use collectively. In others, entrepreneurial-minded farmers, often in partnership with equipment distributors, purchased the separator, collected a crew, and hired themselves out to local farmers at a set rate per acre.
This second-stage pattern of localized custom work was common throughout Oklahoma’s so-called wheat belt (figure 1). In 1894, for example, in Blaine County, just north and west of Oklahoma City, the average settler owned between $15 and $30 worth of agricultural machinery (mostly plows). By 1910, Blaine County farmers owned nearly $200 worth of agricultural implements such as horse-drawn cultivators, headers, binders, and threshers. In 1920, this figure jumped significantly to over $1,000 worth of agricultural machinery. The average farm size also increased from just under 160 acres to nearly 300 acres per farm unit. This increase in mechanization and in farm size was accompanied by an increase in the average wheat acreage per farm, from 22 acres in 1910 to nearly 120 acres by 1920.
Statistics in this case, however, obscure the fact that few farmers owned $1,000 worth of agricultural machinery in 1920. While some farmers wholeheartedly invested in self-powered harvesting equipment, including tractor-driven combines, most continued to rely on draft animals for their day-to-day farm power. The number of draft animals (horses and mules) in Blaine County in 1910 stood at 7 animals per farm and actually increased to 12 by 1920 (Everhart 1929, pp. 31–36).(1) These seemingly contradictory trends make sense only in the context of custom harvesting. While nearly every farmer had draft animals for use all year around and set aside some acreage for fodder crops like oats, corn, and hay, a small minority of farmers purchased steam-powered harvesting equipment, which they financed by hiring themselves and their equipment out to their neighbors once a year.
On 8 June 1893, the Watonga Rustler reported that "there are five threshing machines owned by parties here and two of them will be brought in this year ... a number of our young men will go to Kansas for work as soon as the harvest is done here."(2) Interviews with custom cutters conducted in the 1940s echoed the Rustler’s report. Long-time custom cutters recalled that before farmers bought combines, "wheat was bound, shocked and left until the threshing machine worked its way into the community and threshed for farmers." Threshing crews—"young men, bachelors, adventurers and others"—moved with the harvest a certain distance and then returned to their homes and farms at the end of the season. This localized pattern of custom harvesting in the emerging wheat belt of west-central Oklahoma spread as improvements in harvesting equipment, and sturdier trucks especially, made it easier to transport both crews and machinery greater distances.
Custom harvesting linked mechanization and land tenure through the medium of community dynamics. In the wheat-producing regions of Oklahoma, custom cutters and farmers contracted with one another on an annual basis. Both farmers and custom cutters relied on other farmers’ recommendations and personal experience in their decision to contract with one another. A new farmer, for example, would ask his neighbors to recommend a reliable custom outfit. The farmer would then write the custom harvester, requesting his services in the following year. Most of this correspondence took place during the winter. Similarly, the combine owner would make inquiries about the farmer’s reputation, his facilities for housing and feeding the crew, and, above all, how many acres he realistically expected to harvest. Combiners were paid a portion of the harvest per acre in addition to board and daily wages for skilled crew members. Since it took approximately the same amount of time to set up operations to harvest 40 acres as it did for 200 acres, custom harvesters were predisposed to service farmers with larger acreages. If a farmer had only a small portion of land in wheat, he might attract a combiner by lining up contracts with several farmers in the immediate vicinity.
In spite of all these carefully laid plans, however, neither the farmer nor the custom cutter was legally obligated to honor the agreement. If a custom combiner contracted to harvest a field in Kingfisher County on a certain date, but found himself delayed by rains in Garfield County, the farmer in Kingfisher could not hold the combine operator liable for any loss that might result from overripening, hail, or other circumstance. Conversely, should an uncontracted combiner be in that farmer’s neighborhood at a time when the grain had reached maximum maturity, he was under no obligation to wait for his contracted unit to arrive. Custom cutters did their best to avoid unplanned idleness by telegraphing ahead to say they were on their way.(3)
Figure 1. Distribution of experiment station wheat survey by county, 1901
The potential economic and social implications of the combine contract system were profound. Small farmers especially were obliged to maintain good relations with their neighbors and combine owners. Small-scale producers faced a built-in bias in attracting a custom cutter to their fields, thus increasing their risk of ruin in any given season. The informal and extralegal nature of the custom cutting contract system left unlucky farmers with unharvested grain or crops ruined by early frost or hail with no official redress for their losses. The custom system also directly affected land use. Given the fixed costs of board and wages, the custom cutting system encouraged farmers to plant a larger percentage of their land in mechanically harvested crops in order to get their money’s worth. In turn, larger acreages increased farmers’ chances of regularly attracting custom harvesters until they could afford to purchase their own equipment.
In spite of these risks in the custom cutting system, most farmers were not in an economic position to purchase their own equipment until the end of World War I. Even then, this third stage in mechanized agriculture did not arrive in Oklahoma until the mid-1920s, when internal combustion PTO-equipped tractors designed to power smaller separators put individual units within economic reach. A 1939 survey of Oklahoma’s wheat belt observed a "major change" in 1925 and 1926, when "farmers sold part of their work stock and bought tractors, while some even went to the extent of selling all their stock and relying entirely upon tractors as a source of farm power."(4) By the end of the 1920s, farmers in Oklahoma were convinced of the utility and greater efficiency of self-powered agricultural machinery whether it was leased (hired) or individually owned. Throughout the Great Plains, labor-saving agricultural technology favored economies of scale and specialization in a single crop, like wheat. Stimulated by high grain prices and a lack of farm labor during World War I, the trend toward mechanization and monoculture was well established throughout Oklahoma’s wheat-producing counties by 1920—well ahead of the average farmer nationally. Oklahoma farmers whose agricultural practices operated outside this trend, however, would encounter profound social, economic, and ecological challenges to their way of life.
Langston and Antelope Township
On the Great Plains, the intersection of different races and cultures and the abundance and disposition of land have made the history of western land tenure unique from other regions (Luebke 1980). The Homestead Act (1862), more efficient transportation, and an entrepreneurial system of resource law all contributed to a high rate of settler turnover in the American West. Moreover, localized studies of "frontier" settlement(5) indicate that successful land-holding frequently depended on a settler’s ties to his or her community. As John Mack Faragher (1986, p. 237) concluded in his study of Sugar Creek, Illinois, "[the] individual…was surely important; but it was the community which prevailed."
"Community" is the key to understanding African-American settlement in Oklahoma after 1889. There were, by conservative estimate, 25 all-black towns in Oklahoma before statehood in 1907 (Tolson 1974; Hamilton 1991). Some lasted only a short while, some remained predominantly black, and others became home to both black and white residents. Langston, Oklahoma, located about 12 miles east and north of the territorial capital of Guthrie in Logan County, was the best known of the black towns populated by migrants to Oklahoma.(6) Langston was founded in 1890 by a black entrepreneur, Edwin P. McCabe, who purchased the land from a white farmer, Charles Robbin, of Guthrie. McCabe was a well-known figure in Kansas, where he had served as state auditor. McCabe began publication of a newspaper, the Langston Herald, that same year and circulated copies throughout the South. Langston’s population reached its height (2,000) just before the opening of the Sac and Fox lands in 1891. Thereafter, the town declined in population until 1897, when the state legislature created the Colored Agricultural and Normal University of Oklahoma and located it just west of the town.(7)
While many Langston residents took up town lots and remained as business owners and professionals, many of the town’s early residents considered it a holding place while they waited to take up homesteads. Based on newspaper accounts outside the Langston City Herald, Langston residents seemed to have exhibited a genuine spirit of cooperation in keeping with other "escape" societies during this period. In April 1891, the New York Times sent a reporter to Guthrie and Langston to investigate the numerous claims being made by white newspapers in Arkansas, Kansas, and Missouri that thousands of African-Americans were making the pilgrimage to Oklahoma from their homes in the South for the express purpose of forming an all-black state. Southern newspapers frequently depicted black migrants as outcasts of the worst "sort," possessing little more than the rags upon their backs. In contrast, the Times reporter found that Langston had approximately 200 permanent residents and that the most destitute among them "have been cared for by persons of their own race until they could help themselves and help others." On black-owned farms near Langston, the Times discovered "two, four and sometimes eight families, all working together awaiting the time when more lands will be opened for settlement." Even within the town’s limits, "83 acres of land have been broken up and will this year be used as a cooperative garden by the entire colony."(8) To counter white stereotypes of shiftlessness and poverty, the Herald regularly advised black southerners considering a move to Oklahoma to "be prepared to support yourself and your family for up to year. We make this point strong."(9) While Langston’s residents arrived with less capital to invest than many of their white neighbors, their situation could not be attributed to a lack of industry and cooperation.
Antelope Township’s black residents expected little help from either government agencies or their white neighbors. Like thousands of other black southerners, Oklahoma’s immigrants were fleeing an increasingly violent, racist South. Neither the turn of the century nor the movement of blacks to northern states stemmed the tide of aggression. The first decade of the twentieth century saw an epidemic of race-related riots throughout the nation (Franklin and Moss 1994, pp. 312–17). In its campaign for the Dyer antilynching bill in 1922, the NAACP reported that 3,436 black Americans were lynched between 1889 and 1922 (ibid., p. 357).
Racial fearmongering followed blacks all along their route to Oklahoma. The most prevalent fear expressed by whites, both in the South and in Oklahoma, was of African Americans’ intention to populate the new territory in sufficient numbers to take over the legislature and make application to the Union as an all-black state. This prediction was, of course, out of all proportion with reality. From 1880 to 1930, the black population of Oklahoma, including Indian territory, never rose above 10 percent.(10) Even as they met together to make plans to move, black migrants were threatened with violence or, conversely, wooed by southern landowners worried about the shrinking pool of agricultural laborers. In Oklahoma, white politicians and boomers focused their attention on the rumored appointment of Edwin McCabe as territorial governor. As one white republican was quoted as saying, "We will not tolerate Negro government here. If McCabe is appointed governor…I would not give five cents for his life."(11)
Most black Oklahomans in the 1890s, however, were less concerned with politics than they were with securing a home and a farm where they could live unmolested. As the header for the Langston City Herald expressed, "We are for the right, and ask no quarter but Justice." Editors McCabe and later Lee Merriweather encouraged migrating blacks to secure their independence by becoming farmowners and operators. "There is no use talking; nothing makes a colored man feel prouder than to stand on his own property and call it home…. Colored men—buy land." In contrast to white-owned county newspapers that advertised lots in excess of 160 acres for sale in the 1890s, the Herald noted the filing fees on 80 acres ($7) and even 40 acres ($6). Moreover, black farmers were encouraged to plant "diversified crops, where there need be no such thing as a total failure."(12) Given the racially charged atmosphere, it is not surprising that black farmers emphasized self-sufficiency, first, and production for the market, second.
A survey of farm production among both black and white farmers in Antelope County is illustrative of the differences between the two groups. A comprehensive survey of Oklahoma’s early agricultural history is difficult to reconstruct, because very few county agricultural censuses are extant before statehood. Fortunately, the 1904 census for Antelope Township in Logan County has survived, depicting one of the best years for agriculture in the first decade of the twentieth century, well after the establishment of the town of Langston and three years before statehood and the legal codification of Jim Crow in Oklahoma. In short, 1904 marks a high point for black landownership and agricultural production in Antelope County in the central wheat belt of Oklahoma.
Contrary to popular fears of black majorities, the total population of Antelope County in 1904 was 958 persons, 623 listed as "white" and 335 (35 percent) designated as "colored." Langston ranked as the largest town in the township, with 227 blacks, while the next largest town, Campbell City, contained only 27 white residents. Rural blacks in Antelope County, however, were greatly outnumbered by white farmers, 108 to 575. Based on the organization of the census along range and township lines, the vast majority of Antelope Township’s black residents seemed to have lived close to one another, with less than a dozen black-owned farms scattered amidst their white neighbors.
Black farm units were overwhelmingly family and subsistence based. Rachel Williamson, aged 60, and her two children operated a small family farm that specialized in household and truck produce. Although the entire farm, including "improvements" (buildings, well, and fences), was valued at only $200, there were 60 acres in crops: 25 acres in wheat, 25 acres in corn, and the rest in kaffir (feed), corn, and hay. In addition to these crops, the Williamsons owned milch cows and chickens, producing 380 pounds of butter and $73 worth of eggs and poultry. A small orchard produced apples, pears, peaches, apricots, plums, and cherries; from these, the family fermented 80 gallons of wine.
Robert Slaughter, aged 59, his wife Mariak, aged 48, and their five children, ranging in age from 15 to 21, moved to Oklahoma from Arkansas, though Robert was born in Virginia, and his wife, in Tennessee. Their farm had 90 acres in crops including wheat (27 acres), corn, and cotton. The Slaughters owned $30 worth of agricultural machinery—probably one or two manufactured plows and a horse-drawn thresher or wagon for transporting farm produce to Langston or Guthrie for sale. Like the Williamsons, the Slaughter family had invested in fruit trees, including over 200 peach as well as cherry and plum trees. Their farm was assessed at $500, the second highest for black-owned farms in Antelope Township.
Similar assessments held for other black family farms in the township. The Langdon, Tomlinson, and Jones families, each with 5 to 10 members, all raised small acreages of wheat, corn, and fodder; owned cows, swine, and chickens; and planted orchards of several varieties. More commercially minded, King Neal and his son Luis planted the usual corn and cotton but, rather than wheat, invested in 1,500 peach trees as well as apple and cherry trees. At the other end of the scale, struggling to make ends meet, Isaac Jefferson (44) and his wife Laura (38) and their 13 children (ranging in age from 1 to 20 years) lived on 80 acres, producing wheat (30 acres) corn, and oats and owning less than $10 worth of agricultural machinery.
Diversified farming, however, was not sufficient to meet most black families’ needs. Elsewhere in the Antelope Township census, many of the same men and women are designated as agricultural laborers. Clearly, the earnings to be gained from mixed farming practices were not enough to provide black farm families with much-needed cash. Even Rachel Williamson, at the age of 60, hired herself out seasonally as an agricultural worker on neighboring farms.
Moreover, a small number of Antelope’s rural black residents, not listed as farm owners or even tenant operators, fell under the general occupational heading of "agricultural workers." This seems to have been the primary occupation of Willis and Susie Hand and their 7 children, aged 20 years (Bell) down to 8 (Walter). It would be wrong to assume, however, that the Hands and others worked primarily outside of the black agricultural community. Given the variety and kinds of crops the black residents of Antelope Township were raising and the descriptions of multifamily farming practices, it is possible that community-based labor was a deliberate strategy to compensate for their isolation from the mainstream of the Oklahoma economy. Advertisements and photographs of local black vendors at the turn of the century suggest that African-American farmers captured local markets by specializing in the day-to-day needs of townsfolk in Langston, Guthrie, and even Oklahoma City.(13) By producing crops like cotton, fruit, eggs, butter, and other unmechanized commodities, black residents circumvented the need for agricultural machinery and capitalized, instead, on their biggest asset, their own labor.
This theory seems even more plausible given the farm practices of whites living next to Antelope’s black farm families. In keeping with the trends earlier noted in Blaine County, 60 miles to the west, Antelope’s white farmers wholeheartedly invested in wheat as a cash crop by 1904. J.B. Paris (46), his wife Salley (42), and their 5 children had lived at least 7 years in Oklahoma. The Paris’s had 90 acres in mixed crops and 160 acres fenced. They owned virtually no machinery but planted 140 acres to wheat. They owned livestock, valued at $180, which they kept on 70 acres of native pasture. Like their black neighbors, they planted an orchard of peach, apple, pear, apricot, plum, and cherry trees. Their farm was assessed at $900. Their neighbors, the Whitleys, from Iowa, had 6 children. They raised 90 acres of wheat in 1904, along with corn, broomcorn, oats, and prairie hay. Their small herd of milch cows produced 150 pounds of butter, and, like many Antelope County residents, the Whitleys had 3 acres in orchard. The difference between Antelope’s white and black residents was not so much in their choice of crops and products as in the quantity of each. By devoting more of their effort and land to wheat growing, Antelope’s white farmers demonstrated a greater reliance on mechanized agriculture. While the average value of agricultural machinery for white farmers was not much more than for blacks ($20–30), the average acreage that Antelope’s white farmers planted to mechanically harvested crops like wheat was 119 acres, compared to only 40 acres on black-owned and -operated farms.
The question arises: Why didn’t black farm families engage more heavily in the wheat market? As a group, the black farmers of Antelope Township could have acquired horse-drawn implements for harvesting wheat and other cereal crops. Antelope’s white farmers clearly relied on custom cutting for harvesting their wheat crops and realized a profit in these years, so why not black farmers? While conclusive answers to questions of group motive and behavior are always hard to come by, several possibilities present themselves that may help us understand black farmers’ reluctance to mechanize their farm operations.
The first reason might have been ecological. The physical landscape surrounding the town of Langston was of poorer quality compared to other locations in Logan County. Situated in the red-bed plains, the soil near Langston was clay based and subject to severe erosion and gullying. Indeed, much of the area today is used for grazing. Given the limited funds of many black families (based on their farms’ assessments) and the fact most purchased land after the original land runs, it is not surprising to discover that black landowners were only able to afford land of lesser value. It seems that black migrants sought to live close to one another for support and to maintain their kinship networks. Even if black farmers were aware of the land’s limitations, the proximity of friends and family may have been compensation.
Another possible reason for blacks’ alienation from the wheat economy of Oklahoma might have been white society’s expectations of black farm practices, or lack thereof, in regard to mechanization. Black or "Negro" agricultural practice was a popular area of study at Oklahoma’s land grant colleges at Norman and Stillwater in the 1920s and 1930s. These early attempts at quantification contain valuable statistics no longer available and also demonstrate white attitudes toward black farmers in this period. Representative of this school, Asa Dagley at the University of Oklahoma in 1926 explained that the black farmer "is much more fitted to plow in a little bend in the creek with one mule and a broken plow than he is to turn the sod of the broad prairies of the state where it is necessary for him to handle four horses and operate a piece of good machinery" (Dagley 1926, p. 104).
Dagley’s assessment of the black farmer’s capacity for modern agricultural practice was based on a widespread belief that the black farmer "would, if left alone, let his crop become hopelessly lost in weeds and grass." This inability to relate to "such abstract, burdensome things as duty, or attention to business" was a result of blacks’ misconstrued idea of freedom after the Civil War as "freedom from all restraint, and especially from all kinds of work." According to Dagley, the inability of the black farmer to retain control of his land was inevitable, and "one reason the Negro of today quits the farm is because he cannot cope with the scientific farming of the white man" (Dagley 1926, p. 131). If Dagley’s explanation of blacks’ failure to thrive as farmers was typical of thinking in Oklahoma in the first two decades of this century, then the social environment in which blacks were endeavoring to make a living from farming was as unyielding as the land on which they had settled.
As stated earlier, most farmers before 1925 did not own their own agricultural (harvesting) machinery but depended on custom cutters to harvest their crops each year. No doubt the small acreages of wheat and other mechanically harvested crops cultivated by black farmers were not very attractive to custom cutters. This may have been a self-imposed limitation by black farmers desiring to be diversified agriculturalists, or it may reflect an unacceptable level of risk in depending on custom cutters who were under no obligation to service their fields.
Although I have found no direct indication, in letters or interviews, that custom combiners purposely passed over black farmers, there is evidence that combine units discriminated against Indian farmers who attempted to enter the lucrative wheat market during and just after World War I. In 1967, field worker Julie Jordan interviewed Guy Quoetone, Kiowa, about Indian farming after 1900. Quoetone related that he and other Kiowa raised wheat but had trouble getting it threshed.(14) During the war, Quoetone "had to hire a colored man to help me stack my wheat." Showing Jordan a picture of a custom combining unit, Quoetone explained that "the machinery don’t belong to me, I just hired the thresher…in those days the white people that owned the threshers, they kind of boycott the Indians. They won’t thresh our wheat…they wait till all the white people get all theirs threshed and then they thresh ours. It was discouraging for us to raise wheat because we can’t get it cut and we couldn’t get it threshed."
Again, further research is needed to say with any certainty that black farmers in Oklahoma suffered similar discrimination at the hands of custom cutters, and stories of immigrant white and black farmers working in cooperation with one another in the early years of Oklahoma settlement hint at a more complicated interaction than that depicted by Quoetone. Having worked as farmers in a white-dominated society before their migration to Oklahoma, black farmers may have simply elected not to compete with whites for the same services in anticipation of the situation encountered by the Kiowa, who were entering the market for the first time.
In Oklahoma from 1890 to 1920, white farmers passed from self-sufficient homesteaders with only a few acres under plow to full-fledged market-oriented producers in less than a decade.(15) Drought gripped most of west-central Oklahoma in the early 1890s and a large percentage of the original homesteaders gave up their claims before the turn of the century. These "relinquishments" were bought at auction by new settlers or by neighboring homesteaders. This pattern of consolidation continued through the first two decades of the twentieth century. In Blaine County, for example, the number of acres under production increased slightly between 1910 and 1920, but the number of farm units decreased by more than half, from 2,387 to 1,222, in just ten years. The average farm size in the so-called "wheat belt" of Oklahoma increased from the standard 160-acre homestead to nearly 300 acres by 1920 (Oklahoma 1920, p. 62; Brown 1939, p. 3; Everhart 1929, pp. 34–35). By 1948, the average farm unit in western Oklahoma was twice the acreage of 1920. At mid-century, the average farm size was 650 acres, 462 of which were planted in wheat (Fisher 1949, p. 4).
Black farmers in west-central Oklahoma did not fare as well as their white neighbors in terms of capital accumulation or land tenure. According to the U.S. Census of Agriculture 1925 (U.S. 1927), black farmers made up nearly 40 percent of the farm population of Logan County, but only 10 percent of the owner-operated farms belonged to blacks (688 units compared to 6,000). Moreover, 25 percent of Logan’s 515 black farmers lived on black-owned farms, which means that black farm units supported more individuals per farm than white-owned farms. The rest of the black farm population worked as tenants, on both cash and share basis, or as agricultural laborers.
Black tenants did not, however, constitute a significantly larger percentage of tenants (14 percent) overall in Logan County in 1925. The consolidation of farms into larger units affected poorer farmers, black and white. The difference between black and white tenants was in farm size. Although the statistics compiled for Logan do not directly measure the number of acres farmed by black and white farmers, there is a correlation between the percentage of black farm units (24.3 percent) owned, part-owned, and leased and the percentage of farms (25 percent) between 50 and 99 acres in size. This does not indicate that black farmers occupied all or even most of these farms; however, only 40 percent of Logan County farms were between 100 and 175 acres, while 25 percent were between 175 and 500 acres in size, indicating a growing disparity in Logan between large and small farmers.
Black-operated farms in Oklahoma overall averaged 150 acres in 1910 (slightly less than the standard 160-acre claim). Between 1910 and 1920, the average farm size increased slightly, but the number of black-owned farms decreased by nearly 15 percent. This number went down again, by 9 percent, in 1925. At the same time, the number of black tenant farmers increased by 20 percent between 1910 and 1925 (U.S. 1918, pp. 776–92; U.S. 1935, p. 9). The upshot is that black-owned farms probably remained the same size even as their numbers decreased, while black tenants worked larger and larger acreages.
One reason for this shift from ownership to tenancy, and an overall loss in black population between 1910 and 1920 (9.4 percent), was the depression in value of those crops commonly grown by black farm owners and an increase in value of wheat and other crops grown more extensively by white farm owners. For example, the total value of Oklahoma’s cotton crop in 1917 was approximately $114 million dollars. The value of the state’s cotton crop in 1918, however, was only $66 million, with no substantial decrease in the number of acres planted to cotton in that year. The same trend followed for other nonmechanized crops such as broomcorn, potatoes, sorghum, kaffir, and milo. In contrast, wheat, oats, and alfalfa all increased in value at least 10 percent between 1917 and 1918 (Oklahoma 1920, p. 62).
This drastic loss in the value of nonmechanized crops hit Logan County especially hard. For example, as indicated earlier in the descriptions of individual farms in Antelope Township, peaches were a staple of the county economy and a favorite investment of black farmers. This is reflected in the county’s agricultural statistics. Compared to an average of 28,500 trees planted in eight neighboring counties,(16) Logan contained 173,399 peach trees in 1925 (U.S. 1927, p. 1078). These were enumerated as mature trees, that is, trees at least 5 years of age. Having a value of $1,610,000 in 1917, they were worth only $551,000 a year later, or one-third of their former price (U.S. 1920). This startling statistic may be due to a number of factors. Most obvious is that farmers throughout the state were ripping up their orchards in order to plant more acres to wheat, which was continuing to rise in price. Another possibility was a loss in the trees’ productivity about this time. Planted soon after the turn of the century, many orchards by 1915 had passed the peak of their maturity and were rapidly declining in productivity. This must have come as a terrific blow to black farmers like King Neal, who had over 1,500 trees planted on his farm in 1904 in Antelope Township.
Given the cost of agricultural machinery before 1925 and an inhospitable social climate that made wheat production by custom harvesting untenable, black-owned farms were faced with economic, social, and ecological challenges to their livelihoods and lifeways. These adverse developments did not overcome the black community in Antelope County or in Oklahoma generally, but resulted in a loss of rural population as black families sought new opportunities elsewhere or fell into the tenant class (together with less successful white farmers and new arrivals) of Oklahoma farm operators. For black farmers in west-central Oklahoma from 1890 to 1925, entrance into the system of mechanized production of staple crops was never really an option. While not the only marginalized agricultural community in Oklahoma, blacks’ traditional farm practice of community-based subsistence agriculture supplemented by wage labor and local distribution of nonmechanized products left them open to discrimination based on racist assumptions about their ability to compete with white farmers. As Oklahoma’s agricultural economy matured and the climactic and ecological conditions of the region became apparent, the niche that black farmers hoped to fill narrowed and with it went their much desired but tenuous grip on the land.
* Northwestern University, Department of History, Evanston, Illinois 60201.
1 The agricultural statistics compiled by Everhart were taken from the county assessor’s rolls and from the United States Statutes at Large, vol. 10–12 (census). The assessment rolls are no longer extant, except for a few volumes stored at the T.B. Ferguson Home and Museum in Watonga, Oklahoma.
2 "Facts for Farmers," Watonga Rustler, 8 June 1893.
3 My description of the organization of custom cutting in the early twentieth century comes from Fisher’s (1949) firsthand interviews, and from Ellsworth and Baird (1927). See also Isern (1981).
4 Brown (1939, p. 1). See also Ellsworth and Baird (1927).
5 "Frontier" is such a loaded term nowadays for western historians that its use evokes a historiography of its own. For my purposes, the term frontier refers to any region in which newly arrived and original inhabitants were struggling to establish dominance over the area’s physical resources. In this way, the term "frontier" can be used to describe the cattle industry, mining, and agriculture. The United States Bureau of Statistics in 1890 defined frontier by population density; thus many western historians have contended that much of the West is reverting back to a frontier state as a result of recent de-population. For a historiographical overview of this debate, see Limerick (1987, pp. 17–32).
6 The first black towns in present-day Oklahoma were populated by the former slaves of Indian tribes emancipated after the Civil War. Tension existed between this group and black migrants to Oklahoma from the South. Initially disdainful of southern blacks’ servile mannerisms, the freedmen of Indian Territory quickly offered support to new arrivals in a common struggle for recognition and respect.
7 For the history of Langston University, see Peterson (1979).
8 "The Blacks in Oklahoma," New York Times, 9 April 1891.
9 "Editorial," Langston Herald, 17 November 1892.
10 U.S. (1927). Even within Logan County, the number of black farmers did not exceed 20 percent of the total between 1900 and 1930.
11 "Oklahoma as a Negro State," Kansas City Evening News, 4 March 1890 (Frank A. Root Collection, Oklahoma Historical Society, Oklahoma City).
12 "Freedom Peace and Prosperity," Langston City Herald, 17 November 1892.
13 See Guthrie and Logan County Directory, 1898, "Blacks in Guthrie" photo file, Oklahoma Territorial Museum Archives, Guthrie, Oklahoma.
14 See Guy Quoetone, "Indian Farming in the Early 1900s," Kiowa File, Doris Duke Collection, Western History Collection, University of Oklahoma, Norman.
15 This shift was not uniform throughout the territory but progressed in waves of settlement as different areas were opened to homesteading between 1889 and 1904. This pattern meant that all stages of development, from soddies and only a few acres under plow or fence to fully established farms with permanent homes and barns, existed simultaneously throughout the territory right up until statehood in 1907.
16 The eight counties surrounding Logan are: Kingfisher, Blaine, Payne, Oklahoma, Lincoln, Noble, Garfield and Canadian.
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