PROBLEMS FACING FAMILIES
Social isolation
• Occasional trips into town to buy supplies / local HOEDOWNS / visits to neighbours
Outlaws & bushwackers
• Local judges and sheriffs, POSSES and vigilante groups
Lack of wood for fuel or to build houses
• Dugouts/ SOD houses / Cattle and buffalo dung ‘CHIPS’
Indigenous Renegades
• US Army reprisals
Disease
• A coat of WHITEWASH to kill the fleas and bedbugs / ‘Soap’ made from boiling fat with POTASH
PROBLEMS FACING FARMERS
Colorado beetle and grasshoppers
• Crop-dusting after 1920s
Outset costs: $800+
• Borrowing, often at huge interest / a second job
Not enough land: 160 acres was not enough to support a family
• Timber and Culture Act (1873) / Desert Land Act (1877)
The hard ‘sod’ broke wooden ploughs
• John Deere steel ‘SODBUSTER’ ploughs
Arid conditions, with hot summers (80°C) and fires
• Wind pumps & ARTESIAN water / TURKEY RED wheat / ‘DRY farming’
Cattlemen and ‘crazy quilt’
• fighting back – e.g. the JOHNSON COUNTY War.
Toil – esp. when on your own
• ITINERANT labourers and teams at ploughing, planting, harvest
Scarcity of wood for Fencing
• After 1874, barbed wire.
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