Look at the house above. It is made out of lumps or sods of earth.

The family who proudly pose for this photograph have built this home themselves with hardly any building materials.

These people were known as the homesteaders and their homes called sodhouses.

Many thousands of them moved west from the 1850s onwards to begin new lives. They came from the east and from Europe - mainly England, Germany and Sweden, to escape poverty and over-crowding and sometimes to escape religious persecution.

Many more people went west after the US Civil War ended in 1865. Thousands of freed black slaves became homesteaders.

Why did they go to the Plains?

Land in the far west - California and Oregon - was too expensive by 1860 for most settlers. Farming on the Great Plains was the only option.

The government encouraged this settling of the Plains -

• 1862 Homestead Act - each family given 160 acres of land as long as they farmed it for five years

• 1873 Timber Culture Act - a further 160 acres of land was given as long as 40 acres was planted with trees

• 1877 Desert Land Act - 640 acres of very cheap land was made available in areas with low rainfall

• Railroad companies sold huge tracts of land along their railway lines to homesteaders to encourage use of their trains

What were the problems and solutions of farming on the Plains?

Problems	Solutions
Ploughing and sowing - Very hard work, the grassland was tough to break up and cast iron ploughs regularly broke	New machinery - Industrial revolution in the East made better farm machinery such as John Deere's sodbuster
Lack of water - Irrigation was no use due to the shortage of lakes and rivers. Wells were also expensive to dig and no guarantee of success.	Dry farming - Farmers preserved moisture in the soil by ploughing after rain or snow, trapping in the water. Wind pumps - Halliday's windmill could keep going all day and night, pumping up water from wells deep down, no matter which way the wind blew.
Crops - Ordinary crops like maize (corn) and spring wheat didn't grow well in the harsh weather conditions.	Turkey Red Wheat - Introduced by Russian immigrants accidentally thrived on the Plains as it was similar to the Russian Steppes where they came from. The famous western tumbleweed also arrived this way.
Fencing - Wood was scarce and expensive so fences couldn't protect crop fields from cattle or dodgy neighbours!	Barbed wire - Invented by Joseph Glidden in 1874 - this was a cheap and effective solution for the homesteaders.