Settlers' Children: Growing Up on the Great Plains
Hampsten, Elizabeth (1991).
Norman and London: University of Oklahoma Press; 247 pages. $22.95. ISBN 0-8061-2342-7.
Settlers' Children draws upon diaries, letters and oral histories to provide a picture of how childhood was viewed and experienced among those who made North Dakota their home in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As the author is well aware, the land being 'settled' was already occupied by indigenous peoples, but there is little doubt that the settlers saw themselves entering an untamed wilderness in which danger was heightened by the presence of deeply unfamiliar (and sometimes antagonistic) others. The children of this book include those who accompanied their parents into this strange land and those whose parents had already established homesteads when they were born.
Focusing on how parents and children experienced their lives, Hampsten sees her study as diverging from the tradition of studying the history of childhood through the history of institutions connected to children. But gaining a view of how people experienced their lives in bygone days is difficult, particularly where sources are scarce. Even now, children tend to keep records and write letters only sporadically or under supervision. Settler parents did not tend to describe their children at length in the letters, diaries, and other private documents that have survived. Further, Hampsten tells us, the children whose lives are being explored fall into the category of the 'obscure:' people who were not distinguished by virtue of birth or accomplishment and who were less likely than the more educated and privileged to write of their lives or to preserve records once they are written.
However, contemporaneous materials do exist, if not in abundance. Equally important, Hampsten found a considerable number of published reminiscences and many people who were eager to talk about their experiences, or their relatives' experiences, of growing up on the frontier.
Providing extensive excerpts from various first-person accounts, Hampsten uses a case study approach that preserves the sense of the individual. At the same time, by citing many accounts, she has grounding for statements that go beyond the individual case. Additionally, recognizing that North Dakota was different in some ways from other territories- it was settled by a higher number of recent immigrants and has a distinct geography- Hampsten finds sufficient similarities of population, environment and circumstances to consider the North Dakota experience as a Great Plains experience and perhaps more generally as a 'Western' experience. Hampsten not only extrapolates beyond local geographic boundaries; she believes that her study of children's history in North Dakota may illustrate- and so contribute to correcting- the widespread misunderstanding, neglect and abuse of children that issues forth from a confluence of forces in our society. While Hampsten seeks to extend the meanings of her inquiry, she centers on specifics and avoids rushing toward generalization.
As I read Settlers' Children, I found myself remembering in some detail my exposure to the 'Westward Movement' in elementary school. I attended a progressive school in New York City from the late 1930s through the mid-1940s, grounded in the educational principles of John Dewey. The City and Country School placed social studies at the core of the curriculum and engaged us in serious 'hands on' projects through which we were to gain understanding of the lifeways of those we studied. After two to three years of studying our city and its history (including the time before Hendrik Hudson), the arrival of the pilgrims and the 'settlement' of New England, we moved westward. By this time we knew that 'Indian' was a cover term for peoples of different tribes who lived in different parts of the country and followed distinct customs and religious beliefs, but who were all somehow related. The underlying value system of the school favored a view of the Indians as people who had been deeply misunderstood and seriously persecuted. Nonetheless, they remained 'others' whose lifeways belonged to the past. As in more traditional schooling, the idea of 'progress' framed our study of the westward movement: pushing the frontier forward was a step in the glorious movement of American history. One could attribute this one-sided writing of history to the fact that the U.S. was then in World War II, but this construction existed before the war and continues to prevail today- although it is finally being called into question.
Settlers' Children provides a sharp corrective to the romanticized view of the westward trek, home-steading, and life on the prairie that has been fed to generations of American children in school, through books and other media, and that tends to persist into adulthood with continuing support from the mainstream culture.
The people who 'settled' North Dakota came from the Scandinavian countries, from the British Isles, and from other parts of Europe. Most were poor. Sometimes the men- single or married and some with children- went first; other times, the family went together. They knew little of the geography of the area, of possibilities for farming or employment. Once arrived, they were concerned to establish their own space, literally and figuratively; parents hoped that their children would not forget the past, the homeland. But how did these parents view their children? And what were the children's experiences of their lives?
In the second half of the 19th century, childhood as a period of life was coming into its own in Europe and the more urbanized parts of the United States. Children were living under more benign conditions and infant mortality was decreasing. By the late nineteenth century, the health, education and welfare of children had become a major concern of professionals and members of the lay public. Child psychology took shape as an academic discipline. Educated mothers organized study groups under the aegis of the child study movement. Proposals for educational reform were abroad in the land. Now viewed as inherently innocent (rather than touched with sin and needing to be saved) and full of potential, the child required nurturant care and thoughtful instruction in order to develop optimally in preparation for assuming the adult roles and responsibilities that lay ahead.
But these ideas about the child did not prevail among the urban poor or in most rural areas, and certainly not at the frontier. According to the accounts and interpretations presented in Settlers' Children, frontier parents of the mid- and late-19th century did not care much about having their children educated. They expected their children to work on the farm. Even those who were more prosperous 'thought of work as good in itself; they assumed it was good for children to work' (p.20). Children often received little attention from their parents. They were not seen as requiring protection, or space and time of their own. Unprotected by child labor laws, children of the frontier spent hours in the fields and around the house doing strenuous work for days on end. There were, of course, exceptions. Two daughters of medical families described in the book had very different experiences- experiences of being warmly cared for, of playing dolls with a best friend, and so forth. But these children, although living in North Dakota, did not belong to frontier families.
Only children too young to work were willingly sent to school. Other children were allowed to go to school when the farm work was done for the season. Thus, most children attended school only a few months a year. While school seemed unnecessary (and perhaps even an interference) to many parents, children apparently valued the time away from the farm. The accounts indicate that school provided an opportunity to be with other children, to have some leisure and freedom of movement, and in some cases to be cared for by an attentive adult - the teacher. The poorly educated teachers were not well equipped to inspire their students, and they worked under extraordinarily difficult conditions. For the children, school was more a relief from work than an intellectual experience. Nonetheless, some children went on to high school, an undertaking that involved boarding in town and sometimes standing up to parents who resisted losing a working hand. Very few children ventured beyond high school into higher education.
To this point, Settlers' Children provides a moving and cohesive account. While threads of some stories go off in several directions, and might have been edited out, the reader can follow the presentation without difficulty. However, in Chapter Five, devoted to parents' preoccupations with their children, readers are quite suddenly told that
...many women who wrote about their experiences thought about their children unceasingly...children were of overwhelming concern to their mothers...Women thought of little else, and all other activities- social relationships, farm work, paid employment, even church-building -took place in the context of child care (pp. 95-96).
The accounts excerpted support these statements, but are not consonant with the picture provided earlier. The author needs to sort out the differences, to provide more conceptual grounding. This becomes even more urgent as we read the chapter on 'Happy Childhoods.' Here, accounts of some relatively happy childhoods (and subsequent accomplishment) are placed together with other accounts that reiterate the theme of hardship and deprivation. Interviews gathered in the Historical Data Project of the Works Project Administration in the 1920s and 1930s provide material for another theme, a theme that is mentioned several times in this book but not adequately developed- namely, that telling one's life story is a principle way of making sense of one's life, and that a great deal of construction and reconstruction goes on in the process. In this process, painful experiences may be recast. As one interviewee said, 'Those pioneer days were pleasant ones to look back at, even though they were hard ones' (p. 151).
Hampsten concludes by emphasizing the ambivalence of feeling that comes through in the reminscences:
Those who come after the first generation deeply want to praise and honor and memorialize their past. Except in writing about Indian populations, they seldom speak against the idea of migration and settlement. On the other hand, memories of deprivations will not leave them, and...they see little more than ugliness. They speak and write as though they are sad and angry, wanting at the same time to be proud and progressive minded (p. 240).
In sum, this book provides a great deal of rich, thought-provoking material. But the presentation suffers from several problems. Many of the excerpts are too long, wandering away from the point they were introduced to illustrate; chapters are insufficiently shaped around central themes; themes are too often submerged. Further, Hampsten shifts from focusing on childhoods-as-experienced to how childhood experience is represented in the telling, without making the difference clear. The book lacks the conceptual structure that would bring it from the periphery to the center of studies of the history of childhood. Nonetheless, it is a significant contribution to the history of childhood in the United States.
Reviewer Information
Sarah Lawrence College