Who is the bad guy?
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INTRODUCTION - Farmland True Crime
Woody Guthrie:
If you’ll gather round me children
A story I will tell,
‘Bout Pretty Boy Floyd, an outlaw,
Oklahoma knew him well…
Sarah Mock: If you’ve ever heard this urban legend-turned-folk classic by Woody Guthrie, you might be familiar with its star– the 1930s outlaw known as Pretty Boy Floyd. Born Charles Arthur Floyd, he grew up in Oklahoma and whether or not you believe the anti-hero hype, he was, by all accounts, a thief and a bankrobber for sure.
But Woody Guthrie didn’t immortalize the man because of the money he stole. Floyd was widely celebrated because of the farmland he stole.
Farmland mortgage records, actually, which he was said to have stolen from banks he robbed, effectively clearing the debt of poor farmers in the midst of the Great Depression, allowing them in some cases, or so the story goes, to keep their land.
Pretty Boy Floyd was an outlaw, and he died like one, in the midst of a gun battle on a farm in Ohio in October of 1934. In doing so he took his place among the final generation of Old West badmen. In their day, the men and women on this list were amongst the most famous Americans, many of them world-renowned for their antics, skills, and cruelty.
There’s the names you know– Jesse James and Billy the Kid, who robbed trains and stagecoaches, rustled cattle and horses, and were pursued by local lawmen to the cutting edge of the American frontier and beyond. And there’s many more you probably don’t know– like Mexican-American outlaw José Chávez y Chávez, his Hungarian-born contemporary “Big Nose” Kate, or the Black and Cherokee youths of Oklahoma’s Rufus Buck Gang.
Maybe Pretty Boy Floyd with his Robin Hood shtick doesn’t seem cut from the same cloth as these more traditional outlaws, but they have more in common than it might seem. All of these people struggled, in their own ways, against the deeds, tracks, fences, and padlocks that were rapidly hemming in the American West.
So today we’re going to flip the coin of the 19th century homesteader, to better understand their counterpart– the Outlaw. Which will require us to delve into the shared history of rural crime and private farmland that spans from America’s Old West to 16th century England. We’ll make sense of how a history of farmland dispossession , that crime that Pretty Boy Floyd purportedly fought, contributes to poverty, desperation, and acts of resistance that often land former ruralites in chains– or worse.
The path of this rural land to outlaw pipeline is what we’ll tackle today– from agrarianism to banditry on America’s farmland.
This is The Only Thing That Lasts. I’m Sarah Mock.
[MUSICAL INTERLUDE]
PART 1: The Lore of Goose and Common
Sarah Mock: To start us off today, I wanted to talk to Peter Linebaugh, a professor at the University of Toledo. Peter is a lot of things. He’s a Michigander, a philosopher, a storyteller, and a historian.
His expertise is in the Enclosure period of English history, the moment when farmland ownership and crime first became irrevocably linked. When I asked him to explain this historical collision– he revealed that, on top of everything else; he’s also a connoisseur of old English folk poetry.
Peter Linebaugh: It’s a short ditty that has an origin, I think, in 17th century Ireland, but became quite common in the early 19th century and let’s see, I should have it by memory.
The law locks up the man or woman,
who steals the goose from off the common,
but lets the greater villain loose,
who steals the common from the goose.
Sarah Mock: The fact that this three hundred year old folk art is still cited in 2024 suggests how prominent these ideas were, and how enduring this sentiment has proven over the centuries. But to understand what’s going on in this poem, we first need a quick primer on something called the Charter of the Forest. This agreement is nearly 1,000 years old, and it gave common people– all people, in other words, a set of rights with whimsical names that were critically important for their survival. The charter outlines estovers, or the right to harvest wood in the forest, chiminage– the right to roam across land. And pannage, the right to release pigs in the forest to forage. In short:
Peter Linebaugh: It established, even though you don’t own the land, you have rights to the land, you have common rights to the land. So this is part of the ancient charters of English liberty.
Sarah Mock: We don’t often think of the American legal system as being “ancient” but this is in a lot of ways, its origin story. Because American law is grounded in, and founded from, English law.
So the Charter of the Forest formalized the rights of ordinary, free people to the world around them, and for the better part of 500 years these rights to the common– or the shared, community spaces of forest and fields, were foundational to most lives in England. Alongside these more formal rights came widely respected customs, even some related to things that lay outside the physical bounds of the Commons, like farm fields.
These fields, wheat fields in particular, belonged to a landlord and were rented to farmers. Yet one of the most widely respected customs in England, a custom with Old Testament origins, is gleaning– the practice of going back into a harvested field to collect the scraps of unharvested grain. This was laborious work, often carried out by women and children, but it often yielded enough nutrients to provide for a family through a difficult winter, and especially for the likes of rural widows, orphans, or those with large families, gleaning was quite literally a matter of life or death.
That was still true for most of the English peasantry in the late 18th century, despite the fact that the enclosure movement in England had been afoot for a century or so. Enclosure was a movement amongst the land-owning class– those who no longer depended exclusively on the Common, to survey, define, and make private all the land in England, much of which had previously been considered to be Commons.
But in 1787, something happened. A commoner, one Mary Houghton, went gleaning. In the village of Timworth, in Suffolk, in the field of the wealthy Mr. James Steele.
Peter Linebaugh: The landlord was attempting to enclose it, and before he could enclose it, he had to reduce the power of the community which opposed enclosing.
Sarah Mock: Again, Enclosure had been ongoing for some time already, and both common customs and the rights of the Charter of the Forest had begun to erode everywhere across England, often in slow and insidious ways. But this moment was a turning point. Because the landlord charged Mary with trespassing (well actually, Mary’s husband, but that’s another story), and the case went to the 18th century equivalent of the Supreme Court.
Peter Linebaugh: The high court of England, declares that English common law does not recognize a right to gleaning at the harvest.
Sarah Mock: This is the meaning of “letting the greater villain loose, who steals the common from the goose.”
In other words, this is the legal work of stripping commoners of their ancient rights that protected the essentials of subsistence, if nothing else.
The language of enclosure does a lot to emphasize what was gained in this era, namely, private property– the stuff that got ‘enclosed,’ but it tends to glaze over what was lost– the rights and customs of common people.
So, what does any of this have anything to do with American outlaws? Well, one aspect of Peter I haven’t mentioned yet, he didn’t actually start out studying enclosure– he started his historical journey studying banditry.
Peter’s expertise on enclosure is actually part and parcel of his study of highway robbery, piracy, and other “crimes against property,” which came distinctly into fashion during this era. And by all accounts, they’ve yet to go out of fashion. To this day, some of our most romantic and durable heroes are notable bandits– from Robin Hood to Zorro. But the figure of the dashing renegade hides something, in Peter’s opinion, much more complex.
Peter Linebaugh: Underneath that romantic side, there’s something far more fundamental. And that is resistance by common people to the expropriation of their subsistence, of the taking the bread from their mouths.
Sarah Mock: The arc of this story of resistance is familiar– free commoners, slowly but surely routed from their ancestral common lands, facing poverty, starvation, and death, do what they must, which for some at least is stealing back the products of those land, whether that’s grain, wool, wood, or the coins and jewels the landlords bought with the profits of selling those commodities. This is the story of Robin Hood and many others, a character who was, no matter how dashing and virtuous, a robber, a criminal, a highwayman.
That name, the highwayman, is no accident. In the 18th century, during the heyday of the Royal or King’s Highway, the highway was the main road by which people, and more importantly, goods, traveled from the countryside to cities. It was, in the eyes of many commoners, the open wound from which their food, fiber, and other precious resources were bleeding away.
Peter Linebaugh: The highway, like the canal, become a location for the sparking of riot, the sparking of food riots, which happened frequently from the 16th century on up into the 19th century, to lower the price of grain or to prevent grain from leaving the neighborhood. It was felt that it was not just, it was not fair that the labors of your community are exported and you suffer as a result. So that’s why the highway becomes the terrain of robbery. And also it becomes a place where the double nature of robbery, who’s robbing whom, is raised.
Sarah Mock: What stood out to me the most– hearing about the motivations of highway robbery– is that these motivations– the sense of injustice that rural people should suffer so much by poverty and decay while simultaneously feeding and clothing the nation, that sentiment is not uncommon, in America and elsewhere, today.
[MUSICAL INTERLUDE]
So we’ve seen how this historical moment, with its erosion of rights to land that had been custom since ancient times, motivated an explosion of banditry amongst common people, and at the same time, what we now call poverty laws expanded too– laws against vagrancy, against trespass, against foraging, gleaning, and hunting. And punishments got crueler and bloodier too.
Peter Linebaugh: Essential to the enclosed field was the gibbet or the gallows. After the person was hanged and thousands were hanged, tens of thousands were hanged. Their body was removed and, and put in an iron cage and hung on a post like a lamppost or a tree near the enclosed field for all to see. Enclosure was accompanied and it was part of a human terror campaign led by the state.
Sarah Mock: By one count only about one out of 100 hangings in London were due to conviction for murder around this time. The rest were for lesser offenses– like robbery, piracy, even trespass. Capital punishment was old hat for the English by the late 1700s, most punishment at the time was corporeal in some way– if not life-ending it likely involved the stocks, lashings, or maimings, and then release. It was possible to end up in a for-profit workhouse at the time alongside debtors, the homeless, the infirm, and even orphans. But workhouses were much more like modern jails– a temporary holding place.
The invention of the penitentiary was different.
Peter Linebaugh: Sitting in a cell for 10 years, by yourself. This is the penitentiary. The penitentiary, the place of penitence, is an enclosure and its practitioner, architect, and theorist was named John Howard. And he published his book, The Condition of Prisons in England, in the same year that the Constitutional convention was formed in Philadelphia, that Mary Houghton lost her gleaning in England in 1787 AD. The first edition was 1776. So this period of so-called freedom is a period of the penitentiary, the period of the enclosure, not just of the factory in the field, but also of the body.
Sarah Mock: Like the singular origins of the enclosure and banditry, Peter sees a similar entangled beginning for enclosure and the penitentiary.
Capital and corporal punishment were terrible, without doubt, but with scars and missing limbs, commoners could still return, occupy, and fight for their common land. But the penitentiary, and its cousin, penal servitude in exile, were novel and terrible solutions to this problem. These punishments removed commoners from the land and kept them away, effectively dissolving bonds of kinship and community without the pesky business of martyrdom. It was a highly effective strategy, and the popularity of these kinds of punishments rose dramatically as the enclosure movement advanced.
And Americans were paying attention.
[MUSICAL INTERLUDE]
So an infatuation with incarceration made it across the sea, and early prisons were founded throughout the 18th and 19th centuries in Maine, in Massachusetts, and famously, on Walnut Street in Philadelphia.
The Charter of the Forest did not make the voyage. But that does mean there was no familiarity with the ideas of commoning among early Americans. European commoners found their way to American shores, and occasionally even made a name for themselves, preserving and sharing common ideals.
The most famous American commoner might well be Thomas Paine, the founding father, American revolutionary, and good friend of Benjamin Franklin, who grew up just a few miles from where Mary Houghton was found guilty of gleaning. And whose most famous work, a pamphlet entitled Common Sense, references the sensibilities of the people of the commons, and was read by virtually every American patriot prior to 1776.
So common ideas– common sense, common law, the common good– did make their way into the American consciousness and legal doctrine, both before and after revolution. Even as they were running headlong into the fact that Americans were hungry to own property, farmland in particular. And that under Paine’s ideas equality, every man should have the same chance to wrest property from the wilderness for themselves.
But what’s to be done when the wilderness is gone? When the last bit of unclaimed nature is claimed, what equal opportunity does the next guy in line have to private property? And what about the person after him, and the generation after them?
How Americans answered these questions, and the outlaws who resisted. That’s after the break.
[AD BREAK]
PART 2: Fencing the Homestead
Sarah Mock: At the end of our conversation, I asked Peter whether he thought America even had an enclosure era, in a similar way that England did, and his answer surprised me.
Peter Linebaugh: Think over barbed wire. Think over razor wire. Why did they come about in the U.S.? Why were they invented in the U.S.? These were methods of enclosing land.
Sarah Mock: In my experience with the history of the Western U.S., barbed wire, which was first patented in 1867, looms large. I think many would go so far as to say Euro-Americans couldn’t have
“won the West” without it. It’s cheap, it’s light, and perhaps most importantly, cattle and people respect it (at least some of the time). Without barbed wire, the creation of a boundary between a pasture and a corn field, between a neighbor’s place and your own, would have been not only difficult but prohibitively expensive in terms of time and resources. A nd without a marked boundary, it’s much more difficult to define, and therefore enforce, property rights.
Barbed wire might have been necessary, but its existence alone doesn’t not an Enclosure Era make. Unenclosed land America surely did have– many of the millions of acres West of the Mississippi, but who were the enclosers– who aimed to be the lords of the new private farmland?
How about the Sinykins? Harry and Faige Etke Sinykin, that is, the Russian Jewish family who we met last episode. After fleeing Russian pogroms, they arrived as homesteaders on the Dakota prairies, proving up their claim and earning their own private property right in 1907.
But the Sinykins were hardly the James Steeles of America– they weren’t richly appointed landlords anxious to dispossess peasants to ensure their wealth– were they?
Well as Rebecca Clarren, journalist, author, and direct descendent of Harry and Faige Etke Sinykin tells us, their idea of property rights started with their understanding of the Homestead Act.
Rebecca Clarren: The Homestead Act, as my family would have understood it, and so many Americans would have understood is, this land is empty and we are inviting you to come and do an important, really Christian thing, which is to make land productive. This land is being wasted.
Sarah Mock: This is John Locke’s improvement argument, right? Free people, exerting their labor on the wilderness, and therefore improving it, and so earning private property for themselves.
Combined with Thomas Paine’s ideas of liberty and equality, this was going to be the path by which America would manifest its destiny, by the efforts of common men and women.
In this way I think it can be argued that no, the Sinykins were not in the same mold of James Steele– the story they’d learned about American homesteading was not about imitating England, it was about learning from their mistakes.
Here’s Jessica Shoemaker, the law professor at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, who we met last episode.
Jessica Shoemaker: We’re going to not have a dynastic land system. We’re instead going to make land ownership open and accessible to new entrants to farming. We’re going to encourage stewardship, right? We’re going to say that you can become a land title owner if you live in the place and make improvements for some period of time, because we want to build kind of connections to these spaces and we want to build this rural community where there’s these agrarian stewards and this kind of Jeffersonian ideal of the new democracy.
Sarah Mock: Jessica argues that, for a few different reasons, these promises were never realized. In no small part because the idea, or ideal, that the Sinykins, and so many other Americans believed in, was false.
Jessica Shoemaker: All of homesteading occurs on this sort of manufactured blank canvas.
Sarah Mock: This is what historian refer to as terra nullius, the idea that America was an empty place, that there were, at the very least, no other legitimate claims to the land to contend with, and at the most, that there was literally no one else on the continent.
Like any good wallpaper, this idea of terra nullius worked to conceal worked to conceal what proponents of homesteading and manifest destiny didn’t want to see– that in fact there were many people occupying the American continent, from Indigenous nations, freed slaves, and Asian emigrants, to Spanish and French explorers, settlers, and their descendents and even a few people whose heritage was too complicated, obscure, or unsavory to be related.
In short, the terra was very much not nullius, but that didn’t matter– it was the principle, that America was for Americans, that mattered, the canvas either was blank, or it would be made blank.
So Harry and Faige Etka Sinykin claimed a corner of the canvas, 160 acres of free farmland in South Dakota, which might have been free cost-wise, but it wasn’t free in the sense that no one else was claiming it. Here’s Rebecca again:
Rebecca Clarren: What they may or may not have known, my ancestors, is that the land, this free land that they’re getting, had been reserved for Lakota usage in perpetuity. In 1851, the Lakota Nation had signed a treaty with the United States, but by 1908, when my family are planting their first crops on the South Dakota prairie, the Lakota are living on just about 2%, by my calculations, of what was reserved for them by federal treaty, which is the highest law of the land.
Sarah Mock: Despite the fact that Rebecca ancestors had settled only 13 miles from the nearest reservation where Lakota were being confined, and despite the huge trove of family records Rebecca parsed,
Her ancestors recorded almost no stories about their Lakota neighbors.
As we discussed in Episode 2, the Lakota, like other Indigenous groups, did not have a concept of private ownership of land like the Americans did. They held much of their land– especially their expansive hunting grounds– in common, not unlike the forests and fields of Old England.
The 1851 treaty was meant to ensure Lakota access to this subsistence landscape, but in a matter of years, American officials had turned this promised land into a prison.
Rebecca Clarren: The Lakota are not allowed in the early 1900s, they’re not allowed to leave the reservation without permission of the white sort of mayor, they were often called supervisors or Indian agents who the United States put in charge of running the reservation. They weren’t allowed to leave without a permit from one of those people.
Sarah Mock: Rather than confined, Peter might have described the Lakota at this time as enclosed, in the same way that bodies became enclosed In England by penitentiaries. In effect, the Lakota were already being treated as outlaws.
But to understand how treaties with sovereign Indian nations led to this confinement of Indigenous people on the fringes American homesteads, we have to consider the bigger picture of Western history.
It’s worth remembering that the settling the Western half of the U.S. was as much about that earliest European aim, of establishing a trade route to Asia, as anything. California promised to be that “Golden Gate to the East,” but to take advantage of it, American manufactured goods would have to be moved from the East Coast, and its agricultural goods moved from the Midwest and the South, to the West Coast– by rail. The transcontinental rail line was possible, and then money was there. But there was a problem.
Rebecca Clarren: Inconveniently, there are millions of buffalo and tens of thousands of Plains Indians living on that land, and it will be very difficult to put a railroad line across that land.
Sarah Mock: These Plains Indians had proven to be highly effective fighters, and attempts by the U.S. Army to simply route them by force often failed. In the face of these defeats, and many stalemates, the fledgling U.S. government decided to treat with their adversaries, promising to respect the people’s sovereignty and security within the agreed upon lands.
These treaties, signed and guaranteed by the U.S. Congress, represented the most sacred promise one nation could make to another. And then, time and time again, they were broken.
At times, the encroachment on treaty lands looked almost accidental, something as simple as a homesteader staking a claim on land they didn’t know was part of Lakota territory. At other times, the dispossession was direct and acute– like when U.S. agents, noting that the annihilation of the buffalo had left an abundance of grass on treaty hunting grounds decided unilaterally to rent out these large swaths of pasture to Texan ranchers, for pennies on the dollar.
While Indigenous groups used what tools they had to protect what was promised, including violence, the U.S. government’s justification that Indians had to be confined and controlled to protect settlers grew more persuasive. And so, not unlike the commoners of old England,
Indigenous peoples increasingly found themselves vulnerable, displaced, and confined, fighting against both lawmen and soldiers while they’re home was systematically carved up and carried away.
A few hundred miles south of the Dakotas, a different conflict, though with similar themes, was unfolding.
Karen Roybal: Well, the U.S. unfortunately has a long history of not upholding the treaty rights that were guaranteed. They’re still not upheld, but certainly with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.
Sarah Mock: That’s Karen Roybal, an associate professor of Southwest Studies at Colorado College, whose research has centered on dispossession in what is today Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California.
She mentioned the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, signed in 1848, which was the agreement that ended the Mexican-American war, and which handed all or part of what would become 9 Southwestern states to the U.S. Part of the agreement was that existing land arrangements, including property owned by Mexican citizens, would be formally recognized by the nation that was absorbing them.
What the U.S. actually did was introduce a foreign legal system into an old and well-established community, one deeply suspicious of the powers that created the new system itself.
Karen Roybal: Part of what happens is that there’s like this cadre of folks, those are lawyers and judges who are working together to one, they represent, Mexicanos in the court systems. As you can imagine, those folks were not necessarily cash-rich, right? They were land-rich, but not necessarily financially secure. And so in order to pay for those legal fees– well if you don’t have the cash, then, you end up paying with your land.
Sarah Mock: This was far from the only way Mexicano lands were taken. Incomprehensible English-language notices summoning landowners often went unanswered, leading to de facto surrendering of ownership. Elsewhere white settlers simply came and squatted on farms, and if existing owners couldn’t provide documentation proving ownership, they could lose their land to this kind of interloper.
Beyond individual properties, there were also hundreds of communal land grants which existed in the ceded territory. These were made by the Spanish crown over the previous 200 years to specific communities, and meant to encourage settlement and village establishment. These land grants were Commons, though there were individual homes and irrigated fields, the vast majority of these granted lands were communally used for grazing, hunting, and forestry.
But before the U.S. Senate certified the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, it removed the relevant articles protecting the land grants, and the vast majority were never honored, leaving common people across the Southwest without legal access to land and resources they’d been using, in some cases, for hundreds of years.
Not unlike their Indigenous neighbors to the north and east, formerly Mexican landowners were fighting in the courts, trying to staunch the onslaught of Anglo settlers, and generally trying to survive displacement, cultural erasure, and navigating a new language and society.
This same pattern plays out too in the Southeast, where in the years after the Civil War, freed Black men and women demanded land to farm as part of emancipation. This need for land is best summed up in the idea of “40 Acres and a Mule” for freed peoples. The idea began as a wartime order issued by General Sherman after his march to the sea– but continued to be a rallying cry for freed Black folks in the years after the war ended. By the start of Reconstruction in the post-war years however, when America was more focused on healing its internal rift than keeping its promises, the land that General Sherman had handed over to freed slaves was already being clawed back.
Here’s Jessica Shoemaker again.
Jessica Shoemaker: There’s also stories like the experience of Black farmers, for example, who struggle to acquire roughly 15 to 20 million acres after the Civil War. And then, dramatically lose that property.
Sarah Mock: Black farmers have been dispossessed of their land since the first 40 acres were granted. During Reconstruction, a major qualm amongst policymakers was that these freed people were getting these grants “for free.” Lawmakers at the time worried that land rights for former slaves would
“‘ruin the freeman’ by leading them to believe they could acquire land without ‘working for it.’”
To put this in perspective, just a few states away, homesteaders were quite literally getting land for free, and celebrated as heroes for it, while the Black farmers who had been working Southeastern farmlands for generations, without compensation, were labeled undeserving.
Across the newly unified nation, this story was playing out again and again. The canvas of farmland was being– legally at least– wiped cleaned during the 19th Century, and all the claims of place and ownership held by previous and even current occupants, particularly if those occupants weren’t white, were largely being washed away, especially to accommodate homesteaders.
Jessica Shoemaker: It’s a real sort of time warp that happens. So much of property is built unfortunately to look backwards and to stabilize and shore up and privilege claims based on past use or past practices. But that past only goes back so far, right? We’ll go back to homesteading, but we won’t look before that.
Sarah Mock: The Indigenous, Black, and Hispanic farmers in America, many of them legal U.S. citizens, were systematically dispossessed of the land their ancestors farmed and occupied often for hundreds of years. But that certainly wasn’t the end of it.
Here’s Rebecca Clarren again.
Rebecca Clarren: I know I sound like a broken record. But the record is broken. I write that in the book because I just felt like, my God, readers are going to feel like I’m just telling the same story over and over again. Because in every generation, the United States, the Department of Interior comes up with this new justification for land taking. But it’s the same plot. It’s the same idea. We want your land. We’re just giving you another reason why.
Sarah Mock: Rebecca is not exaggerating when she says “in every generation.” The homestead era of dispossession was often carried out through force and forced treaties, which followed the previous eras where land was taken as part of bogus purchases, particularly when both sides did not have the same understanding of the terms of the agreement.
But after the homestead era, land taking grew even more insidious.
On the plains, treaties were undermined, worked around, and in some cases, flat out broken. This was the case for the Lakota. The encroachment of settlers and government grazing leases, was followed by federal dam projects which flooded prime Lakota farmland, submerging critical wild and domesticated food sources beneath reservoirs that were meant to protect homesteads down river from floods and droughts. But then, American policymakers turned the full power of private property on reservations.
Here’s Jess Shoemaker again.
Jessica Shoemaker: And so things like allotment, which was, in the 1880s, federal government saying, we are concerned that tribal people are still being tribal people, basically, and we affirmatively want to assimilate Indigenous people in a process towards extinguishing tribal relations. And it’s all sold in this story of productive land use and individualistic agriculture. And so what happens with allotment is the federal government, often without tribal permission, reaches into reservation communities and takes whatever land tenure system the tribe has set up within that space, wipes it clean, and allots individual parcels of reservation property to Indigenous landowners.
Sarah Mock: By turning reservations into individual parcels, the federal government was erasing a communal resource and replacing it with taxable private property. Maybe you can see where this is going. In the years following allotment, many, many Indigenous people lost their individual lands due to unpaid taxes, which led to liens, foreclosures, and repossessions. Plus, whatever lands were left over after all the Indigenous families received their parcels, were often either sold off to private interests, or opened up to homesteaders. A crushing aspect of the Lakota story of the homestead era, is that in the 1980s, the Supreme Court affirmed that the U.S. government did, in fact, violate its treaty with the Lakota people, stealing the Black Hills, a sacred Lakota site, as well as many other lands in the process.
Today, the Lakota are still fighting to reclaim their lands.
For Black farmers too, dispossession has had a new face in every generation. Racism, violence, and coercion have been present in every age, but not unlike Indigenous communities, tax foreclosures, partition sales, and other legal property maneuvering has devastated Black farmland ownership to this day.
Perhaps even moreso, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the very agency whose funds helped Harry and Faige Etke Sinykin stay on their homestead throughout periods of disaster, have contributed to Black land loss, mainly through an acknowledged pattern of discrimination in farm lending practices.
Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA): In 1920, 925,000 African American farmers, 14 percent of all farms were African American. Today, there are only 18,000 African American farmers, less than 0.01 percent of all farmers. Each day, African American farmers lose 1,000 acres of land. The loss of African American farms will result in the loss of economic independence, jobs, and history.
Sarah Mock: That was U.S. Congresswoman Maxine Waters, speaking at a hearing of the Congressional Black Caucus, on the crisis of the Black farmer in America. This hearing was held in 1997, and by all accounts this issue has not abated in the ensuing decades. Case in point, a 2022 report estimates that Black farmers lost around $326 billion worth of farmland in the 20th century. And according to USDA’s own figures, more than 4,000 Black-owned farms were lost between 2017 and 2022.
[MUSICAL INTERLUDE]
PART 4: Dispossession, Despair, and the Rise of the Desperado
Sarah Mock: So this is the history that lies behind the manufactured “blank canvas” of the Homestead Act– the era that could reasonably be described as America’s enclosure. In the homestead years, hundreds of millions of acres of private agricultural land were created, and millions more transferred, legally or illegally, for fair compensation and for peanuts, from longtime occupants who often owned land in common, to new, individual arrivals.
Again, I think these themes would not be foreign to very many rural Americans today, landowner or not. In more recent decades, dispossession has gone by another name, and its effects were supposedly softened by the exchange of money.
Consolidation, a word that’s forever on the lips of those in the farm community, refers to the fact that, for the better part of a century, big farms have gotten bigger, and small farms have gone out of business. Some of these farmers perhaps wanted to get out of farming, wanted to move to the city and use the money from selling their lands to fund other pursuits, as the Sinykin descendents eventually did.
But many of these farmers did not want to sell. The 1980s farm crisis was a particular moment when many poor farmers were forced by economic conditions off their land, which then, as with the previous occupants, was often sold off to someone richer for cheap.
But Karen Roybal goes a step further in her analysis, because to her mind, enclosure in America does not stop at the edge of town.
Karen Roybal: Dispossession is an evolving process. And so I think that’s why we continue to see the residual effects and that’s why we see today like dispossession and displacements happening through gentrification. We’re still continuing to push people away.
Sarah Mock: Most Americans have heard of gentrification, but we rarely use the word dispossession in those same discussions. Gentrification is hardly our generation’s only strategy to void people’s property rights– because that’s what dispossession is, right? In the first place, property rights are a promise from the state that land, or something else, will be yours, to use or dispose of at your discretion. But the problem with this promise is America’s long history of breaking land-related promises.
Here’s Jessica Shoemaker again:
Jessica Shoemaker: One thing that we know for sure is that some people’s property rights are more secure than other people’s property rights. And we see that in a whole history of things like, which communities are subject to condemnation actions or eminent domain proceedings from the government. Those are the more vulnerable, marginalized, economically, or racially or otherwise communities.
Sarah Mock: Jessica is right here to point out that a community’s wealth– particularly as measured in economic activity, is a good predictor of its vulnerability to dispossession. This is true when we think about where a city places a waste management facility or where it builds an airport, but it’s also true when we consider that Lakota land was flooded by dam projects not because it wasn’t fertile and productive, but because in the eyes of planners, homesteads contribute to state economies and tax bases, whereas self-sufficient and sovereign Indigenous communities did not. Therefore the rationale to flood the reservation to save the homesteads made sense.
The irony here is sinfully rich, right? Because the whole fantasy of the yeoman farmer, the homestead’s superhero, was that the homestead family would be self-sufficient.But those communities that were the most self-sufficient on the American frontier were perceived as a threat to federal authority– the giver of property rights, and so as a matter of policy, their self-sufficiency was attacked, eroded, and eventually, destroyed.
Since then, as this drama played out again and again, America has faced a set of questions that would have been familiar to the English leaders of three centuries ago. What is to be done with the landless poor? What if they try to stay on the land their family occupied for centuries, even if it’s now considered trespassing? Would they move on, becoming vagrants until they found other property to squat on? Would they find their way to the already overcrowded urban areas, where, if they couldn’t navigate the struggle of low wages and high cost of living, they might be reduced to crimes like begging, stealing, illegal trade, or sex work? And we see our failure to answer these questions playing out in our communities today.
Here’s Karen Roybal again.
Karen Roybal: We see examples of what happens when that sense of place and the cultural ties to the land are lost. And I’m going to give the example, in northern New Mexico, in Espanola, that has a really high incidence of drug use and drug abuse, and that’s not separate from the loss of land, right? There’s this great sense of loss that happens. And I’m not saying that’s directly responsible for what’s happening. But I think that there’s links, right? That we could trace back to think about the detriments that land loss has on folks.
Sarah Mock: This sense of desperation that arises from land loss, and the loss of culture and security that land holds, sounds an awful lot to me like the kinds of emotions that, a few centuries ago, motivated English commoners to engage in highway robbery, a tradition that crossed the ocean and changed its name– in America, we call them outlaws, or more accurately, desperados.
The gunslinging desperados of the Old West, whether they were white or Black, Mexican or Indian, robbed the trains and stagecoach routes that were, in many ways, the American answer to the Kings Highway. It’s always fascinated me that in the story of Robin Hood, the Sheriff of Nottingham is so clearly a villain, but in the American West, the local sheriff is rarely seen that way.
In American mythology, the desperados are always the villains, even as they follow in the footsteps of romantic heroes of yore by resisting the extractive and domesticating power of barbed wire, banks, railroad tracks, and land barons.
As Karen indicated, it would be overstating the case to suggest that dispossession and its associated negative outcomes, were the only or even the key contributor to the rise of crimes against property– like stagecoach or train robbery, cattle rustling, and the like, in the Old West.
But as Karen also says, it certainly seems like there are links– then as now.
To me, the similarities between the story that Peter Linebaugh told about English bandits and the stories of dispossession in an American West teeming with outlaws are simply too strong to be ignored. And the historical record proves that from Jesse James and Billy the Kid to Geronimo and Sitting Bull, Westerners who earned the outlaw moniker were often resisting the taking of lands, whether by the federal government or private interests.
And in America as in England it took a focused campaign of state violence, by sheriff’s posses, U.S. Marshals, and the American military together, to establish the laws and fences required to hand out private property in an unenclosed West that had previously been a relatively equal if brutal place for people of various races, creeds, and ethnic backgrounds.
The establishment of private farmland required that Indigenous people be confined to their reservations by force, that the landless rural poor be cajoled into urban labor, and that freedmen and women and non-white folks be excluded from property wherever possible. And for the resistors– there’s always the penitentiary, like one of America’s first federal prisons, the one in Leavenworth, Kansas, the cage at the edge of the fenced-in West.
[MUSICAL INTERLUDE]
It shouldn’t surprise you now that it was Peter Linebaugh who first pointed me to Woody Guthrie’s Pretty Boy Floyd– a song that Peter might call an American folk poem in the spirit of The Goose and The Common. It wasn’t Floyd’s Robin Hood-esque story, though, that captured Peter’s imagination, it was Guthrie’s conclusion, a message that Peter thinks would have been as clear to 16th-century English peasants a s to 19th and 20th century American farmers.
Woody Guthrie:
As through this world I’ve wandered,
I’ve seen lots of funny men.
Some will rob you with a six gun,
And some with a fountain pen.
And as through your life you travel,
Yes as through your life you roam,
You will never see an outlaw
Drive a family from their home.
[MUSICAL INTERLUDE]
CONCLUSION
Sarah Mock: So far in this podcast, we’ve talked about farmland as a scarce, or not-so-scarce, national resource, as a site of crop production and trespass, as a promise of freedom and self-sufficiency, and as both a battlefield and a treasure trove.
These aspects of farmland still resonate in our modern conversations, but I would argue that they are dwarfed by another aspect– the idea of farmland as place, as home and heritage, an extension of family and even of a farmer’s self. These ideas may seem intangible, but in the realm of public discourse, and winning hearts and minds, few ideas have proven more enduring, or more powerful, to the American people.
Jessica Shoemaker: Even when we think about family farmer, like all the political force that white, existing family farmers have, that’s a claim to place attachment that we give a lot weight to in our agricultural and other tax and other policy, but not so much the more vulnerable farm tenants or farmworkers or others.
Sarah Mock: Those who can’t own, rent. How the claims to place of America’s sharecroppers, farmworkers, and other non-owner farmers shaped a century of American policy— next time, on The Only Thing That Lasts.
SIGN OFF
Sarah Mock: Before we sign off, I talked through information from a number of sources and experts today, so if you want to dig into it yourself, check out the shownotes, or our website for links.
While you’re there, make sure you head over to ambrook.com SLASH research to stay up on the latest reporting from the Ambrook team on agriculture, land, and environmental issues like the ones we talk about here on the show. After you subscribe to the podcast, don’t forget to sign up for the newsletter, and follow @AmbrookAg on socials for news about upcoming projects and stories. And we can’t wait to hear what you think! If you like what we’re doing, let us know, and don’t forget to share.
The Only Thing That Lasts is an Ambrook Research production. This podcast is written, produced, and mixed by me, Sarah Mock. Our editor is Jesse Hirsch, with support by Ali Aas. Technical support by Dan Schlosser, and general support by Mackenzie Burnett and the whole team at Ambrook.
A final note, Ambrook Research, the media outlet that produced this podcast, is 100% editorially independent from Ambrook, the fintech company that funds it.
