P a g e 2 G h o s t T o w n s a n d H i s t o r y o f M o n t a n a N e w s l e t t e r their goods, livestock and equipment. They allowed grain growers and ranchers to ship their products to eastern markets. The Northern Pacific in 1900 was the largest landowner in Montana, and it had millions of acres to sell. The Great Northern and the Milwaukee Road depended for their very existence on filling up the plains – once home to widespread Indian nations and buffalo – with productive, Jeffersonian, agrarian yeomen. Their message to potential farmers all over America and Europe was simple: Come hither, and replenish the earth. Factors other than railroad promotion and cheap transportation drew settlers to Montana after 1890. Land was free – 160 acres under the Homestead Act of 1862. The acreage doubled in 1909, and the proof period dropped from five to three years. Governments at all levels sought to attract citizens. Rainfall seemed ample, and if not, scientific agriculture – or dryland farming –promised good crops anyway. Commodity prices were high. It all seemed so easy … free land, railroad competition, instant returns, endless markets, high profits. No wonder people poured into Montana – 103,000 in the 1890's, 133,000 in the 1990s, an incredible 173,000 in the 19-teens. From 1890 to 1920, Montana’s population exploded by nearly 300 percent. In 1910 on a single day in Havre, 250 homesteaders arrived. In 1913, each month, 700 people filed there. In March 1916, the number reached 1,200 a month. The plains areas alone accounted for more than 70 percent – 220,000 – of Montana’s population increase in the first two decades of the century. Everything expanded – prosperity; population; land under cultivation; wheat production (both yield per acre and price per bushel); women, children, and families; the number of towns and counties; railroad trackage. The years 1900 to 1920 were years of frenzied railroad construction in Montana. The great transcontinentals sent feeder lines to the farthest hamlet, mine or forest. Steel rails crisscrossed the state. You could go anywhere, it seemed, on the iron horse. Every boom, unfortunately, produces a bust. The homestead era began gradually and collapsed abruptly. When the Great War ended in Europe in 1918, the bottom dropped out of the market. Commodity prices plummeted. A searing drought, for which even scientific agriculture had no remedy, scorched the plains. Crop yields imploded. Fire, wind, hail, plagues of locusts, a flu epidemic and dust storms of biblical proportions battered Montana’s grasslands. Paradise became hell overnight. The same trains that had carried thousands of settlers into Montana for 30 years carried thousands away after 1918. Montana was the only state in the nation to record negative population growth in the 1920's.
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