What was life like for people living in “soddies?”
Stace Webb
Wenatchee, Washington
West of the 100th Meridian, the annual rainfall was half of the precipitation found in the tallgrass prairie. The free 160 acres provided by the 1862 Homestead Act would have sustained an Eastern farm, but barely supported a subsistence shortgrass farm on the western Great Plains.
Since wood, rock and brick clay were scarce, Plains settlers built houses of sod similar to Ireland’s turf homes or th
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