It became obvious, around the turn of last century, that
something was very wrong with America’s farmers. Many of
them—much too many—had lost their minds. “An alarming amount of
insanity occurs in the new prairie States among farmers and
their wives,” observed E.V. Smalley, the editor of Northwest
Illustrated Monthly Magazine, in 1893. The cause, Smalley
believed, was loneliness. The Northern European immigrants who
came to settle Nebraska and the Dakotas were accustomed to
living in small farming villages, among people their family had
known for generations. Now, marooned on the Great Plains,
separated from their neighbors by vast distances, language
barriers, and extreme weather, they lived in almost total
isolation. “Is it any wonder,” asked Smalley, that so many
settlers “lose their mental balance?” In The Americans, the
historian Daniel Boorstin traced the madness of the farmers to
the Homestead Act of 1862. The legislation, signed by Abraham
Lincoln, decreed that a settler had to live on his acreage for