The Lane County Bachelor
Channel: Stephen Griffith
Date: 2020-05-22

Day 67 of the American Songbag Stay-at-Home Series  (folksongindex)

In 1927 Sandburg wrote: "What is a pioneer? An American poet answered, "A pioneer is a beginner." It was a child-like answer. The pioneers in any country are those who make its beginnings. They begin the trails that later become roads. They stake out land claims, put in crops and start farming. An inscription chiseled on the state capitol building of Nebraska reads, "Honour to pioneers who broke sod that men to come might live." 

They were strugglers, those who went out on the Great Plains to make homes. They took weeks for the wagon trip west as "movers." Or they rode on "Homeseekers' Excursion Trains," eating from lunch baskets, sleeping on the seats of railroad cars two, three, four nights. Once located on the quarter-section claim, which would be their own land and home if they stayed a few years and farmed it, there was strife and struggle. 

To get food and clothes, to keep a shelter going that would shut out rain and snow, to outwit the grasshoppers that came to eat crops, to live through bad cooking, blizzards and vermin, was a steady round of strife and struggle. "There's nothing will make a man hard and profane like starving to death on a government claim," we are told in this song. They had a saying, "The worse things are the better they are." 

Sometimes the battle wore them down; it was too much. With "nothing to lose and nothing to gain," they quit as this bachelor, Frank Bolar, did. "They moved to new parts," was common talk as to neighbors. Or, "they vamoosed, skedaddled." 

The text here is from Edwin Ford Piper, whose poems of "barbed wire" cover that Iowa and Nebraska territory where cattle used to have free range. There were no fences; then came barbed wire. "My people always sang Lane County Bachelor to the Irish Washerwoman," says Piper. It is a document in jig time.