Veteran's History Project: The Zeek Homestead

"Section 18, Township 17, North of Range 18, West of the Indian Meridian, Oklahoma."

So reads the land description of Homestead Certificate No. 9951. My great-grandfather, Ira Zeek, was granted this piece of land by the United States of American and it was made official, after great-grandpa proved it up, on the third day of February 1908, by President Theodore Roosevelt, whose signature appears on the certificate.

In 1893, the U.S. government opened what was then known as The Cherokee Strip in Oklahoma Territory to settlement by the growing numbers of land hungry Americans. The native tribes, Cherokee, Cheyenne, Choctaw and others, that had been forced onto this land, were once more removed to the ever-shrinking confines of their reservations. There had been several previous land runs, as the territory was being opened to settlement, since the first one in 1889, though none prior had been of this magnitude. There were 42,000 parcels available but no one had even imagined that more than 100,000 would-be settlers would flock to the Kansas/Oklahoma border for a chance at free land.

On Sept. 16, 1893, those 100,000 settlers, on foot, horseback, in buggies and wagons, aboard the southbound train and some astride bicycles, would make the greatest rush for land ever seen on the Great Plains of the American continent.

At noon on that day, a cannon boomed to announce the start of the run. Mounted soldiers, at 200-yard intervals, carried the signal westward by firing their rifles into the air, and the mass of humanity that stretched for miles from east to west surged into this new "promised land."

Far more than half would fail to make a claim and many of those who thought they had succeeded were forced from their claims, at gunpoint, by others more ruthless in their pursuit of happiness. And of the 42,000 who did stake and file a claim, many would fail to prove it up and abandoned the dry, unproductive land of crimson rock and powder fine dust.

The opening of this huge parcel of free land made it possible for my own grandfather to file a claim in a sweeping bend of the Canadian River where the Cheyenne had once been located. Through hard work, determination and sheer force of will, great-grandpa Zeek proved up his claim. But something urged him on and the family's tree didn't sink roots in the Oklahoma soil.

However, a faded copy of the land patent sits in my file under "Zeek Family History", proof of what was, or more accurately, what might have been. The file is a disappointingly thin file containing bits and pieces of family history gleaned from decades of searching. It's a file that contains more questions than answers.

According to the family, my grandfather was born on that homestead in a dirt-floored soddy, sometime between 1894 and 1900. But there is no birth certificate. The family bible has disappeared although I did see it once when my great aunt Edith showed it to me. It was an inscription in that Bible that disclosed the fact that there was another child who died in infancy, a child that most of the family had never known about.

There are no photographs, no letters to distant relatives, no fact filled diaries of a homesteader or insightful musings in a journal of a homesteader's wife. The pages of family history are blank and the stark emptiness of these pages was never filled in by my grandfather, my mothers dad, who bitterly refused to speak of anything regarding his childhood or his family.

However, there are stories, stories spoken in soft whispers when infrequent gatherings brought descendants together. Aunts and uncles and cousins know that I am a keeper of the family histories and so most tidbits of information eventually found their way to me, although facts remain elusive and distant memories become less clear as time passes.

I have had the copy of the land patent for nearly 30 years but never took the time to travel to Dewey County, Okla., to find the homestead and walk the land where my great-grandfather homesteaded and my grandfather was born. Back in 2009, shortly after Deb and I were married, one hundred and one years after Theodore Roosevelt signed the land over to Ira Zeek, Deb and I made the journey.

We stopped in Taloga at the Dewey County courthouse to confirm the land description, prove the past ownership and to obtain a map that would get us there. The ladies at the courthouse tried to persuade us not to go.

"You're going way out there?" one concerned county clerk asked, "That's really desolate country. Do you have a compass? Do you have water?"

"No," I replied, "we don't have a compass, but yes, we do have water."

"There aren't many roads out there," she cautioned. "It's easy to get lost."

"We'll be fine," I assured them, map in hand. It was 102 degrees when we left Taloga and headed west across the Canadian River towards Lenora.

Roads were scarce and there was no direct route to Section 18, Township 17, but Deb was an excellent navigator and ticking off the miles from section to section, we finally reached the homestead. We turned on to a section road that was little more than a trail. The red Oklahoma dirt, fine as talcum powder, swirled behind us and settled slowly back down to the scorching ground. When we reached the northwest corner of the section we turned south onto a well-worn two-track trail. At the turn we stopped to take a picture of the sign on the corner post that read;

"Spangler Ranch. Hunting Lease. No Trespassing."

We hadn't seen another vehicle the entire way, and any buildings we passed were abandoned and slowly sinking back into the earth. We figured that even the old two-track road was a public throughway and so we continued on.

In the middle of a 13-mile wide horseshoe shaped loop of the Canadian River, we found the Zeek homestead, surrounded by place names that roll from the tongue like tender words whispered in a sweetheart's ear, Aledo, Taloga, Camargo and Lenora. Creek beds zigzag through deep-cut ravines that struggle to trickle into the sandy riverbed of the Canadian, Sand Creek, Lone Creek, Panther Creek, Teepee Creek – names that fill the head with visions of western adventure suitable for a Louis L'Amour novel.

Family stories tell of difficult times on the homestead and great-grandpa's wanderlust. I think the grass was always greener somewhere else for Great-grandpa Ira. Oklahoma to Kansas, Kansas to Arkansas, Arkansas back to Oklahoma and finally to Kansas again at the last. Farming, ranching, struggling to get by, never coming out ahead, nothing ever seemed to work. The records at the courthouse confirmed the stories. Only one short month after proving up the homestead, great-grandpa sold out. With $500 in his pocket and a $250 mortgage paid off, the Zeek homestead, along with years of broken dreams, years of hoping that "maybe things will be better next year."

There were the years when Great-grandma Mary had hung white cotton sheets to dry, as they were being stained red from the Oklahoma dust that blew unchecked across the land. Years of disappointment and finally defeat that struck them down on the second day of March 1908.

The homestead was overgrown with cedars that had sprung up and nearly filled the section. We found a small clearing with remnants of what appeared to be the family trash pile that indicated where the soddy most likely sat and I retrieved a piece of iron that had once been part of a stove.

Together we walked the land and I imagined my great-grandfather, building corrals, cutting summer grass for winter feed, mending fences, wiping the sweat from his brow as he gazed at a cloudless blue sky that hung hot and dry above a horizon of ragged red rock. I picked up a scrap piece of ancient barbed wire that lay buried in the sand and I knew that the splice I kept had to have been twisted together by him, and I wished that, despite the hardship, he could have somehow hung on to this piece of land.

Deb and I stood near the westernmost property line and looked eastward, across the clearing, where the soddy must have been. "If only great-grandpa could have hung on," I said as we gazed across the grass-covered mound of caved-in sod walls. Standing there before us, in the middle of the section, pumped the Spangler Ranch Inc. oil wells on Lot #3, Section 18, Township 17.

M. Timothy Nolting is an award-winning Nebraska columnist and freelance writer. Contact Tim via email at [email protected].