They are the new pioneers, echoing their 19th-century forebears by flocking to the prairies on the promise of free land and new opportunity.
Across the Great Plains, small towns from Kansas to North Dakota are desperate to fight off decades of decline and depopulation. Now many have made a last-ditch promise to attract new settlers: go there, build a home and the land will be free.
It is a direct echo of the original pioneers whose travails 150 years ago remain central to the United States’s cultural identity from The Little House on the Prairie to the westerns of John Wayne. There is even a new ”Homesteading Act” passing through the Senate, mimicking the 1862 original that opened up the West by giving people ownership of land they had lived on for more than five years.
Surveying an empty and available lot, filled with prairie grasses blowing in the spring breeze, Anita Hoffhines sees the potential to attract settlers to the small town of Ellsworth, Kansas.
One of the lots has already been reserved by a woman from New Jersey.
”She came and saw it and just loved it,” said Hoffhines, the economic development director for this tiny town of just more than 2 000 souls that sits amid fields of corn.
Ellsworth has already attracted 10 outsider families with free land and other aid, such as help with down payments, free membership of a golf club, free connection to the sewage and water systems and help finding a job.
It is also changing the ethnic make-up of one of the whitest parts of the US. In Ellsworth last week a Hispanic family moved in. A Peruvian family is on the way. In the nearby Kansas town of Marquette, one of the new arrivals is a Muslim trucker from California.
Kimberly and Paul Bayless are among Ellsworth’s new citizens. They swapped the urban problems of Las Vegas for small town life on the Great Plains, swimming against a tide of population loss in the rural US that has lasted for half a century. Their reasoning was simple.
”You can breathe here. You can smell the flowers,” said Kimberly Bayless. ”In Las Vegas, I lived seven miles [11,2km] from work and that trip could take me two hours in the car.”
She can walk across her new home town in less than 10 minutes.
Ellsworth has just two traffic lights and a neat and tidy Main Street where everybody knows everybody else. Crime is rare (a recent scandal was a drunk mooning in public) and houses and cars are left unlocked.
Sitting in the stands of the school sports field watching their children play baseball on a warm evening, the Bayless family appear to be the epitome of an American way of life that is increasingly rare.
Beyond the stands, rows of corn recede to the horizon. It is a long way from their old Las Vegas neighbourhood, which was rife with drugs. Several people were shot on their street.
”I visited back there for a few days to pick up some stuff and I just could not wait to leave and come back to Kansas,” Paul said.
But Ellsworth has a tough fight ahead. It was once a booming cattle town with five hotels and 30 saloons. Even a few decades ago, it had twice the population it has now. Today more than 25% of the town’s citizens are over 65.
”I say to those old-timers who don’t like what we are doing: ‘Well, who’s going to replace you when you die?’ We have to start thinking like that,” said Hoffhines.
In a great stretch of the US heartland from the Canadian border to Texas, some towns have not even survived as well as Ellsworth. Many have simply died out. Others cling on, their shops boarded up and their population steadily drifting away.
In the Eighties, controversial academic Frank Popper, an urban studies professor at Rutgers University, suggested that swaths of the country should be given back to the buffalo. It was an idea popular with conservationists but, not surprisingly, outraged many people living on the Plains.
Survival is not easy. Hoffhines aims to stabilise the population, not increase it.
”If we just stay as we are, that will be a triumph,” she said.
It is not an easy move to make. Despite the free land and all the help, jobs are scarce. Many people in the rural US hold down several at any one time, scratching together enough to make ends meet. It is not for the fainthearted. Paul Bayless used to work in computer technology. Now he works in a prison.
But the free-land movement is spreading. Three hours’ drive from Ellsworth is the town of Eureka, which has started its own land giveaway, offering six lots on the site of an old school. The buildings have been cleared away and the calls have already started to come in.
Eureka’s main street, dotted with shuttered-up windows and the shell of a once-grand hotel, is being spruced up and repainted. New blood is just what the town needs.
”It’s come full circle,” said Matt Wilson, chairperson of a Eureka business foundation. ”We gave away the land to the first settlers, now we are giving it away again. We have all the land in the world, but not the people to populate it.” — Guardian Unlimited Â