Homestead Act: The Challenges of Living on the Plains
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Searching for Shelter


To see how one family — the William McCaslins —
changed from a dugout to a full sod house,
play this movie or move the slider control below the picture.
When settlers first moved onto the land, they needed shelter immediately. For a few days, they may have stayed in their wagons or a tent. But many soon built a temporary, one-room structure, called a cabin. A cabin is simply a quickly constructed one-room dwelling, and can be made of any material, including log, lumber, stone, or sod.

If you had a hill on your claim, you might construct a dugout. By digging into the hill, you immediately had a back wall and two of your side walls. Dugouts were cramped, often no more than ten feet square, but they provided quick shelter, allowing the settlers to turn their attention to the other survival needs of providing food and water.

The early settlers who came to Nebraska selected home sites where they found familiar materials from which to build their dwellings. Along timber covered rivers like the Missouri and Republican, log and lumber houses were common. In the few places in Nebraska where you find stone outcroppings, stone was quarried and used. Where there was clay, people made houses out of adobe, or built walls by tightly pounding dirt into forms to make a solid wall.

Meek House
D. Meek, south of Broken Bow, Custer County, Nebraska. Photo by Solomon Butcher.
According to the Butcher's caption,
"The wagon cover over a hole in the ground is a common first dwelling. The furs on the wagon wheel are fox. The pelt held by the man with the beard is badger. Beside him, a pile of traps."
But in many places in Nebraska those building materials were simply not to be found, and so settlers turned to sod. As far as we know, the first building made out of sod, and not adobe, was at Fort Kearny in the late 1840s.

Over the years, by trial and error, newcomers to Nebraska learned how to work with sod effectively. For those who came with little or no money, they were inexpensive to build. You needed money only for windows, doors, and whatever lumber was required for the roof. With walls made of tightly packed sod, two to three feet thick, these buildings did an excellent job of dealing with the extremes of Nebraska's climate. In the winter these walls in held heat, and in the summer, they stayed comfortably cool.

Robbins dugout
Robbins dugout, West Union, T. P. with frame front, Custer County, Nebraska.
What was it like to live in a sod house? Was it better to live in a wood framed house? Click these links to compare the memories of two settlers who lived in different types of houses.

Soon, the cabin no longer met the needs of the settlers, and within a year or two, they would build their first permanent house. Many of the same techniques that they used for their cabins were used for the first house. Like cabins, the first house could be made of a variety of materials, including stone, log, clay, and lumber.