Josh Sides - Backcountry Ghosts: California Homesteaders and the Making of a Dubious Dream

This gem of a book arises from a simple premise. Genocide and gold were the brutal conceivers of California, but it took another epic force to civilize the land. For Josh Sides it is Lincolns great land giveaway known as the Homestead Act that invents the state. Sides brings the act to vivid life on the backcountry roads where homesteaders go about their remaking of nature. Besotted with the dream, they know not their own bounds. They are ghosts, yes. But they are us.

Mark Arax, author of The Dreamt Land: Chasing Water and Dust across California

A surprising, engaging, and original book about homesteading in a state where homesteaders got pushed to the edges. Josh Sides tells gripping personal stories to reveal a much broader California history.

Richard White, author of California Exposures: Envisioning Myth and History

In this revelatory, beautifully honed, and finely researched work, Josh Sides reclaims a very significant yet little-known part of California and U.S. history by bringing forth the story of the thousands of homesteaders in the Golden State between 1863 and the late 1930s. Backcountry Ghostsmoreover courageously engages, expands, and updates the Jeffersonian mythos of land ownership serving as libertys prerequisite.

Anthea M. Hartig, Elizabeth MacMillan Director of the National Museum of American History

Homesteading is at the very center of mythical American assumptions tying together nation and promise, land and purpose. This magnificent book jolts the idea and the practice off their perch of complacent caricatures of meaning and geography. Josh Sides lays one durable myth against anotherCalifornia and homesteadingand what he discovers ought to reorient much of what we think about both.

William Deverell, director of Huntington-University of Southern California Institute on California and the West

Josh Sides

University of Nebraska Press | Lincoln

2021 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska

Cover designed by University of Nebraska Press; cover image is from the interior.

Author photo courtesy of the author.

A portion of chapter 8 first appeared as The Sunland Grizzly in Natural History(June 2014): 3646, http://www.naturalhistorymag.com/features/182751/the-sunland-grizzly . A portion of chapter 15 first appeared as Hit by a Volcano in True West22 (January 2019), https://truewestmagazine.com/lance-graham-volcano/ .

All rights reserved.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Sides, Josh, 1972 author.

Title: Backcountry ghosts: California homesteaders and the making of a dubious dream / Josh Sides.

Other titles: California homesteaders and the making of a dubious dream

Description: Lincoln, NE : University of Nebraska Press, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020024000

ISBN 9781496213211 (hardback)

ISBN 9781496225481 (epub)

ISBN 9781496225504 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH : Land settlementCaliforniaHistory. | PioneersCaliforniaBiography. | RanchersCaliforniaBiography. | FarmersCaliforniaBiography. | Land tenureCaliforniaHistory. | Homestead lawCaliforniaHistory. | Frontier and pioneer lifeCalifornia. | CaliforniaRural conditions. | CaliforniaHistory, Local.

Classification: LCC F 864 . S 586 2021 | DDC 979.4dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020024000

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