Retiring Guy's Digest: Emptying out of rural Great Plains

Tuesday, June 30, 2026

Emptying out of rural Great Plains

(100 most and least populated counties)

Headline: The Alicia Patterson Foundation, 12/29/2004

Jack Coffman and George Anthan report:

In 1890, the federal Census Bureau announced that the nation’s frontier was closed. It’s opening up again.
The great wave of population, which swept homesteaders onto the Northern Great Plains with the promise of free land and hope for a bright future around the turn of the last century, is sweeping back out again at the beginning of this one. A culture that has been central to the history of America’s westward expansion and whose virtues of simple living, honesty, hard work, and religious faith became the core of how the United States came to see itself, is close to disappearing.
This accelerating ebb of population, which covers a vast swath of America from Central Montana to western Minnesota and southward through North Dakota, South Dakota, western Iowa, Nebraska, and Kansas, is leaving behind empty churches, abandoned farms, closed schoolhouses, empty storefronts, and struggling communities like so many conch shells on a beach. Those still living on the rural Northern Great Plains face a daily erosion of the institutions that once provided jobs, education, conveniences, health care, and church life.
It’s ironic that as the nation celebrates the bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark expedition, much of the region they opened to European-American settlement is being abandoned.