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The Lighter Side

Home on the Range

Oh, give me a home
Where the buffalo roam
And the deer and the antelope play,
Where seldom is heard
A discouraging word,
And the skies are not cloudy all day.
(Refrain)
Home, home on the range,
Where the deer and the antelope play,
Where seldom is heard
A discouraging word,
And the skies are not cloudy all day.

(Music excerpted from If You Feel Like Singing By Alice H. Osman and Jean McConochie)

The origin of this song, as of many other folksongs, is uncertain. We know that it was sung in Texas as early as 1867. We also know that a set of words was published in 1873 by a pioneer doctor, Brewster M. Higley, who had moved from Ohio to Kansas (some said he moved to escape his bad tempered wife).The music has been attributed to Daniel E. Kelley, a musician and entertainer who had moved to Kansas from Rhode Island. Honoring these two men, Kansas adopted Home on the Range as its state song in 1947.

The Homestead Law of 1862 encouraged the westward movement that brought Higley and Kelley to Kansas. Under this law, a settler could become the owner of 160 acres of land after paying an $18 fee and farming the land for five years. This distribution of government land soon brought an end to the open range; by 1885, railroad tracks and barbed wire fences had divided the land.

By the turn of the century, most of the buffalo, deer and antelope had been killed. Buffalo can now be found only in zoos and on small private ranches. The deer and antelope herds have grown in recent years; they present a wildlife conservation problem because there isn’t enough open land to support them. The range celebrated in this song—thousands of miles of unfenced grassland between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains—now exists only in memory.

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