History Main / DeterminedHomesteader

* John Rumford in ''Literature/{{Victoria}}'' tries to be one, initially after leaving the US Marine Corps, by reclaiming his ancestral flooded lands for a small farm. However, government bureaucrats sabotage his every effort through obstructionist environmental regulations, and eventually he has to give up.

* ''Literature/StarWarsKenobi'', as a SpaceWestern, portrays homesteaders engaging in moisture farming on Tatooine. In particular, Dannar Calwell took his centrally located plot of land, Dannar's Claim, and turned it into the {{only shop|InTown}} among the farms, providing goods and services to his neighbors. Following Dannar's death at the hands of Sand People, his widow Annileen continues to run the store and raise their two teenage children, Kallie and Jabe, managing her children, her customers, and her business partner Orrin Gault through sheer force of personality, even as she suppresses her own desires under the daily grind. Kallie inherited her mother's love of animals and has found a niche running the store's livery, while Jabe chafes at the life of a shopkeeper and runs off with Orrin's kids any chance he can get.

* {{Deconstructed}} in the ''Literature/YoungJediKnights'' series, where the people of Zekk's homeworld Ennth take this to TooDumbToLive extremes. Due to orbital oddities of its moon, Ennth goes through cycles of worldwide seismic activity every seven years, whereupon the inhabitants pack up and move to space station refuges, then return when things calm down and rebuild ''everything''. Anyone else would have moved to another planet a long time ago.

* ''Literature/StarWarsKenobi'', as a SpaceWestern, portrays homesteaders engaging in moisture farming on Tatooine. In particular, Dannar Calwell took his centrally located plot of land, Dannar's Claim, and turned it into the {{only shop|InTown}} among the farms, providing goods and services to his neighbors. Following Dannar's death at the hands of Sand People, Annileen continues to run the store and raise their two teenage children, Kallie and Jabe, managing her children, her customers, and her business partner Orrin Gault through sheer force of personality, even as she suppresses her own desires under the daily grind. Kallie inherited her mother's love of animals and has found a niche running the store's livery, while Jabe chafes at the life of a shopkeeper and runs off with Orrin's kids any chance he can get.

* ''Literature/StarWarsKenobi'', as a SpaceWestern, portrays homesteaders engaging in moisture farming on Tatooine. In particular, Dannar Calwell took his centrally located plot of land, Dannar's Claim, and turned it into the {{only shop|InTown}} among the farms, providing goods and services to his neighbors. Following Dannar's death at the hands of Sand People, his widow Annileen continues to run the store and raise their two teenage children, Kallie and Jabe. Kallie inherited her mother's love of animals and has found a niche running the store's livery, while Jabe chafes at the life of a shopkeeper and runs off with Orrin Gault's kids any chance he can get.

* The Literature/{{Discworld}} as envisaged by Creator/AAPessimal provides a different example. Building on scattered hints of its existence in canon, the Discworld gets its UsefulNotes/SouthAfrica, populated by hardy [[AmoralAfrikaner Boers]] and other emigrants from the Central Continent, who Trekked into the interior of a new continent to make homes there. [[PapaWolf Andreas Smith-Rhodes]] and his wife [[MamaBear Agnetha Smith-Rhodes]] are typical examples of frontier homesteaders, and between them have five children, five sons and daughters-in-law, and a large number of grandchildren. Two of the daughters were determined to get the hells out and ended up in Ankh-Morpork. One stayed; the other found herself returning to Rimwards Howondaland to marry a landowner and work a bit of land far away from the frontier. A son with no great ambition to leave also, despite himself, emigrated to Ankh-Morpork. A young woman was involved in this.

* In addition to the canonical Beans, the ''WesternAnimation/{{Rango}}'' fanfic ''Fanfic/OldWest'' includes as one of the main characters Grace Glossy. She's a glossy snake who lives with her son outside the town of Mud in a boar-farm inherited from her father and grandfather. One of the main conflicts of the story is the BigBad attempting to claim both Grace and Beans' lands anyway he can, though they're both determined to keep him away.

* ''Film/BendOfTheRiver'': Jeremy, who is absolutely determined to get his farming community started, and refuses to take a large sum of money to sell his winter food stores to the gold miners instead.

* ''Film/FirstWinter'': The mother of the frontier family newly arrived in the Canadian wilderness, hacking firewood and feeding the children while their father spends the winter at a remote logging camp earning money. The mother's teenaged daughter Moira becomes the Determined Homesteader's Daughter after her mother dies..

* ''Film/InvitationToAGunfighter'': Following UsefulNotes/TheAmericanCivilWar, Matt Weaver returns to his hometown of New Mexico and his dusty ancestral farmhouse, only to discover that his property has been confiscated and resold by the [[SmallTownTyrant immoral town boss]], Sam Brewster. Weaver retakes his homestead by force, and becomes such a nuisance that Brewster is forced to hire a gunfighter in an attempt to get rid of him.

* Mrs. Jorgensen in ''Film/TheSearchers''. After her homesteader husband gives way to despair and blames the country for the death of his son, she responds with a rousing speech of how this country will become a good place to live, even if it may take their bones in the ground to achieve it.
--> '''Mrs. Jorgensen''': It just so happens we be Texicans. Texican is nothin' but a human man way out on a limb, this year and next. Maybe for a hundred more. But I don't think it'll be forever. Some day, this country's gonna be a fine good place to be. Maybe it needs our bones in the ground before that time can come.

%% * Many examples in Mercedes Lackey's ''Lierature/HeraldsOfValdemarbooks/stories on the borders of the Pelagirs.

* Creator/JohnSteinbeck's ''The Leader of the People'' has a central conflict revolve around two generations of homesteaders and asks "What happens when the Determined Homesteaders Children grow up, with children of their own?" Thanks to their parents' grit and determination in carving out a life for them, don't have to face the same hardships and may even become arrogant and dismissive of their sacrifices.

* ''Literature/StarWarsKenobi'', as a SpaceWestern, portrays homesteaders engaging in moisture farming on Tatooine. In particular, Dannar Calwell took his centrally located plot of land, Dannar's Claim, and turned into the {{only shop|InTown}} among the farms, providing goods and services to his neighbors. Following Dannar's death at the hands of Sand People, his widow Annileen continues to run the store and raise their two teenage children, Kallie and Jabe. Kallie inherited her mother's love of animals and has found a niche running the store's livery, while Jabe chafes at the life of a shopkeeper and runs off with Orrin Gault's kids any chance he can get.

* Another sarcastic (or self-deprecating) song is "Sweet Nebraska Land", a version of which can be heard of the soundtrack to the Creator/KenBurns documentary ''Series/TheWest''.

* A Determined Homesteader JustForFun/RecycledInSpace is one of the many character backgrounds available in ''TabletopGame/{{Traveller}}''. Ardin Enlisson Helmgard is a sample character on page 91 of the volume ''Sword Worlds'' that gives a splendid picture of the archetypal homesteader, as well as the self image of the Sword Worlder people.

** While determined to make it to Oregon, Father is portrayed as a BumblingDad who treats the journey like a vacation, set his own farm on fire by accident, gets swindled into buying a defective wagon and deformed ox, and nearly gets the family and himself killed multiple times. [[spoiler: It gets to the point where Mother decides to leave him, causing him to [[TookALevelInBadass take a level in badass]] and help rescue their daughter.]] [[note]] Due to the AudienceParticipation element of the show, he gets renamed in each performance. The version on Youtube named him "[[Series/TwentyFour Jack Bauer]]". [[/note]]

** It's a well earned reputation. In the game's prologue, the village avoids the DoomedHometown trope when they actually manage to ''repel'' a Githyanki invasion (albeit barely).

* ''VideoGame/{{Rimworld}}'': Only one of the default starting scenarios plays the trope completely straight, but the early game does a pretty good job of simulating the process of setting up a homestead from scratch in the middle of the wilderness. Especially the "every horrible thing that could happen to a piece of land will during the course of the story" part on the higher difficulty setttings.
* ''VideoGame/SunlessSkies:'' The Reach has numerous Homesteads floating about in the High Wilderness, each a house with its own patch of drifting asteroid land to grow crops on, [[WeirdWorldWeirdFood bizarre as they may be]]. They're often troubled by windstorms, pirates, sky-beasts and strange blights native to the sky, but they do what they can to feed themselves and the rest of the Reach, if not London as a whole if the Stovepipes are dominant.

* These guys: http://urbanhomestead.org/ They are a family devoted unconditionally to their little plot of land, their scrappy-but-lovable farm animals, and living independently even in today's modern world. The catch? They're in the middle of a city. On a miniscule 1/10th of an acre in the middle of a bad neighborhood of Pasadena, CA, they grow 6,000 pounds of food a year and are completely self-sufficient.
* One of the colorful cast of characters[[note]]Others include a [[AmoralAttorney shady lawyer]]--whose uncollected legal fees are the basic dispute in the case and who was at the time of the decision a US Senator from Oregon--and a real-estate speculator/lawyer who would later become Governor of Oregon and Mayor of UsefulNotes/{{Portland}}[[/note]] in ''[[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pennoyer_v._Neff Pennoyer v. Neff,]]'' a [[UsefulNotes/AmericanCourts US Supreme Court]] case every law student reads in first-year Civil Procedure dealing with the issue of jurisdiction, is the defendant, Marcus Neff. Neff was an illiterate but apparently hardworking pioneer who had claimed a homestead in Oregon...and just before he was about to seal his title to it, went to California to participate in the Gold Rush (hey, there's determined, and then there's "free gold just across the border"). This proved to be an extremely bad move for Neff, because it led to a ridiculous chain of events that simply has to be read to believed...and immortalized him in one of the foundational cases of American law. Strange, that.

In terms of family, a male homesteader might have an equally strong-willed wife. She'll be responsible for tending to the fields, cabin, and any children they have. If her husband dies, she might become a DeterminedWidow. The two of them may have several children -- from a practical perspective, kids provided a future for the homestead (and when old enough could homestead adjacent territory to add to the family farm), were a handy source of free labor, and--let's face it--there wasn't much else to do on long winter nights. If they don't have kids of their own, they might take in children of relatives or neighbors.

* Brett [=McBain=] from ''Film/OnceUponATimeInTheWest'', who has a very specific dream for his homestead- he's on land that the railroad will have to pass through, and plans to build and own a station for it which a town will eventually grow up around. This doesn't end well for him, as he and his children are brutally massacred by others who want the land for the same reason. His wife-to-be, Jill [=McBain=], survives because she is still en route by train when the massacre happens; she arrives at what should be her wedding to find that she's now the DeterminedWidow.

* ''Literature/StarWarsKenobi'', as a SpaceWestern, portrays homesteaders engaging in moisture farming on Tatooine. In particular, Dannar Calwell took his centrally located plot of land, Dannar's Claim, and turned into the {{only shop|InTown}} among the farms, providing goods and services to his neighbors. Following Dannar's death at the hands of Sand People, his DeterminedWidow Annileen continues to run the store and raise their two teenage children, Kallie and Jabe. Kallie inherited her mother's love of animals and has found a niche running the store's livery, while Jabe chafes at the life of a shopkeeper and runs off with Orrin Gault's kids any chance he can get.

* ''Literature/StarWarsKenobi'': Annileen Calwell, a DeterminedWidow and shopkeeper, has two teenage children, Kallie and Jabe. Kallie inherited her mother's love of animals and has found a niche running the store's livery, while Jabe chafes at the life of a shopkeeper and runs off with Orrin Gault's kids any chance he can get.

%% * The Lermer family in Creator/RobertAHeinlein's ''Literature/FarmerInTheSky'' are Determined Homesteaders [[RecycledInSPACE In SPACE]], as is Lazarus Long in one part of ''Literature/TimeEnoughForLove''.

* A Determined Homesteader RecycledInSpace is one of the many character backgrounds available in ''TabletopGame/{{Traveller}}''. Ardin Enlisson Helmgard is a sample character on page 91 of the volume ''Sword Worlds'' that gives a splendid picture of the archetypal homesteader, as well as the self image of the Sword Worlder people.

* One SelfImposedChallenge for ''VideoGame/TheSims 2: Seasons'' makes your sim earn their living purely by gardening and fishing... after buying the biggest empty lot and using up all their starting money. If the player uses expansions after ''Seasons'', the sim can buy a lot so big they literally can't afford furniture/housing at first.

* ''Videogame/SunlessSkies:'' The Reach has numerous Homesteads floating about in the High Wilderness, each a house with its own patch of drifting asteroid land to grow crops on, [[WeirdWorldWeirdFood bizarre as they may be]]. They're often troubled by windstorms, pirates, sky-beasts and strange blights native to the sky, but they do what they can to feed themselves and the rest of the Reach, if not London as a whole if the Stovepipes are dominant.

* ''Videogame/SunlessSkies:'' The Reach has numerous Homesteads floating about in the High Wilderness, each a house with its own patch of drifting asteroid land to grow crops on, [[AlienLunch bizarre as they may be]]. They're often troubled by windstorms, pirates, sky-beasts and strange blights native to the sky, but they do what they can to feed themselves and the rest of the Reach, if not London as a whole if the Stovepipes are dominant.

%% This list of examples has been alphabetized. Please add your example in the proper place. Thanks!

[[quoteright:350:[[Film/{{Shane}} https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/shane_joe.jpg]]]]
[[caption-width-right:350:"The one real man in this valley"]]

* ComicBook/LuckyLuke:

!This trope is [[https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/posts.php?discussion=16672552050.58567600 under discussion]] in the Administrivia/TropeRepairShop.