The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl

by Timothy Egan

  Beginning in 1873, villages folded up and left for the Great Plains. Katherinenstadt, Pfeifer, Schoenchen, and others became near ghost towns. The Germans boarded small boats on the Volga to Saratov. From there, it was a train ride to a North Sea port where they took immigrant vessels to New York, Baltimore, or Galveston and boarded trains for the flatlands. In American ports, many were amazed to see a black person for the first time. Some Germans arrived with little more than a yellowed picture of Catherine the Great and a note pinned to their coat, indicating a family or destination. Before long, in places like Lincoln, Nebraska, or Ellis County, Kansas, more German was heard in the streets than English. In the 1870s, about 12,000 Russian Germans came to Kansas; within fifty years, 303,000 would populate the Great Plains. Often the new towns were given the name of the villages they had left behind. In Kansas, Germans established Lieben-thal, Herzog, Catherine, Munjor, Pfeifer, and Schoenchen, which meant "a little something lovely."

  "No one thinks of drouth and grasshoppers—everyone is happy and energetic," the Chicago Tribune reported in a typical dispatch on the kinetic Germans in 1876. They plowed the grass and planted turkey red on land that others had not dared to farm. What struck some of the American yeomen about these Russian Germans was that they liked to sing, and they kept the floors of their simple houses clean enough to dine on. Dust inside the house was something they would not tolerate.

  George Ehrlich turned eighteen on his journey across the Atlantic in 1890. As he continued with his story at the wedding, he told about his emotions on the immigrant boat: scared, yes—a week into the sailing, he regretted leaving home. His money was strapped to a lower leg, and all his possessions fit into one bag. Part of his family had gone one way to Ellis County in an earlier migration, while others stayed behind, hoping they could hide from the czar's conscription police. George received his draft notice at the same time that a terrible drought hit the Volga region, another nudge to go to America. When the wind of the hurricane got ahold of the ship's mast and dragged it into the water, he thought he would never see American soil. The mast was broken about ten inches from the bottom. The longer it dragged in the water, the more the ship listed. The typhoon raged, seas engorged, wind and heavy rain clawing at the ship. Another SOS went out. Nothing in response. They were all going to drown in the mid-Atlantic. Another German—George knew him only as a Catholic boy—offered to crawl out on the mast and try to saw it off. The Captain said it would kill him, but if the boy wanted to give it a try—Godspeed. They tethered the boy to a rope, handed him a saw, and sent him on his way. He shimmied out, the sea heaving, salt spray sweeping over him, inching along the downed mast. When he was far enough along the beam, he started sawing. He cut through rope cables and oak until his hands were numb. At last, the mast broke away. As the beam fell to the sea, the boat righted itself. Now the Captain ordered all the immigrants to bail. The ship had only one working propeller; the other was broken by a cable that had snapped in the storm. The boat limped on, steadily west, away from the grip of the typhoon. In New York, it was announced as lost at sea.

  Almost two months after leaving Hamburg, the immigrants arrived in New York Harbor, their food gone, many of them desperately ill. George Ehrlich landed in America on New Year's Day, 1891.

  Back at the wedding, it was time for toasts. To Catherine the Great, of course. And to America. They raised glasses of schnapps and the spritzy white wine made by the Germans in Oklahoma and thanked God for their good fortune. The accordions and dulcimers came out. They danced the Hochzeit, which was like the fox trot, only faster. The wheat harvest was going to be the biggest ever. In Shattuck and just across the border in the Texas towns of Follett and Darrouzett, the Volga Germans were shedding some of the thrift their forebears had practiced, buying new tractors, Fordsons and Titans, taking out loans from banks to get still more land. Plant more wheat. Fast!

  After arriving in the plains, George Ehrlich had stayed with relatives in LeHigh, looking for work. While there, he missed the rush of 1893 in Oklahoma, when the Cherokee Strip was opened and more than 100,000 people dashed to claim a piece of six million acres of formerly Indian ground. Six years later, Ehrlich heard there were still a few sections left in the old Indian Territory, well west of the good land. For many Germans in Kansas, this was the final chance to get a share of America. In the fall of 1900, George and twenty other men traveled from Kansas to Shattuck, scouting for free land. Close to town, everything was taken, staked by Smiths and Richardsons and Winters and Sherills. George took off on foot, heading for a distant rise to the west.

  "I'll throw my hat in the air if I find what I like," he said. "If not, I'm going back to Kansas." George walked toward the rise. At the base of the small hill, six miles out of town, he found thick grass, rippling in the wind, and a pronghorn antelope grazing. He put his claim on a quarter-section of rich grass at the base of the hill. Paradise, he called it.

  Back in Kansas, George made his peace with his family and prepared to leave, along with hundreds of other Germans. They rounded up their cattle, their chickens, their horses, packed kraut cutters and Bibles, accordions and songbooks. The train was stuffed with farm animals and Bekkers, Borns, Spomers, Haffners—so full that the conductor ordered several people off. It would not move with the weight, he said. Some of the children were hiding under the skirts of their mothers to avoid being counted. They pleaded: this was their last hope. They had fled from places in the world that most Americans did not know existed—could not find on a map—and still were without a home. Oklahoma was their last chance, as Dalhart was to the cowboy Bam White, as No Man's Land was to the Lucas and Folkers families.

  When the train arrived in Shattuck, the Germans were stunned by what they saw. Oklahoma looked like hell. The land was black and charred. The air was full of smoke, the smell putrid. Across the way, the grass of what was to be their new farms was burned, and for miles on the horizon there was nothing but sharp, black bristles. The Indians—mainly Cherokee—who had been promised this land for eternity had left in a fiery fury. They had been betrayed at least three times by the American government. This latest land grab, which opened some of the last chunks of Cherokee Nation territory to homesteading, was agreed to by several tribal leaders, who accepted a promise of 160 acres a person in return for giving up the larger land base. But other Indians thought they were robbed. The Comanche felt the same way. Their small reservation was opened to settlement at the same time, leaving the Lords of the Plains with little but brochures from the government on how to become farmers. As the Indians walked away from the land, they burned everything in their wake, torching the grass. Maybe it would scare the Germans back to Russia.

  On this bewhiskered and blackened land, the Volga Germans would try to recreate what they had in Russia. The second day in Shattuck, a blizzard hit Oklahoma. It snowed for two days. The Germans camped near the train station but their animals strayed into the storm. They spent the next week collecting the beasts, but some died in the chill, with no grass to eat. Shopkeepers in Shattuck refused to sell to the Germans; others tried to pass an ordinance prohibiting the language from being spoken in the city limits. It seemed odd to the Anglo ranchers that these singing, beer-making, strangely dressed people hurried about their business as if predestined to the southern plains.

  But the new German villages on the Oklahoma prairie were no stranger than other colonies of outcasts popping up on the High Plains. Oslo, Texas, a few miles to the west, was supposed to be Norway in brown. Oslo was founded by Anders L. Mordt, late of Kristiania, Norway. Scandinavians belonged in the Dakotas, people told Mordt when he showed up in Guymon, Oklahoma, in 1909 and set up his land office. Mordt had other ideas. He vowed to build one of the biggest Norwegian colonies in the United States on empty ground just across the Texas border. He secured a hundred sections on a site he promised would soon have a rail line running through it, and he bought advertisements in Norwegian language newspapers in the United States. "Buy now before the price goe
s up," went one advertisement in a 1909 issue of Skandivaven. "Plenty of rain and the grains look good." The Norsemen came, about two hundred families. They erected a schoolhouse and a Lutheran church that was to be crowned by a copper bell shipped from Norway. The bell would chime over land that nobody named Grimstad or Torvik had ever before tried to call home, where meals of lefse and lutefisk would break the routine of beef and barley. Alas, the new church bell went down with the Titanic. Oslo was doomed by lack of rain and no rail line. A drought in 1913 broke the colony, and Mordt declared bankruptcy in a summer when not a drop of rain fell and temperatures reached 112 degrees. Oslo disappeared, though the Lutheran church still remains on the grounds of the old colony.

  The Germans stayed with the land because their nearly two centuries in Russia had taught them how to live in a treeless place. George Ehrlich's first job in Oklahoma was as a ranch hand. To learn English, he carried a notebook in his back pocket, and asked the other cowboys for help, pointing out animals.

  "There's cow." Spell it, please. And George would write c-o-w in his book.

  "There's a prairie chicken." And George would scribble p. c-h-i-c-k-e-n.

  "And you're a Kraut."

  George burrowed into a side of the hill, building a dugout, the first home. He married a fellow Volga German, Hanna Weis, put in rows of wheat and corn on 160 acres, raised a few cows for milk. He also started breeding horses. The Ehrlichs had a girl, then another baby girl, then a third girl, and a fourth girl—each of them barely one year apart—before they moved out of the dugout. George built a frame house. They had yet two more girls. The seventh child was a boy—William George Ehrlich, who was called Willie. Then came two other girls, and a second boy, George Ehrlich, Jr. Now there were ten children. During World War I, the Ehrlichs were nearly run out of Shattuck. George used to invite the schoolteacher to his home on weekends. Early in the war, the teacher saw a picture of the Kaiser in Ehrlich's house, next to a portrait of Catherine the Great. She reported it to authorities. Two days later, police surrounded the Ehrlich homestead. The house was searched, turned inside out.

  You are spy, they told him.

  Spell it, please. S-P-Y.

  Ehrlich and eleven other German immigrants were taken to Arnett, the county seat. Word was, they would be hanged as traitors. Around midnight, the police came to the jail and herded Ehrlich and his neighbors out, headed for Woodward, a bigger town just to the east, to appear before a federal judge. It was January, the night air cold, and Ehrlich nearly froze from hypothermia on the long ride, handcuffed in the back of a truck. About 2 A.M., Judge T. R. Alexander appeared, bleary-eyed. The police explained that they had rounded up a pro-German cabal. One of the Germans, who was retarded, started sobbing, blubbering in his native language. A guard told him to shut up—if he heard another Kraut word out of any of them, he would cut their hearts out. He flashed his knife.

  "George Ehrlich," the judge said, repeating the name several times. "What are you doing here?"

  The judge remembered Ehrlich from an earlier appearance, when he came to Woodward for citizenship proceedings.

  "What are you doing here?" the judge asked again.

  "I cannot talk," Ehrlich answered, in his hybrid English-German. "This guard will stab my heart out."

  "You talk to me," Judge Alexander told him. "Now what are you people here for? It's the middle of the night."

  "Pit-schur."

  "What's that? A picture?"

  "Yah."

  An officer produced the picture that Ehrlich kept in his house—Kaiser Wilhelm and his family in formal pose.

  "That's a beautiful picture," the judge said, then turned to the police. "Is that all you got against these people?"

  "They're pro-German. They're hurting the war effort. Spies, for all we know."

  The judge turned to the Germans from the Volga. "How many of you are supporting America in the war?"

  All hands went up. Ehrlich reached into his pocket and produced two hundred dollars' worth of government stamps issued to support the war effort. A friend produced war bonds. The judge looked at the sheriff and asked him how many of his officers had war bonds or stamps. None.

  "Take these people home," the judge said. "If anything happens to them, I'll hold you responsible." They drove back in the freezing predawn darkness and released the men to their families at sunrise. A daylong party followed.

  The youngest of the Ehrlich ten became everyone's favorite. Georgie, they called him, a kid full of energy. He was changing by the hour, but so was the land. People were buying cars and tractors, adding rooms to houses, using fine material for clothes. On a summer evening, August 14, 1924, Georgie wandered out to the road as the wind carried sand from the tractors. A cattle truck came along. The driver never saw Georgie and ran him over. He died on the spot. After George and Hannah lost their little boy, the life seemed to go out of them. For years thereafter, Hannah said she had no desire to live. George would admonish her, reminding her of all the hardships the Germans had gone through. But his wound had not healed either. At times during the day, when he was alone in the fields, he cried so hard his body shook.

  Another toast—the last of the schnapps, more dessert of stewed apples. Ehrlich finished his story of the trip to America and a neighbor, Gustav Borth, raised a glass. Gustav's story was similar: he had dodged a draft notice from the czar and sailed to America, but he was held at Ellis Island, quarantined after a glaucoma outbreak. He almost went to South America. The stories that George Ehrlich and Gustav Borth told the children were almost forty years old; it seemed as if they were describing another world, a time of unfathomable hardship. Life in America in September 1929 was almost too sweet, too bountiful, too full of riches the Germans in Volga could not have imagined.

  Even with wheat prices falling now, George Ehrlich saw only good years ahead. Having escaped the czar's army, Atlantic seas that pummeled the immigrant ship, fires that had burned Oklahoma, the anti-German sweep during the Great War, and the loss of little Georgie, he thought he could live through anything. But in the next five years, he would find himself in the middle of something meaner than old Russia, crueler than the storm-tossed ship, longer than any grass fire—an epic of pain.

  5. Last of the Great Plowup

  THE STOCK MARKET CRASHED on October 29, 1929, a Tuesday, the most disastrous session on Wall Street to date in a month of turmoil. Investors were relieved at the end of the trading day.

  "RALLY AT CLOSE CHEERS BROKERS; BANKERS OPTIMISTIC" was part of the three-stack headline in the next day's New York Times. The show business paper, Variety, was more direct: "WALL ST. LAYS AN EGG."

  It was nothing, brokers said, a correction at the end of a dizzying decade, the most prosperous in the story of the republic. It got worse, quickly. Over the next three weeks, the market lost 40 percent of its value, more than thirty-five billion dollars in shareholder equity—money enough to float a hemisphere of nations. The entire American federal budget was barely three billion dollars. For someone who had followed the advice of the day and taken their savings out of the bank and put it all into General Electric, say, shares had grown by 500 percent from 1925 to 1929. In a month, they lost it all. More likely, they had bought more shares on margin, borrowing on the bet that stocks were going only skyward. To pay the margin loan after the crash—sometimes as high as 18 percent—they had to sell at a time when many stocks did not get any bids at all. Banks had gone on their own speculative binges, reaching into people's savings accounts to make millions in interest-free loans available to bank officers and other insiders for stock purchases. When stocks tanked, banks were hollowed out until the money was gone. One company, Union Cigar, went from $113 a share to $4—in a single day. The company's owner jumped to his death from a building on Wall Street.

  But plunging investor suicides were rare, an urban myth. Most Americans did not own stock: at no time in the 1920s did more than 1.5 million people purchase shares of the stock market. At the most, 4 million people
owned some stock—through gifts, inheritance, or purchase—in a nation of 120 million. What Americans still did was work the land. In 1929, thejobs of nearly one in four people were on a farm. The country had one foot in the fields, one foot in a bathtub of gin in the city.

  On the High Plains, the Wall Street gyrations were a distant noise. The crash hurt rich people, city slickers, all those swells and dandies. It could not reach the last frontier of American farming. The newspaper in Boise City boasted that the ripple of the crash never touched the Panhandle in 1929. Instead, with record harvests, a new railroad, and even dreams of a skyscraper in town, the paper said, "Our ship is coming in."

  But while prairie families may not have owned stock, they did own wheat, and it was starting to follow the course of the equities market. On Wall Street, people put 10 percent down to borrow against the future growth of a stock; in Kansas a dryland wheat farmer did the same thing—gambling on grain. The 1928 crop had come in okay, the price holding at about $1 a bushel at the end of the year. Most people had anticipated $1.50 wheat; some even talked of the $2 yield they had been getting at the start of the decade. There was a drought elsewhere, covering Maryland and the Carolinas all the way to Arkansas, that should have pushed prices up.

  Outside of Boise City, the Lucas family was getting ready to start the first harvest of their winter wheat, a June cutting, when the sky darkened and rumbled. Carlie Lucas had died, suddenly, leaving the farm to his widow, Dee, and her five children. She had help from her late husband's brother, C.C., and two young sons, now stout. Her daughter, Hazel Lucas, had married Charlie Shaw and headed off for Cincinnati. With the prices down and loans to repay for all the new farm machinery, the Lucases needed this crop. Maybe, if the wheat came in right, Dee Lucas could get shoes for the kids and bring something special into the house that Carlie had built next to the old dugout. Electricity was not an option. In town, there was a picture show with a piano player accompanying the screen narrative, and diners were lit up, as were some houses. But in the rest of No Man's Land, the juice had yet to arrive. Nobody had washing machines, vacuum cleaners, or incandescent light bulbs. But the farmers did have their miracle machines. In fifteen years, the Lucas family had gone from a walking plow pulled along behind a mule, to a riding plow, in which horses carried the blade through the soil, to a fine-tuned internal combustion plow.