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

by Timothy Egan

  At least on the Eastern seaboard, the dust came and went like a snowstorm, and then the normal seasonal fluctuations resumed. But in No Man's Land or the Texas Panhandle or Kansas the seasons varied only by temperature or the ferocity of the wind. Dust blew every season. It had become life itself. Even snow brought little change from the choking gray and black. A snowstorm in March dumped twenty-one inches in No Man's Land, but it fell as dark flakes. They called it a "snuster," snow mixed with dust. St. Patrick's Day had beer but no sunlight—a duster hung over the land for sixteen hours. Late in the month, the sun was obscured for six days in a row. In January 1934, there were four dust storms in the southern plains, followed by seven in February, seven in March, fourteen in April—including one that lasted twelve hours—four in May, two in June and July, one in August, six in September, two in October, three in November, and four in December. That year was not even the worst. For most of these storms, daylight was still visible; the sky never went completely black. But visibility was reduced to a quarter mile or less.

  The dust blew all over the Great Plains, but the worst and most persistent storms were in parts of five states—southern Colorado, southwestern Kansas, the Texas and Oklahoma Panhandles, and northeastern New Mexico. The government placed the geographic heart of the dust-lashed land in Cimarron County, in the middle of No Man's Land. In places where the cover of the land had not been completely stripped, the drifts swooshed in, leaving a fresh source of dust.

  Even with Vaseline in their noses and respiratory masks over their faces, people could not keep from inhaling grit. Dust particles are extremely fine, sixty-three microns or smaller. By contrast, a period at the end of a typewritten sentence is three hundred microns. It could take less than an hour outside to darken one of the masks distributed by the Red Cross. The windows of houses were covered with wet sheets and blankets, the doors taped, the wall cracks stuffed with rags and newspapers. Men avoided shaking hands with each other because the static electricity was so great it could knock a person down. They also put cloth on their doorknobs and metal oven handles to inhibit the electric jolt. Car owners used chains, dragging them along the street as a ground for the electricity in the air. Hospitals postponed operations because they could not keep their surgical wards clean. And flour mills in Kansas had to curtail work because the dust mingled with grain.

  "Rarely a day appears when at some time the dust clouds do not roll over," wrote Caroline Henderson, a Mount Holyoke College graduate and a farmer's wife who lived in No Man's Land just north of Boise City. Out of college, she had fallen for a farmer, and they made a go of it during the wheat boom. Their well gave them enough water to grow a big garden, slake the thirst of hogs, chickens, and cows, and even bring a few flowers to blossom. The wheat shined in the good years, and Caroline had a telephone installed and got a daily newspaper delivered, bringing the world to their homestead. The bust left the Hendersons living a subsistence life in a place where people seemed to age rather quickly. A forty-five-year-old woman looked sixty, it was said, and a man of the same age without a deeply creased face was a rarity. They lost the phone, the newspaper, the garden, the farm animals, and all their crops. By 1934, they had gone three years without income from the land. Caroline's daily tasks began to seem ever more meaningless and hopeless. She clung to small things—a houseplant in the windowsill, pictures of the farm when it was full of grain, a belief in tomorrow. And through the first three years of the dust, she never lost her faith in the land. She felt "a primitive feeling of kinship with the earth—our common mother," Caroline said, writing in a letter to a friend. She made hand towels out of cement sacks and used cheap lye for washing clothes, though it left her hands so rough it frightened her. By 1934, they did not even bother to plant a crop. The Hendersons had some chickens, a few animals, and a garden, enough to keep them alive. Caroline gathered cow chips for fuel, but as the pasture disappeared, and the animals starved, the supply of "prairie coal" dried up as well.

  Like her neighbors, Henderson's thirst for the base elements of life grew with every arid, dust-filled day.

  "We dream of the faint gurgling sound of dry soil sucking in the grateful moisture," she wrote to a friend in the East, "but we wake to another day of wind and dust and hopes deferred."

  12. The Long Darkness

  THE DUST PRESSED HARD on the High Plains when Hazel Shaw traveled over the state line to Clayton to have her baby in the spring. Expectant mothers were told to stay in the hospital or a rest home for a month before their delivery date, and Hazel did not want to take chances. Boise City had no hospital. In New Mexico the air was supposed to be cleaner at the higher ground a mile above sea level. From Clayton, the horizon was not all flat: mesas and ancient volcanoes broke the skyline, and on those days when the light was just right in the evening it was as enchanting as the best parts of New Mexico. The light was one of the reasons the Herzsteins loved Clayton. In town, Charles got his wife settled into a boarding house near the hospital, the doors and windows sealed three times over with sheets and tape to keep pregnant women from breathing particles.

  Charles returned to Boise City. After one week, a message came: it was time. He fired up the Model-T and headed down the dirt road to New Mexico. The distance was barely sixty miles, but with the drifts it could take half a day to make the drive. Even though the road was mostly straight, and he was driving on a cloudless day in April, Charles could not see more than a few car lengths ahead of him. Every driver in No Man's Land knew this kind of blizzard well by now. He paced the Model-T, afraid of crashing head-on with another car coming out of the dust the other way. At times, it was like vertigo, or driving in space. He hung his head out the window to keep track of the roadside ditch, and in that way he was able to follow a line toward Clayton. The message had been urgent—Hazel was starting her contractions, the baby was on its way. Sand heaved up and over the front of the car, swirling, creeping across the hood and into his lap. On sections of the road where the wind had scraped everything down to hardpan, the traction was good, and Charles sped up, doing nearly thirty-five miles an hour. But just as he started to make good time, the car plowed into a drift. He was stuck, the Model-T held by dust that had glommed onto the width of the road. He jumped out and tried to scoop away sand with the shovel he always carried. But the drift was too deep, and even as he shoveled, more dust blew onto the dune. The Model-T was trapped in nearly three feet of sand.

  Unable to free the car, he took off on foot. There was nothing to see in any direction, just the predatory beige sand in his eyes, his hair, blowing against his face. The authorities had warned people not to travel alone and particularly not to walk when a duster was on. In Kansas, one farmer's car broke down and he set out on foot for help. He suffocated to death. But Shaw had no choice. His wife was giving birth. If he stayed in the car and waited for help, he could be buried by the time somebody came along. It would be dark in a few hours.

  He followed the ditch line of the road until it came to a narrow lane that angled away to a small farmhouse. He figured he had walked, at a brisk pace, two miles. Shaw banged on the door of the shack and explained to the farmer what had happened. The farmer started his tractor and the two men rode back to the car. After tugging, digging, and a push from the tractor, they were able to free the Model-T.

  Shaw continued toward Clayton. Anxious, thinking about the baby, worried about more drifts, he kept the speed up, pushing the car to its limit. When he came to a sudden swerve in the road, he was going too fast to correct his speed. The Model-T teetered on two wheels and tipped on its side. For an instant, Shaw thought he was pinned. He was bruised and bleeding but otherwise all right. As he crawled out the window, he saw two wheels still spinning in the dust. He was able to pry the car out of the dust and tip it back, right-side up. The engine started. He finished the drive and made it to St. Joseph's Hospital. Just as Hazel went into her high contractions, in walked a bruised, bleeding, dusty man, his eyelids clogged with mud, his fingers oiled and dirt
y.

  Hazel gave birth to a girl late that day, April 7, 1934. They named her Ruth Nell. She was plump and seemed healthy, but the doctor was concerned about taking her outside. The air was not safe for a baby. He ordered Hazel to stay in the hospital for at least ten more days and remarked that the young family might want to consider moving out of No Man's Land. Others were buttoning up their homes and getting out before the dust ruined them. But the Lucas family had planted themselves in this far edge of the Oklahoma Panhandle at a time when there wasn't even a land office for nesters. They were among the first homesteaders. What would it mean for the pioneers to leave? And if they moved, it was not just the uncertainty of where to go and what to do but also the feeling that they would never again own something. It was a big step down from working on your own quarter-section to being adrift, with strangers staring at you like just another piece of Okie trash, saying you should be deported. Deported! Where? Uprooted, nesters were tumbleweeds. At least here, a hungry man had pride of place and ownership. The family optimism ran through Hazel. She and Charles had opened a business in Boise City and were not going anywhere. It was settled: no matter how ugly the air, no matter how dead the ground, how cashless the economy, new life in No Man's Land—Ruth Nell—was something that did not come around very often. The baby had to be savored and given a proper start in the place called home.

  For others, 1934 was the worst year. In early May, the temperature reached one hundred degrees in North Dakota. Parts of Nebraska, spared some of the earlier storms, were starting to blow. Fields that had yielded twenty bushels of wheat per acre were lucky to get a single bushel. On eight million acres, crops were so withered that there was no harvest. Another two million acres were fallowed—not planted at all. With ten million acres bare, farmers in Nebraska fell into the same desperate straits as their neighbors to the south.

  Not only was 1934 the driest year to date in the arid siege—just under ten inches of rain fell on the Oklahoma Panhandle—but the pockets of original buffalo grass that had kept sheep and some cattle alive were vanishing as well, smothered by dusters. About a third of Cimarron County was blowing, by the estimate of the ag man, Bill Baker. Some grass was under ten feet of sand. Other parts, stripped and buffed by the wind, were as hard as a basement floor. Even the Kohler ranch was losing the last of its grass, and they had irrigation water from the Cimarron River, a lifeblood that most people had lost. The Kohlers could spread water on the sod but could not keep it free of the galloping sheets of dust. They tried fences and windbreaks, but the rampaging soil skipped over the barriers and drifted anew. Nearly three dozen sheep choked to death in the Kohler corral, gagging on the dust.

  Later that year, the government men offered contracts to wheat farmers if they agreed not to plant next year. This idea seemed immoral and not the least a bit odd to people when they first heard about it. Like the cattle slaughters, it was a part of a Roosevelt initiative to bring farm prices up by reducing supply—forced scarcity. In the end, many farmers were not going to plant anyway—what was the use, with no water?—so the idea that they could get money by agreeing to grow nothing was not a hard sell. More than twelve hundred wheat farmers in No Man's Land signed up for contracts and in turn got a total of $642,637—an average of $498 a farmer. Thus was born a subsidy system that grew into one of the untouchable pillars of the federal budget. It was designed for poor grain growers, one foot in foreclosure, near starvation, pounded by dirt. And plenty of farmers were starving.

  "I fell short on my crop this time," a farmer from Texas wrote President Roosevelt in late 1934. "I haven't got even one nickel out of it to feed myself and now winter is here and I have a wife and three little children, haven't got clothes enough to hardly keep them from freezing. My house got burned up three years ago and I'm living in just a hole of a house and we are in a suffering condition."

  For people who had been without income since 1930, a check of $498 was a sufficient enough windfall to keep them on the land, though not enough to run a farm for another year. It allowed them, though, to exist. They paid just enough of their overdue taxes, and just enough of the outstanding interest on their bank loans, and just enough to get seed, to keep them from closing the door and walking away. Without the government, all of Cimarron County might have dissipated in the dust in 1934. For that year, the government bought 12,499 cattle, 1,050 sheep, and gave out loans to 300 farmers. The government estimated that 4,000 of the 5,500 families in six counties of the Oklahoma Panhandle were getting some form of relief, from a few dollars a week to work on road crews to forced scarcity payments. All told, nearly a million dollars came from Washington to the distant corner of No Man's Land.

  Hugh Bennett thought if he could rest the land in some of these blowing prairie states, nature might have a shot at a comeback. Bennett was trying to change agricultural history. One idea was to put new growth on the bald grasslands, a restoration project that had never been tried before on such a scale. His other idea was to get individual farmers to break down their barriers of property and think beyond their fence lines. It wasn't enough for one farmer to practice soil conservation if his neighbor's land was blowing. Bennett wanted people to see the whole of the living plains, not the squares of ownership.

  Bennett put one of Roosevelt's alphabet agencies, the Civilian Conservation Corps, to work on some of his early demonstration projects, and tried to inspire them with a sense of urgency about their mission.

  "We are not merely crusaders," he said at a rally of CCC workers, "but soldiers on the firing line of defending the vital substance of our homeland."

  Oklahoma's governor, Alfalfa Bill Murray, was furious as the first benevolent acts of the New Deal began to arrive on the southern plains. It was making the Sooner state into a bunch of "leaners," as he called them. Of course, Murray had run for president by promising every American an entitlement to the four B's—bread, butter, bacon, and beans. Patronage flowed from Alfalfa Bill outward. Now his old rival, the dandy with the tilted cigarette holder and the funny accent, was bypassing him; FDR was the face of salvation. Nearly one in five people were still unemployed, but government jobs had given four million people a paycheck. Because there were far more willing workers than jobs, the government set a quota for each county based on population. Fueled by his customary two pots of black coffee a day, the titan from Toadsuck railed against Roosevelt and his public works projects, calling him a communist. He quit the Democratic Party in protest of the New Deal. But his power was ebbing away. He could not use the National Guard to halt government help for farmers or to keep people from building roads and bridges. The people in his state loved the new president, and the papers were full of praise for the New Deal. Murray became increasingly irritable. In one speech late in the year, while puffing on a cigar, Murray lit into the president as usual. Just then, a schoolboy raised a voice. Murray exploded, snapping at the child.

  "You little screw worm!" the governor shouted at the boy. "Get out of here!" Alfalfa Bill's political career never recovered.

  One proposal that Murray had championed was a plan to dam the Beaver River near Guymon, the first sizable town east of Boise City. As envisioned by promoters in No Man's Land, the dam would hold enough water to allow people to irrigate, and then they would no longer have to rely on rain. And if the Beaver ran dry, as it often did, they could mine the big aquifer that underlay the southern plains, the Ogallala, for water. So long as they put water in a pen, it didn't matter how it got there. Hydrologists were just starting to grasp the magnitude of the Ogallala: it was nearly the size of Lake Huron, nestled several hundred feet below the surface. With steam engines and windmills, nesters were barely able to reach the upper part of the aquifer. But what if big natural gas engines were put to work, sucking the water up to make the arid land green? The technology was not there yet, FDR was told. In the meantime, the plan to build a dam in No Man's Land landed with a thud in Washington. Harold Ickes, the Interior Secretary, was having second thoughts about encouraging
people to stay on the land. Ickes believed it was better to give people incentive to leave. The land had been settled on the slogan of "a quarter-section and independence," and now that quarter-section could kill you and people were becoming dependent on the government. Ickes wanted to get the land back into the public domain and move upward of half a million people out of the area. His idea was heresy to some—by peeling back manifest destiny, it was an admission that American settlement in the southern plains had been a colossal failure. By Ickes's reasoning, the High Plains could never be productive farmland again. Why delay the inevitable?

  The president had his doubts about reverse homesteading. He did not want an uninhabited expanse of sifting sand in the middle of the country. Why not try and change the land itself? Roosevelt, like his fifth cousin Teddy, was an authentic conservationist from the start. As a child, he learned to love nature and was fascinated by the variety of plant life in the Hudson River Valley. When Roosevelt suggested planting a great wall of trees from the Canadian border to Texas, people derided the plan as a Soviet-style joke. If God wanted trees to grow on the Great Plains, he would have put them there himself. The wind blew too hard for saplings to take root; there was too little rain. But Roosevelt persisted: why not plant rows, and in between would be farmland protected from the wind, a "shelterbelt"?