The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl
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Study on soil conservation districts and their impact on curbing future dust storms, from 2004 study by Zeynep K. Hansen and Gary D. Libecap, "Small Farms, Externalities, and the Dust Bowl of the 1930s," Journal of Political Economy, June 2004, vol. 112, no. 3.
Other Bennett information from previously cited USDA biography and Brink, Big Hugh, and Soil Conservation Service records, provided by U.S. Forest Service, La Junta, Colorado.
Folkers family details from author interviews with Faye Gardner, April 30, 2002, and Gordon Folkers, May 2, 2002.
Hazel Shaw's last years from author interview with her son, Charles Shaw, September 21, 2003.
Osteen epilogue from author visit to Ike Osteen's house, April 25, 2002.
Acknowledgments
During a reporting trip for this book I arranged to meet a man about town in Guymon, Oklahoma, one of the little communities in No Man's Land that was hammered during the Dust Bowl. Gerald Dixon was well past eighty, a vigorous and bright-eyed man with a droll sense of humor and a quick step. We met in his cluttered office, a museum in itself, where he dabbles in just about every business in Guymon.
"Get in the car," he said at the start of the lunch hour. "I'm taking you to the finest dining establishment in town—the country club."
We rode in his big Buick out to the edge of Guymon, passed a few wheat fields, turned off the main road, went past trailers and some abandoned farmhouses and onto a narrow, rutted dirt road. I could not see another car or another human. The wind was shrieking, the same tune I heard during most of my days on the plains, and tumbleweeds rolled by the car. The sky was white and warm and empty. I began to think that Gerald was lost or that he was playing a trick on me.
"You sure there's a restaurant out here?" I asked.
"'Nother couple of miles."
Finally we descended into a little draw to a shed with some cars parked around it. There were about a dozen guys, most of them Gerald's age, and a handful of women. They were cooking burgers over a big outdoor grill, drinking beer and pop, and talking up Sooner football. Gerald introduced me to his posse, Guymon lifers, and said I was looking for stories about the Dust Bowl. Over lunch, they gave me terrific leads and true-life details to flesh out what I'd only read about the Oklahoma Panhandle during the Dirty Thirties. These old folks were all kids then, teenagers mostly, but they remembered the dusters and the hunger as if they had happened last Friday.
"Now here's a treat," Gerald said. "Hope you saved some room for cobbler."
All morning, they had been cooking peach cobbler in a pit. Fresh peaches, honey, brown sugar, a rich pie dough—all blended into a big vat of cobbler cooked around hot coals set in the ground. I never tasted a better thing at midday, and it was typical of the kind of hospitality I found on the High Plains. It also gave me an inkling as to why people stuck around, even when they faced "the hate of all nature," as John McCarty put it.
That part of the country was like another planet to me. I'm a son of the Pacific Northwest. I grew up with wraparound green, water everywhere, and a horizon always interrupted by mountains. The Gerald Dixons of the flatlands made me feel at home in a brown land. So, for Gerald and his boys out at the burger shack, for the peach cobbler and all the rest, my deepest thanks.
About thirty miles west, in Boise City, I found an invaluable tour guide to the past in Norma Gene Butterbaugh Young. My thanks to Norma for her help and memory, and for her service to the region's history. Hundreds of family stories would have slipped away without her.
Every town has at least an attic that holds the local secrets, usually a small museum. Among the bigger facilities, the Oklahoma Historical Society was very useful, especially the oral history department. Mildred Becker, curator of Wolf Creek Heritage Museum in tiny Lipscomb, Texas, was one of the best of a breed. I would also like to thank the staff of the XIT Museum in Dalhart.
Further thanks are due Charles Shaw, for his generosity of heart in sharing stories about his mother; to the wonderfully effusive Jeanne Clark, who helped to launch this project by bringing together a number of witnesses from her hometown of Lamar, Colorado; to Melt White, maybe the last true cowboy left on the Texas Panhandle; and to Ike Osteen, Baca County's greatest living resource.
For the idea, the direction, the patience, and for keeping his hand on the wheel whenever I wanted to steer the other way, I owe everything to Anton Mueller at Houghton Mifflin. My agent, Carol Mann, saw the match and nudged me into it. And a final bow to Joni, Sophie, and Casey—a family that has never stopped being curious or thrilled by the magic of bookmaking.
Index