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

by Timothy Egan

  An Oklahoma farmhouse, 1930s

  People from four states gathered in Guymon, Oklahoma, east of Boise City, to share stories and plead for help. The Red Cross was overwhelmed, with far more people begging for assistance than the agency could respond to. Some relief was on the way from one of the new agencies of the federal government: it would provide enough money to pay men to shovel dust from the streets of Guymon, Liberal, Texhoma, Shattuck, Dalhart, and Boise City. The wage was one dollar a day, and a man could not work more than three days a week in order to give others a chance.

  A distress telegram was sent to Congress from the sodbusters of the High Plains. It was something these nesters never thought they would do—beg. In Dalhart, the editor of the Texan, John L. McCarty, was against asking for help. It was humiliating, his town with its head down and hand out. He preferred defiance, scoffing at people who complained of the dust—"the softies, the tenderfeet, the cry babies," he called them. Still, people on the dust-sweeper rolls and those who had broken the prairie grass, only to have it break them, took up a collection and sent out the urgent request, a telegram signed by 1,500 people:

  WE ARE FIGHTING DESPERATELY TO MAINTAIN OUR HOMES, SCHOOLS, CHURCHES, AND VARIOUS ENTERPRISES TO MEET LOCAL NEEDS. WE DON'T WANT DOLE OR DIRECT RELIEF. WE WANT WORK.

  Other farmers were leaving, joining the exodus of tenants from the drought-crushed eastern half of Oklahoma and from Arkansas and Missouri, where cotton farming had crashed. But most people decided to hunker down and see it through. After all, there was a new president. The drought was longer and harsher than anyone could remember, but this had to be the bottom of the pit. The law of averages said so.

  One night just before dinner, after clearing the floor, the dining table, the lampshades, and the kitchen counter of their daily dust at her home in Boise City, Hazel Shaw put on her white gloves and smiled. She had an announcement for her husband.

  "I'm pregnant."

  III BLOWUP

  1934-1939

  11. Triage

  THE GOVERNMENT MEN came to the High Plains in the second year of the new president's term with a plan to kill as many farm animals as possible. There was not a buyer in the hemisphere for the wretched-looking cattle stumbling over the prairie, many of them blind, their ribs outlined through the skin, scabby with sores, and their insides all bound up with dust. And nobody was going to get much grain out of this anemic, flyaway ground, not with the drought in its third year, and less than five inches of rain so far by mid-1934. Every day presented another bleak task for a farmer who had raised a calf to maturity only to see it break a leg in a blinding dust cloud or choke trying to get a breath. It made silent men cry to see herbivores on what had been the greatest grassland under the heavens dying cruel deaths from this lifeless, cursed turf. A cow could live only so long chewing salted tumbleweeds and swallowing mud. The job of the government men was to set things right by drying up the market of surplus beef, hogs, and grain. They gathered a crowd of gaunt-faced nesters into the Palace Theater in Boise City. In between takes of Mae West's I'm No Angel, they put an offer on the table:

  Tell you what: bring those tired animals to us and we'll give you cash dollar, up to sixteen bucks a head. The ones that can still walk, the cows with a pinch of flesh left between their bones and saggy skin, we'll send down to a butchering plant in Amarillo, and the meat will go to hungry people. The others will probably fetch no more than a dollar—the minimum buyout—and we are going to kill them here. Could use a cowboy or two to help us along. That's our deal.

  Okay, fine by me, said Fred Folkers. He was down to a few head of cattle, and they were having trouble standing. He had a dairy cow still and milked her, but what came into the pail looked like chocolate milk, and he had to put a dishrag into the bucket to draw out the dust.

  And Hazel Lucas's uncle, C.C., agreed it was probably the only way to get a dollar to keep the homestead going. He did not like the idea of shooting your cow in the head and shoving her into a ditch after raising her from infancy. But it was either that or watching her die, gagging like the others, or fevered and blind. It was wrong keeping an animal alive in the No Man's Land of 1934. Lucas's old milking cow was already gone, and he had just a small herd of cattle and two horses left. Some people asked the government men what would replace the cattle after they had been shot. What were they supposed to do now? The year before, the government had bought up more than five million hogs for slaughter, focusing on "piggy sows," or pregnant pigs. The plan was to get farm animals off the land. Period. Shrink the expansion. The government men had set a goal of killing eight million cattle over the next year to bring prices up enough for farmers to get a fair return on their labor. As they worked the new towns of the southern plains, they found the worst stragglers they had seen. Nearly one out of every three cattle bought were judged too sickly to be butchered. The Lucas animals were typical. Uncle C.C.'s cattle were condemned; not a one was healthy enough to get shipped to Amarillo. The government men told Lucas he could do the shooting, or they could let the cowboy they had hired execute the Lucas animals. He chose the cowboy.

  On the day the Lucas farm animals were rounded up for killing, the children went down to the cellar, closed the door, and covered their ears. Gunshots rang out, a bullet to the head for each animal, and the children started to cry. Now only a few horses remained to show for C.C.'s time on this Oklahoma dirt. Everything else was gone. One of his daughters tried to scrounge up enough feed to keep the horses alive, but the animals could not hold down tumbleweed like the cattle. One horse chewed on the fence. The dust had piled so high that the fence line was a shifting dune, which made it hard for the horse to stand. Later, the mare was found on her side, nibbling at the edge of a fence, gums bloodied and eyes clogged with dirt. She died shortly thereafter. Hazel Lucas tried to soothe the children, her nieces and nephews. Think about tomorrow. Think about green fields and new life. Think about water. Think about clear skies and spring the way it used to be...

  Hazel took the children up to the Kohler ranch north of town, by the trickled remains of the Cimarron River. It had become a Sunday drive destination for people in Boise City—a place to see something green. Julius Kohler was one of the first Anglo settlers in No Man's Land; he came to the edge of the territory in 1902, when the grass was free from the Texas line to Kansas. Using horses, Kohler built eight miles of canals from the Cimarron River to his ranch. Just a crawl of water made it out of the river now, the worst drought the Kohlers had ever seen. All but one of their springs were dry. By diverting just enough liquid from the Cimarron, they were able to keep a small oasis going while everything else in No Man's Land looked like the surface of Mars. Hazel walked the children over the grass, had them touch the original prairie. This is what it all used to look like when our family came here, Hazel told the children. New life amid the death—think of that, the story of No Man's Land. Renewal. One of the reasons Hazel was going to bring a baby into this blast furnace of coarse air was because she believed the land could look like the little patch at Kohler ranch. Someday. But the Sunday drive back to Boise City would grind up hope, as they passed one blowing, sandblasted homestead after the other. The town itself was cloaked in a haze; you could not tell you were close to Boise City until the car rumbled over the railroad tracks into town. Used to be, Boise City looked like toy buildings on a Monopoly board; it was an oasis as well. But now it was dirt-wrapped and camouflaged, without any distinct lines, a half-existence amid the runaway prairie.

  People who traveled through predicted it would all soon be gone—houses, towns, even railroad tracks. "The tracks will soon be mere streaks of rust through a howling desert, which separate by 1,500 miles the two inhabitable coastal regions," wrote a reporter for New Outlook magazine in May 1934. There was an exodus, small but steady, of people who folded their lives in No Man's Land and headed for some place where the sky was not so enraged.

  South in Dalhart, the government men bought four thousand cattle for killing. T
hose animals did not look any better than the cattle of No Man's Land. Some were dying of thirst and starving. Roaming over the tattered remains of the XIT, they looked for water until they dropped, their tongues coated with sand. Bam White took a short-term job, getting two dollars a day shooting cattle, work for a cowboy. The government hired cowboys because they would not go soft when it came time to look a hungry, wet-nosed calf in the eye and shoot her dead. The old XIT hands took the emaciated cattle out to a ditch near town and gunned them down. People in town were welcome to come pick over the carcasses, looking for salvageable meat, before the burial. Sometimes the animals didn't die right away; they lingered in pain and moaned, and their cries were carried by the wind at night, people in town said. It was hard for Bam to explain to the children what they were doing, killing animals that had been brought here for people to make a living. Nothing was right in the world anymore. And these animals were gonna die anyway, might as well get a buck or two for killing them.

  Fifty years earlier the government had cleared this land of the finest grass-eating creature on four legs, had cleared away every bison to make room for cattle. Barely one year after Quanah Parker's Comanche had surrendered and were pushed off the treaty land that had been promised to the Lords of the Prairie for eternity, Charles Goodnight moved his cattle onto the grass, pronouncing it the richest sod on earth. That was yesterday—an eye blink in time. And now the cattle brought to replace the bison were being mowed down because they were starving: they could not stand, could not drink, could not live another day, and even if they could people were unable to make a living off them. The government killings were supposed to restore market balance, not right nature's wrong. It was a sick thing, harder still to comprehend, to cowboys like Bam White. The XIT was so exhausted that barely a blade of grass was seen in the summer of 1934; a ranch that had been bigger than some Eastern states was a drifting wasteland, and probably all the better that most days the wind blew dust so hard a man could not see far enough to get a sense of how awful it was. That prairie writer, the Kansas newspaperman William Allen White, said he knew what was to blame, and it was time for people in the Great Plains to look inside themselves and acknowledge what they had done. He blamed the wheat farmer who broke ground at a gluttonous pace.

  "His good times had ruined him," White wrote.

  The Fourth of July was so hot nobody wanted to stir. Same as the day before, and the day before that. Winds were down a bit, but dust was in the air. People wore scarves or one of the surgical masks distributed by the Red Cross. It was a rare person who did not have the dust hack—a gut-turning cough. If you smoked, and most people rolled their own cigarettes, it made it all the tougher to get through a night without the lungs trying to shake out prairie topsoil coated with nicotine. Thanks to the government cattle-culling operation, there was a little money coursing through town. John McCarty tried to get people out of their smothered dugouts and houses. There was a baseball game at the Dalhart diamond, fifteen cents a head to watch the cellar-dwelling Texans take on the Clayton nine, composed mostly of cousins of Don Juan Lujan. The rabbit drives were on hold because it was too hot to club animals. And while nobody felt like going out into sun-scorched fields and corralling big-eared pests, the campaign against rabbits continued nonetheless. It was us or them, many people felt. The Chamber of Commerce passed the hat for money to hire a man who claimed a good knowledge of how to mix a large batch of poison, and he was contracted to find a biological solution to the rabbit problem.

  McCarty kept his pledge to stress the good news in his paper.

  "Conditions are going to be much brighter and better," McCarty wrote in his column, "and when they are we will hardly realize what has happened."

  He tried to dissuade every person who considered leaving Dalhart. Move out of the Texas Panhandle for California? He argued that Dalhart had more sunny days than California, that its people were hardier, its soil better, and that the long drought was in its last gasp.

  "The law of averages are working in our favor now," he wrote. "We are overdue for rain, prosperity and lots of good things, and it is coming as sure as two plus two makes four."

  It would take a powerful dose of amnesia to block out what had happened on the High Plains, but McCarty gave it his best.

  "Aside from wind and sandstorms," he wrote, "there is really no disagreeable weather in the north Panhandle."

  Beer was back in Dalhart, after a sixteen-year absence. The Busy Bee Café sold cold pints for a nickel a pop. But liquor was still against the law. The Number 126 house, having survived McCarty's stillborn campaign, went about its business of selling sex out of sight in the mustard-colored house, though the girls tried to be a little less conspicuous. For people who did not like baseball, whores, or cold beer for their diversions, the Reverend Joe Hankins held a revival on the Fourth of July, at the First Baptist Church, titled, "What's Wrong with Card-Playing and Dancing." He swept the dust off the pews and welcomed a hundred young people. Following the sermon, the kids crowded to the front of the church and pledged never to dance and never to play cards.

  On May 9, 1934, a flock of whirlwinds started up in the northern prairie, in the Dakotas and eastern Montana, where people had fled the homesteads two decades earlier. The sun at midmorning turned orange and looked swollen. The sky seemed as if it were matted by a window screen. The next day, a mass of dust-filled clouds marched east, picking up strength as they found the jet stream winds, moving toward the population centers. By the time this black front hit Illinois and Ohio, the formations had merged into what looked to pilots like a solid block of airborne dirt. Planes had to fly fifteen thousand feet to get above it, and when they finally topped out at their ceiling, the pilots described the storm in apocalyptic terms. Carrying three tons of dust for every American alive, the formation moved over the Midwest. It covered Chicago at night, dumping an estimated six thousand tons, the dust slinking down walls as if every home and every office had sprung a leak. By morning, the dust fell like snow over Boston and Scranton, and then New York slipped under partial darkness. Now the storm was measured at 1,800 miles wide, a great rectangle of dust from the Great Plains to the Atlantic, weighing 350 million tons. In Manhattan, the streetlights came on at midday and cars used their headlights to drive. A sunny day, which had dawned cloudless, fell under a haze like that of a partial eclipse. From the observatory at the top of the Empire State Building, people looked into a soup unlike anything ever seen in midtown. They could not see the city below or Central Park just to the north. An off-white film covered the ledge. People coughed, rushed into hospitals and doctors' offices asking for emergency help to clear their eyes. The harbor turned gray, the dust floating on the surface. The grass of the parks and the tulips rising to break the Depression fog were coated in fine sand. From Governors Island, visibility was so bad a person could not see the boats just beyond the shore. Baseball players said they had trouble tracking fly balls.

  Reporters rushed out to query the experts. "I spent my youth in the south, where such occurrences are more common, but I didn't remember one in which the dust was carried so high," said a New York meteorologist, Dr. James H. Scarr. "I can't say I like this air. It cuts off all my free-breathing."

  The pyrheliometer, an odd-looking instrument that resembled something vaguely futuristic with an art deco touch, measured sunlight at 50 percent—that is, only half the ultraviolet rays of a normal sunny spring day made it to the city.

  New York was a dirty city in 1934, the air clogged with auto exhaust and the effluents of thousands of small shops, factories, bakeries, and apartments. The air could be so hazardous that people with respiratory problems were advised to move out to the Western desert for life. On a typical day, the dust measured 227 particles per square millimeter—not a good reading for someone with health problems. But on May 11, the dust measured 619 particles per square millimeter. It got inside as well. In the NBC radio studios, air filters were changed hourly. A professor from New York University, Dr. E
. E. Free, calculated that on the seventeenth floor of the Flatiron Building on Fifth Avenue, the thickness of the dust was about forty tons per cubic mile, which meant all of New York City was under the weight of 1,320 tons.

  New Yorkers did not like this monstrous visitor from the heartland. They had heard reports about blowing homesteads and had seen a few newsreels, but it was a world away, far beyond the Hudson River. On May 11, the orphaned land of the Great Plains came to the doorstep of the nation's premier city. For five hours, the cloud dumped dirt over New York. Commerce came to a standstill. The captain of a cargo ship, the Deutschland, delayed coming into anchor because he was not sure what had happened. The outline of the Statue of Liberty was barely visible, and it wore a coat of light gray topsoil. The Deutschland's skipper said it reminded him of the Cape Verde Islands, where the sands of the Sahara blew out to sea.

  "HUGE DUST CLOUD,

  BLOWS 1,500 MILES,

  DIMS CITY 5 HOURS"

  That was the New York Times headline the next day. The paper called it "the greatest dust storm in United States history."

  The storm moved out to sea, covering ships that were more than two hundred miles from shore. Its rear guard also spread south, leaving a taste of prairie soil in the mouths of members of Congress. Dust fell on the National Mall and seeped into the White House, where President Roosevelt was discussing plans for drought relief. Dust in Chicago, Boston, Manhattan, Philadelphia, and Washington gave the great cities of America a dose of what the people in the little communities of the High Plains had been living with for nearly two years. People in the cities wondered why the plains folks could not do something to hold their soil down. One man suggested laying asphalt over the prairie. Another idea was to ship junked cars to the southern plains, where they would be used as weights to hold the ground in place.