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

by Timothy Egan

  Summer temperatures were brutal. For two days in July and two days in August, the mercury reached 118 degrees, the highest ever recorded at that time in No Man's Land. August went down as the hottest of the century in Oklahoma. It was 117 degrees in Dalhart, 120 in Shattuck. There had been some rain but it came in bursts, big dumps from the sky that spilled over the hard ground and inflamed ditches into flash floods, and then it was all gone, and they went back to drought and temperatures above the century mark.

  Throughout the heat wave, Hazel was desperate for a little cross-breeze in the apartment—some clean, moving air—so they could sleep at night, but she could not risk the dust getting to her new baby. Hazel kept the place so sealed up it was like living in a can. She would not take the baby outside except on the clearest of days. She draped a wet sheet over the crib, about two feet above the head of the baby. He was never in the crib without a dampened cloth overhead. Later, when Charles grew to a young man, he was claustrophobic and thought it had to be a product of his early months spent looking up at a dusted, wet sheet from a crib in a sealed apartment.

  At the end of the year, she said goodbye to No Man's Land. Hazel put on her white gloves and brushed back tears but said tomorrow would bring good things to the young family, so it was not worth a long cry. She planned to leave with her dignity intact, like a lady. In 1914 at the age of ten, she had first seen the grassland, rising on her toes on the driver's seat of her daddy's covered wagon to get a look at this country. She would hold to the good memories. She and Charles and the baby moved to Vici, closer to the center of Oklahoma, near her husband's family. There would be a place, always, in Hazel's memory of the blackest days in No Man's Land. But it would shrink, because Hazel would force it down to size to allow her to live.

  A hundred miles to the east, the Volga Germans tried to keep their community around Shattuck from crumbling. Strong men still wept, hiding their lapses like alcoholics sipping in secret. The men cried because they had never seen anything like this and had never before been without a plan of action. Always, they had been able to hammer at something, to dig and scrape and cut and build and plant and harvest and kill—something forceful to tip the balance, using their hands to make even the slightest dent during the bleakest times. Families spoke furtively of a mother or young bride who had gone crazy, walking away from her house only to be found days or weeks later stumbling around a town, lost. Just as they had fled the Rhine in 1765 and the Volga 120 years later, the Russlanddeutschen now talked of moving again.

  Most days, George Ehrlich sounded like he believed he would live through this, but it could have been the brave, forced words of one who had seen it all. A German family could live on bread, beer, and wurst, the Ehrlichs told their Anglo neighbors. They got some money from the government, about seven dollars a head for cattle, which gave them enough to buy flour and sugar—something was always coming out of the oven. A cousin would bring out the violin that had survived the immigrants' trip through the hurricane in 1890, and there was music and warm bread and memories of the Volga at its best. But the drought was in its fifth year, and it was taking its toll.

  The Borth children were felled by dirt. The doctor came to Gustav Borth's three-room house and examined them. Two of the kids had fever, chest pains from coughing, sore ribs. Dust pneumonia was his diagnosis. He said they had to get out of the High Plains or get to a medical shelter. But the nearest hospital was full and the Red Cross never made it to the German community with a triage facility. Gustav moved Rosa's bed to the kitchen next to a cook stove heated by cow chips. With enough cow manure as fuel, the Borths could keep her warm. There was no room for another bed. Her brother was put in the room with his parents. For three weeks, the kids hacked and spit up dust, waiting out their illness. A girl of fifteen, Rosa fixed her stare on the brown land outside the window; she never saw a bird or a flower or a bee. If she could just find a single green weed, she decided, it would be enough to make her happy.

  With his children facing a mortal illness, his land dead and dusted, Gustav thought of the Russian steppe often, and it was always better in his mind than this place in America. He still went to church, half a mile away, and the family tried to sing "Gott is de liebe" along with the rest of the congregation, but they were nearly empty inside. Many times they were too embarrassed to be seen in public, for Rosa was clothed in dresses made of chicken feed sacks.

  "Es ist hoffnungsloss," Gustav Borth said. It is hopeless. Usually, he tried to keep the overt pronunciations of failure from his family. Like the tears.

  "Es ist hoffnungsloss."

  Then the bank took his combine. During the glory years, the combine had allowed Borth to pile high his grain, his stacks of fibrous gold. He moved the children hundreds of miles south to live with cousins in Texas. Gustav was left with his homesickness for the Old World, his sense of failure.

  ***

  That spring, with The Plow That Broke the Plains playing in theaters, Dalhart found itself in the spotlight. There on the big screen was Bam White cutting up the best grassland in the world, the cause of this nightmare. John McCarty was livid. He denounced the film as a tool of the government, designed to drive people off the land. It went to the very character of the Panhandle pioneer that the editor of the Texan had long praised as the epitome of courage and foresight. If this kept up, Dalhart would die.

  "It is purely a propaganda film," McCarty said. "It is bound to do more damage to our credit and our agriculture that it can possibly do good." McCarty urged people in neighboring towns to come take a look at Dalhart for themselves: see the defiance, feel the fighting spirit. Politicians in Texas joined McCarty in their outrage. Eugene Worley, a delegate to the Democratic National Convention in 1936, demanded that the government withdraw the film from theaters. "It's a libel on the great Texas panhandle," said Worley. Melt White went back to see the film again, staring up at his daddy moving along the horizon of the windblown land, with the stirring music, as a narrator said, "Forty million acres of the plains totally ruined by the plow."

  The filmmaker, Pare Lorentz, was hardly the first person to blame misguided agriculture for the wreck of the plains. Seasoned XIT ranch hands and soil scientists such as Hugh Bennett had made the same case, in their way. The New York Times correspondent in the Midwest, Harlan Miller, saw the run-up and frenzy of the wheat boom, the town building and the suitcase farmers, the debt loads and the technological revolution, and he watched it all fall apart—the whole arc.

  "Plowed recklessly during the World War and since, denuded of the vegetation which knits the earth against the onslaught of the winds, powdered by drought for years, these arid lands have taken wing," he wrote in a long piece for the Times on March 31, 1935, two weeks before Black Sunday. A similar story from a year earlier carried the headline: "PLOW SPELLED ITS DOOM."

  A son of the Texas Panhandle reached the same conclusion. Doc Dawson's youngest boy, John, had left Dalhart in 1929 to start a law career in Houston. He returned in the mid-1930s to help his struggling father and to see if anything could be salvaged from the land the Doc had hoped would bring him a comfortable retirement. John was startled and angered by what he saw. A letter from his mother just after Black Sunday had described "the blackest dark you ever looked into," but her words did not prepare him for his reaction. The land had become a moonscape, empty and hideous. During dusters, the earth had a sickly smell. He found no wildlife, no grass, no trees growing outside of the few hardy locusts planted in Dalhart. The Last Man Club and Lorentz's film were getting a lot of attention, creating an impression of a town engaged in a big struggle over the forces remaking the land. But Dawson found that most of his neighbors were just plain numb, worn down by the struggle to get through another day. There was no economy, no buyers for goods in town. His mother tried to keep up appearances and talked still of books and cooking a Sunday meal and God. But she was distressed by the dust that showered down her walls, by the filthy streaks on the windows, the puckered faces she saw at Doc's
soup kitchen, people in pain from hunger. Five years now they had put up with it. Five years, with no end in sight.

  Still, the Doc told his son he had a feeling a little rain might finally be coming their way. Six years earlier, when the boy first came home from college, the Doc had taken him out to his land and scooped up the earth. As he held it in his hands, he pronounced it the finest dirt on the planet, capable of producing damn near anything. Now he said he was exhausted, out of money and nearly out of time. His health was shot. The Panhandle had to get one normal year of precipitation. But what, exactly, was normal? Dalhart had been a town for only thirty-five years, and weather records had been kept barely longer than that. John Dawson was upset because he felt people had done this to themselves. All of them—the nesters who had chased away the cowboys, the real estate promoters, the people who subdivided the XIT, and Dawson's own father, who carved up his own little piece of the Panhandle only to have it become a collection point for tumbleweeds—shared some of the blame.

  Government kept the town alive. Hugh Bennett came to Dalhart in August 1936 to look over the biggest soil conservation project on the plains, called "Operation Dust Bowl." The plan was to slow the drifts by contour plowing, which created furrows and made it less likely for the earth to lift off in great sheets, and then plant it over with grass seed from Africa. The goal was to build a living thing from scratch, to create a place of interdependence, not a crop. Only God on the third day of creation might know the feeling. Bennett was also struggling to put the fledgling conservation districts together. The nesters had usually worked alone, one man against the land, and sometimes one man against another, each with his section. Bennett was trying to create what amounted to neighborhood civil defense committees of the soil. But people had to take the initiative. A soil conservation district would fail if only a few people went along with it. It was all theory, of course. But neighbors bitched about other neighbors not wanting to do their share, or shucking duties, or being sloppy or lazy or drunk or too religious or just plain onerous. Big Hugh got an earful.

  At the same time, Bennett, as part of the team appointed by Roosevelt, was working on the investigation into the cause of the Dust Bowl. The administration had started a number of big initiatives but most of them were tentative, pending the conclusions of the Dust Bowl jury. The president wanted the report by summer's end.

  McCarty went out of his way to impress Bennett, to show the president's man that Dalhart deserved its shot at redemption. See here: Uncle Dick Coon and his properties and that C-note in his pocket—hoo, boy, he's got big plans. And just look what a break they nearly got from Tex Thornton last year, after he busted up the sky with his TNT and nitro. All they needed were a couple of steady soakers, and the land would spring back, green and frisky. His town was a fighter. It was full of Spartans. It would lead the way for others in the High Plains. When a group of people from Guymon, which was nearly as smothered and gasping as Boise City and Dalhart, came for a visit, McCarty arranged for a handful of musicians to meet them. See here, he told Big Hugh: look how the town opens its arms. The musicians got up on a flatbed truck just as the boys from Guymon rolled in to see what one dusted town could learn from another. The wind had been blowing sand all day, making it hard to see, and then it shifted, bringing in a reddish dust from New Mexico. McCarty got on the flatbed and invited the Guymon visitors to come on up with him, join hands, and sing. They started singing "Old Faithful." The dust fell red and heavy, and when a weak rain was squeezed from the sky, it was liquid gunk.

  "...Old Faithful, we rode the range together ..."

  People fled for cover. But McCarty continued to sing from the back of the flatbed truck, holding hands with a bankrupt merchant from Guymon, showing everyone the spirit of Dalhart while clay drops fell and splattered his face, making it look as if he were crying tears of red mud.

  21. Verdict

  IN AN AGE when people who ran the country thought the great rivers of America could be plugged to create a green promised land in the Pacific Northwest and electrify the Tennessee Valley, Hugh Bennett was encouraged to think big and think epic. When he returned to Washington after the Dust Bowl summit and a tour of his conservation projects, Bennett believed that the Great Plains could be saved; it did not have to blow away and lose its people. But all the marvels of concrete and rebar used elsewhere could not put back what the winds and a swarm of one-way plows had done on the prairie. There would be no magical engineered solution. Some believed so, of course. Congress authorized a plan to reverse the flow of water under the Continental Divide, an attempt to create a hydraulic savior, moving west to east through a tunnel. In Oklahoma, politicians were still insistent on choking off the little flow of the Cimarron River to create an impound of water near Guymon. Others thought the solution was to go deep, dig far below the surface, and mine the great underground reservoir of ancient water, the Ogallala Aquifer. Deep wells, drilled for oil or gas, had found a ready source of water five hundred feet or below. Bring it up, many county leaders told Bennett during his tour of the Dust Bowl. If rain would not come from the sky, it could come from the ground. The Ogallala was there for the taking, just like the grassland itself thirty years earlier. Bring it up.

  Four million acres of farmland were empty, abandoned, with no takers, not even Resettlement—whose mission was to buy back land. From the start, Bennett thought the answer was getting people to treat the prairie soil on its own terms, a great plowup in reverse. Conserve what farmland could be saved through new methods of contour plowing, crop rotation, and soil conservation districts. For other lands, the ground could be seeded, and in time the southern plains would have its grasslands back. Perhaps. Bennett, whose graduate degree was in chemistry, was not given to policy speculation. He was a man of science: look at the facts, draw the right conclusions. But he was in new territory. They all were. There were no historic models.

  Roosevelt had asked for an honest verdict: why had the Great Plains blown away? What made this land die? The crisis of the transient prairie had already cost Depression-strapped taxpayers an enormous sum—five hundred million dollars since 1933—on remedial land projects, grants, loans, and relief. Before spending any more money, the president wanted to know if the plains could be saved, and if so, how. Roosevelt had also asked whether the arid flatlands should have been settled. Had it been a colossal mistake to allow homesteading on the land? Was the Jeffersonian small farmer, small town, agri-citizen model a horrible fit for the grasslands? Had this environmental catastrophe—the worst in American history—been aided by government?

  The report of the Great Plains Drought Area Committee was delivered to the president on August 27, 1936. It was labeled "personal and confidential," signed first by Bennett, and then seven agency heads. An extended memo, The Future of the Great Plains, was due at the end of the year. But this shorter report showed where the committee was going. The conclusions were stark.

  The climate had not changed. This refuted a theory Roosevelt had been mulling for some time: that the plains were in the first years of a hundred-year cycle of change. The plains had suffered a severe drought—no argument there—but dry times were part of prairie life, dating back eons. An accompanying map showed the president what was obvious to any student of American geography: the nation's midsection west of the ninety-eighth meridian, from the Canadian border to Mexico, received only twenty inches of yearly rainfall or less. This was simply not enough rain to raise crops, no matter how much "dust-mulching" or other dry farming gimmicks were promoted, and it was why banks for so long had refused to lend money in this arid zone. During the drought, the dry states had received anywhere from five to twelve inches annually.

  "There is no reason to believe that the primary factors of climate, temperature, precipitation and winds in the Great Plains region have undergone any fundamental change," the report stated. "The problem of the Great Plains is not the product of a single act of nature, of a single year or even a series of exceptionally bad years."


  What, then, was the cause?

  "Mistaken public policies have been largely responsible for the situation," the report proclaimed. Specifically, "a mistaken homesteading policy, the stimulation of war time demands which led to over cropping and over grazing, and encouragement of a system of agriculture which could not be both permanent and prosperous."

  For Roosevelt, who believed in human initiative aided by government goodwill as a guiding force, these words were hard to take. His most trusted aide on the land and a host of experts were telling him that people —not weather or bad luck—had caused the problem. What's more, in an additional blow to Roosevelt's humanitarian impulses, the experts said a big part of what ailed the prairie could not be fixed by man.

  "The basic cause of the present Great Plains situation is an attempt to impose upon the region a system of agriculture to which the Plains are not adapted," the report stated. "The Great Plains has climatic attributes which cannot be altered by any act of man, although they may be slowly changed, for better or worse, by natural weather cycles which we cannot yet predict."