Hard Travellin

by Kenneth Allsop

  Yet - and here the saga of repeated defeat and repeated evanescence of effort begins to stamp itself upon this region - when the spell of killer summers abated and a phase of rains and coolness entered others came through to repair the crumbling houses and attack the earth again.

  Between 1900 and 1910 the population of the ten states leaped thirty-eight per cent to more than three million, the armies which had withdrawn battling back again. Here is ‘the tragic drama frequently repeated’ (in the phrase of a 1937 Works Progress Administration bulletin) beginning to shape itself into the dwelling fury.

  In the forty-eight years after 1889 the Great Plains states were stricken by severe drought almost one year in six. The ‘excessively dry periods’ occurred in 1889, 1890, 1901, 1917, 1930, 1933, 1934, and 1936. But really it may be seen with greater clarity how those early stragglers - dependent literally upon the seed they scattered from sacks by the palms of their hands - had to meet the seasons, when it is put the other way: that from 1880 until the New Deal installations of irrigation equipment and the enforcement of education on crop procedure, there were no more than three naturally favourable periods for raising cultivated crops. They were 1880–1885, 1902–1906 and 1918–1923. Other than in those brief respites, drought and locusts and parching winds, while not afflicting the states uniformly, struck at them all, erratically but mutilatingly.

  In all these early calamities and flights there was no urban spectator audience with economic criteria and social conscience to record, to tell, to expose the indifference to the suffering of those rolling onward. Unheard of, out of sight, they just went and found some kind of refuge and salvation, or didn’t find it.

  The truth is that few of them were equipped to combat the conditions they blundered into, and they further confounded their dilemma by inexperience or by experience wrong for these unfamiliar violent conditions. In 1937 the Social Research Division of the Works Progress Administration, belatedly trying to formulate a policy for correcting almost a century of mistakes and mess, came to the conclusion - not explicitly stated but intrinsic - that the Dust Bowl refugee, far from being a unique creation of the Thirties or being indigenous to Oklahoma and Arkansas, was an inevitable outcome (again, the detritus) of a free-for-all system and the obstinate, superstitious faith, immutable under recurrent evidence to the contrary, that balance could emerge from licensed anarchy.

  The People of the Drought States was one of three reports on the problems of the areas of ‘intense drought distress’ and set out to show how uncontrolled settlement had inevitably brought about dislocation between the people and the natural resources. The bulletin’s frame of reference was that of the movements of the past, what became accepted as ‘normal export’ of population.

  Then in 1936, it pointed out, there were fifteen million people living in the ten Great Plains states where fifty years earlier there had been only three and a half millions, a population growth then of unprecedented speed. Once the conquest of the prairies had been made feasible by the commercial feed-lines of the railroads, by the first rudimentary interstate carriageways, by the mass production of barbed-wire whereby the small homesteader could fence off his plantings from the ranger’s cattle, and by the development of the cheap bolt-together windmill which sucked up to the surface at least a sustaining trickle of water, then ‘a large army of restive settlers from the Eastern states and direct from Europe flocked into the Mid-West to lay their claims’.

  But the ‘demand for homesteads and the desire to bring each homestead under the plough were so insistent that no thought was given to those factors which might limit agricultural activities. And when the conditions seemed unfavourable an unstable population, avoiding rather than solving its problems, simply moved on.’

  Where was it that this fickle, impatient army went wrong ? For one thing, reported a 1926 bulletin issued by the North Dakota Agricultural Experiment Station, Rural Changes in Western North Dakota, ‘many of them were single and among the homesteaders were women, old people, excitement seekers, rovers and people from the most widely separated walks of life. Not infrequently the homesteader had never been on a farm previous to his filing.

  ‘A study of twelve townships of Western Dakota classifies nearly one-half of the 669 farm operators who had moved out of the territory by 1925 as having come in the first place chiefly for speculative purposes. No more than one-fourth of these speculators had had any farming experience…’

  Again in the 1870-1910 migration the vast majority of the migrants came from below the Appalachian and Allegheny Mountains, a region dominated by row-crop agriculture. At bottom was the fatal misconception of the Homestead Act, which was grounded in experience acquired by settling a mildly amiable zone where humidity was uniform and relatively high, and where medium-sized farms made sense.

  The Act had no relevance West of the hundredth meridian. The quarter-section originally allocated to the settler was too tiny for either grazing or for dry land farming. Later modifications - increase of land grants per person, regulation of the settlement of desert, subsidized irrigation projects - were too late, too haphazard, too piecemeal to provide material benefit. In fact the changes of policy often caused dispirited settlers to pack up and move on, and failed to put others in their place.

  Equally important, as settlement reached deeper into arid country, the farming techniques themselves needed radical revision. But ‘the early settlers from the Eastern states or from Europe knew only the intensive mouldboard culture. To them, any man who did not turn his soil completely over and pulverize it was slothful. To allow stubble to protrude, as when the soil is partially turned with disc harrow or plough, was to demonstrate his laziness. Wheat seed beds were made almost as carefully as gardens had been made in the place of original residence. Thus, adaptation to the new environment was necessarily slow and difficult … There were no experimental stations to determine better methods, and the individual farmer could improve his efforts only through his own and his neighbours’ experimentations.’

  One more factor was quick profits offered by government-stimulated wheat raising during and after World War I, especially between 1927 and 1930 when succulent export markets were open, which encouraged brutal over-forcing of the land.

  The Grapes of Wrath were ripening for many years, the fruit of ignorance and greed, and irresponsibility toward the soil, based on the attitude that there was plenty farther on when this had been thrashed out. Prairie sod, binding safely the powdery tilth beneath, was recklessly hacked up; swamps and shallow lakes were drained to grab more wheat acreage; what woodland there was had been clear-felled for housing materials, or the bark of each tree snipped through until it died, then the whole wood burned down to extend money-making crops; pasture was improvidently over-grazed.

  By the Thirties it had become obvious that drought, if not man-made in this province, had been man-worsened, and that even if some miraculous climatic endenization occurred a dependable normal rainfall could not repair the harm and ensure a firm prosperity.

  The exodus of the Okies and the Arkies was an upheaval of dreadful proportions but it was really the breaking of a riptide built up from a procession of smaller waves. To stem this ‘aimless and expensive migration’ not only interim measures were urged but ‘far reaching changes in attitude and policy toward land ownership and land use’. Otherwise, it was warned, ‘a new wave of immigrants may come in to take the places of those who have recently left. Cheap land and the prospects of speculative gain are almost certain to attract new settlers. Even the most distressed portion of the area reported some migrants to farms between 1930 and 1935…

  ‘Stability of residence itself is not necessarily a desirable goal’ - even here, be it noted, the American belief in the holiness of movement itself has to be dropped a curtsy - ‘but the high degree of mobility which has been characteristic of the Great Plains area indicates an unsatisfactory adjustment between man and his natural environment’. And even this was but part of a vaster agitatio
n, people running away, people racing to goals. A Department of Agriculture calculation is that between 1920 and 1937 thirty million persons moved from farms to towns and twenty-one million moved from towns to farms: coming and going, a minimum of fifty million migrations.

  The Grapes of Wrath and the road refugees of the Thirties were prognosticated as long before as 1896 when Frederick H. Newell, chief hydrographer of the U.S. Geological Survey, wrote with a poetical power rare in official reports: ‘Year after year the water supply may be ample, the forage plants cover the ground with a rank growth, the herds multiply, the settlers extend their fields, when, almost imperceptibly, the climate becomes less humid, the rain clouds forming day after day disappear upon the horizon and weeks lengthen into months without a drop of moisture.

  The grasses wither, the herds wander wearily over the plains in search of water holes, the crops wilt and languish, yielding not even the seed for another year. Fall and winter come and go with occasional showers which scarcely seem to wet the earth, and the following spring opens with the soil so dry that it is blown about over the windy plains.

  ‘Another and perhaps another season of drought occurs, the settlers depart with such of their household furniture as can be drawn away by the enfeebled draft animals, the herds disappear, and this beautiful land, once so fruitful, is now dry and brown, given over to the prairie wolf. There comes a season of ample rains. The prairie grasses, dormant through several seasons, spring into life, and with these the hopes of new pioneers. Then recurs the flood of immigration, to be continued until the next long drought.’

  The temper of the times was to lick this limbo into shape as you break a wild horse, with spurs, rope and muscle. The government’s aim - it could not qualify as a policy - was to rid itself as swiftly as it could of the remaining public domain, and so satisfy the clamour for space which had been partly deliberately inculcated, to disembarrass itself of the surplus labour of its see-sawing Eastern industry. The pressures were irresistible.

  Many of the claimants dawdled just long enough partially to chop a clearing, sell for a profit and race on toward other quick-buck speculations. After the first rush of stop-and-go settlement, although a more gradual process of adjustment unfolded, foment never faded. More than three million original homestead entries were filed between 1863 and 1963, but only fifty-eight per cent of these were finalized.

  The standards by which Americans assess stability are defined by Malin’s observation that by 1925 West Kansas farmers ‘were apparently more settled as only one half had withdrawn ten years later’. The following years bore signs of roots beginning to attach, but even by 1935 only two-thirds of the farm workers present five years earlier were still ensconced or had a son there.

  From the start the population of the Great Plains has been a youthful one but of course throughout the bewildering heterotopy of Western pioneering an established custom has been for the settler to pack off his sons to fend for themselves - simply, originally, because survival on the family parcel, and with climatic batterings so frequent, was a hair’s breadth measurement: economically, the young man ready to marry and have children of his own was forced to migrate in search of his own space and opportunities, and so with the grandchildren.

  In the Great Plains states especially big families have always been the norm. Long before the First World War made corn the region’s basic trading product, it was producing a human export crop: the sons who trekked deeper into the state or on to others beyond. Between 1920 and 1930 there was more emigration than immigration throughout half of the ten states, and only one showed an excess of incoming over outgoing. Despite the continued enlargement of territory for agriculture, despite the rapid national climb in birth rate - consistently highest of all in the Great Plains - there has been virtually no change in the numbers on farms here since 1910. Probably nearly three millions moved away from the points of ‘residence’ in the years before the notorious exodus of the Thirties, yet these movements attracted little attention or remark.

  The Thirties exodus is probably quite fairly, with clinical detachment, assessed in the official conclusion that ‘the interstate movement in its various aspects would indicate that drought and economic depression accentuated previously existing trends without radically altering the direction of the movement of the Twenties’.

  Yet there were significant differences. The ‘tincan tourists’ were not only Okies and Arkies; and they did not all make for California.

  In the Monthly Labor Review for February 1936 Paul S. Taylor and Tom Vasey reported on a six-month check of all motor traffic at the main highway ports-of-entry to California. Between June and December 1935 53,000 in parties and ‘in need of manual employment’ entered California but twenty per cent of these were former California residents calling it off after trying their luck somewhere else. During nine and a half months ending 30 September 1936, another 71,000 ‘in need of manual employment’ came across the state line in motor vehicles. Fourteen per cent of these were, again, Californians. Among the remainder were 16,500 from Oklahoma, 6,200 from Texas, 2,600 from Kansas, and about 1,500 each from Colorado, New Mexico and Nebraska.

  But other surveys of the time show heavy migration also out of the drought belt up into Minnesota and Iowa. A 1935 study, Rural Migration and Farm Abandonment by George W. Hill, undertaken in Tripp County, South Dakota, traced 114 families who had flitted between 1930 and 1934. A third had moved across the nearby border into Nebraska; one-twelfth had switched to Iowa, and, while many of the others had made for California, a lot had gone South.

  But the Thirties exodus did and still does stand apart. In October 1935 three-tenths of all agricultural households in the Great Plains had been on relief for between fifteen and nineteen months, and one-tenth for two years or more. This was an exodus of an extremity not known before. These were not migrants but refugees, as inexorably driven as the strangely similar shuffling crocodiles moving at the same time, 10,000 miles away, down the roads of Europe from other forms of persecution, and likewise refugees who would in many cases never again find an abode. The Okies and Arkies were quondam settlers being hammered by new social forces, gipsy hordes created by, and for the use of, the evolving factory farm system.

  Objectively the Dust Bowl refugees were the ones who took the rap for a maniacal exploitation of resources which, cherished and studied, would have been forever fruitful. It was soil mining. The complex skein of organic balances which had made the plains rich and green for aeons was smashed in a couple of decades, first by the land-clearers who ‘deadened’ the land by felling and burning out forest, then rape by plough.

  Conservationists measure that three of the nine inches of the vital topsoil of the American continent have been flung away, never to be replaced - gone with the wind in storms and floods into the rivers and the sea. But the refugees who themselves, or whose fathers or predecessors, skinned their country and turned the frontier into a ‘sump-hole of poverty’ were but the victims as the land itself was a victim.

  Land hawks leased great chunks of Indian lands and sub-leased to settlers. As this territory was untaxable there was no money to support public schools, so illiteracy was standard. By the time the tenant or sharecropper, impoverished from the start, had raked together enough dollars to buy his twenty-acre tract he had milked it dry and there was no money for equipment and improvement - for he was paying interest rates on his chattel mortgages ranging from twenty to two hundred per cent. The money vanished into the ‘electric light’ towns, where lived the merchants and usurers who milked him as hard as he had to milk the land.

  The Okie was rootless because he never had the possibility of owning a patch big enough to contain his roots; and, when finally licked by interest rates and weather, he had little to lose by packing up, quitting his slovenly land, and poking on. When in 1770 Oliver Goldsmith published his poem The Deserted Village, it was one of the few records of what the Enclosures had done to the English labourer, for the literature of the time had o
verlooked, or averted its sight from, the misery of a rural population torn from its possessions and set adrift. America’s villages were deserted and her labourers thrown into vagabondage for many years before their impact upon settled communities became disturbing and alarming enough to attract notice.

  In 1939 there was published An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion, text by Paul Schuster Taylor, photographs by Dorothea Lange. This was a picture of America which must have startled America, an America whose tenuous connection with the Hollywood fairy tale, then winding around the world, was the Carole Lombard and Anne Shirley poster hoardings under which nomadic families crouched from the sun.

  The book’s illustrations were of a terribly damaged people, like some separate, doomed aboriginal tribe; ragged, scraggy and worn, on buggies, at the wheels of gangrenous old cars packed with bedding and sticks of furniture, in mule-carts and flat trailers and hard-tyre vans.

  There were families in tents and roadside shelters of cardboard cartons, wooden crates and package paper. There were ghost towns, drained by drought and tumbling cotton prices. There were men, work and confidence gone, hunched on the front stoop of listing shanties, looking with haggard eyes on to bare land herringboned by erosion. There were fathers and mothers, with clusters of small children and bags under arms, trudging on foot down bleak arterials - to where? The captions were mostly from the lips of the dispossessed, those shot-gunned or bulldozed off their living.