The Worst Hard Time

by Timothy Egan

  "This is a period of fast times," a Dalhart businessman, Jim Pigman, wrote in his diary, "and much drinking of poor liquor."

  Just a few strides from the railroad switch tower, Bam White came upon a curious sight: a two-story sanitarium. It was the only hospital for hundreds of miles. On one side of the sanitarium was a tobacco ad—a big, red-and-white snorting bull promoting Bull Durham Smoking Tobacco. Inside was a specimen room, with pickled fetuses, tumors, an enlarged liver, goiters, and a heart. The liver had belonged to a saloonkeeper in the days before Prohibition. It was grayish green and huge, and served as a visual aid—an example of what can happen to someone who poured too much corn whiskey down his gullet. Presiding over the sanitarium was a tobacco-spitting, black-bearded man of the South, Dr. George Waller Dawson. The Doc always wore a dark Stetson, though he was said to take it off during surgery, and kept a brass spittoon nearby for his tobacco habit. He chewed through child delivery and lung surgery, it didn't matter. His wife, Willie Catherine, was the finest-looking woman in the Panhandle. That wasn't just Doc Dawson's opinion; in 1923, she won a diamond ring as prize for being voted the most beautiful woman at a Panhandle Fourth of July celebration.

  "My Willie," the Doc called the missus. She had dark eyes, an aquiline nose, and a powerful taste for literature. Willie kept the accounting books of the sanitarium and also served as anesthesiologist. She was the only person who could run the solitary x-ray machine for a few hundred miles in any direction. The Doc and his Willie were always busy cutting open cowboys and splicing nesters back together after they had been sliced by barbed wire, thrown from a horse, or knocked down by a windmill pump. They patched bones, yanked gallstones, and cut away shanks of infected flesh from people who insisted on paying them with animals, live and dead. In one month alone, the Doc and Willie performed sixty-three operations. A Kentuckian, Dawson had come to Texas for his health. He had persistent respiratory problems and legs that would sometimes freeze up on him, a kind of paralysis that puzzled the Kentucky medical community. The High Plains was the cure. He arrived in 1907, planning to start a ranch and live off his investments. In time, he hoped to breathe like a normal man and lavish attention on the lovely Willie. But he lost nearly everything two years later in a market collapse. His second chance was found in the two-story brick building in Dalhart, well north of his ranch. He opened the sanitarium in 1912.

  By the late 1920s, Dr. Dawson intended to cut back on his medical work and try once more to make a go of it on the land. The money in farming was so easy, just there for the taking. Despite all his years of practicing medicine, the Doc had saved up very little for his retirement. The nest egg would be in the land. He had purchased a couple of sections and was going to try his luck at cotton or wheat. Wheat was supposed to be the simplest way to bring riches from the ground. Doc Dawson would take some time off from running the hospital and see if he could coax something from the Staked Plains to free him of the rubbing alcohol and the pickled organs. It was their last best chance, he told his family.

  Bam White walked past the sanitarium and on down Denrock, the main street of Dalhart. The cowboy passed the Felton Opera House, two stories tall with fine Victorian trim, then a clothing store, with window displays of new dress shirts and silk ties. This was Herzstein's; as far as anyone knew, they were the only Jews in Dalhart. Streetlights, with wicks that had to be lit every night, dangled from cords strung to poles. A bustle of people played cards and jawboned over grain prices inside a new-looking, yellow-brick hotel, the DeSoto. The DeSoto was first class: solid walnut doors, a bathtub and toilet in every room, along with a telephone. A guest could dial 126 and get a reservation to see a girl at the place just west of Dalhart. It didn't have a name, just the Number 126 house. Next door to the DeSoto was the moving picture establishment, the Mission Theater. None of Bam White's children had ever seen a movie.

  Crews came by with sprinklers to wet down the streets, but dust still kicked up with every carriage and car that passed by. The town felt somewhat tentative; a mighty breath or a twister could blow everything down, collapsing all the pretty painted sticks. Talking to folks, Bam White found out real quick who owned Dalhart. That would be Uncle Dick Coon, the well-fed gentleman sitting there at the DeSoto with his cards in one hand and a hand-rolled cigarette in the other. He owned the DeSoto, the Mission Theater, just about every business on Denrock. You watch Uncle Dick for just a few minutes, folks said, and you would see him flash a hundred-dollar bill from his pocket. Three months of cowboy wages pinched between two fingers. Bam White had never seen a hundred dollar bill till he came through Dalhart.

  The C-note was Uncle Dick's heater, his blanket. As a child, Dick Coon's family was often broke. The corrosive poverty hurt so much it defined the rest of his life. As long as Uncle Dick could touch his C-note, he had no fear in life. And he had certainly known fear. Dick Coon was fortunate to live through the Galveston hurricane of 1900, the worst single natural disaster in American history. He lost everything in Galveston but was never bitter. His life had been spared, while six thousand people lost theirs. Dick Coon didn't plan on getting rich in Dalhart; didn't even plan on staying in the High Plains. In 1902, he had been passing through Dalhart, making a train connection to Houston, when he fell under the spell of one of the syndicate's real estate agents. He heard enough to buy his own piece of the old XIT. The ranching went well, but the real money was in town building.

  Back from his tour of town, Bam White found Lizzie in a panic and the children looking at him like they'd just had the life scared out of them. What is it?

  Dead horse.

  Again?

  Dead. Check for yourself, daddy.

  Bam White's horse was flat on its side, the body cold, rotted teeth exposed. She was dead all right. Now Bam was without enough of a team to make it another step. The family had no means to buy another horse, and it had been hard enough traveling from Boise City to Dalhart. Well, then, it must be a sign, Bam said to the kids—maybe he was born for this XIT country anyhow. There have got to be plenty of jobs in this new town, even on a gentleman's ranch.

  Marooned, Bam made his decision on the spot: the family would stay in Dalhart. A guy in town had told him about opportunities in the newly plowed fields. This town was going places. It had a shine, a face full of ambition. The fields were turning fast, making money for anybody with a pulse and a plow. The way White looked at Dalhart was the way Doc Dawson and Uncle Dick looked at their homes in the Panhandle: as the last best chance to do something right, to get a small piece of the world and make it work. The wanderer would settle in and see what the earth would bring him in what had been the world's greatest grassland.

  2. No Man's Land

  IF DALHART WAS A PLACE where dreams took flight on the last snort of a dying horse, the next huddle of humans up the road was a town where just the opposite happened. Hope died the first time people laid eyes on Boise City, Oklahoma. It was founded on fraud. Even the name itself was a lie. Boy-City, the promoters pronounced it, from the French words le bois —trees. Except there was not a single tree in Boise City. Nor was there a city. But that didn't stop the Southwestern Immigration and Development Company from selling lots, at forty-five dollars apiece, in a phantom town in the newly opened Panhandle of Oklahoma. The company sent fliers all over the country, showing a town as ripe as a peach two days into its blush. The brochures sketched a Boise City with elegantly aged trees lining the streets, a tower of cold, clean water gushing from an artesian well in the center of town, and houses any banker would be proud to call home. The streets were paved. Businesses were chock-a-block on Main Street. Three railroads were building lines to Boise City, the company said, and a fourth was on the way. You could grow cotton, corn, or wheat on rich land just outside the city limits. Hurry—sites are going fast. A fiction, all of it. But the story helped them sell three thousand town lots in 1908, one year after Oklahoma became the forty-sixth state.

  When the lucky buyers showed up to see their share of t
he shining new city on the designated opening day, they were shocked. Women came in full-length white dresses and men in polished boots. If anyone from the development company had been around, the life would have been choked out of them by the best-dressed mob on the plains. On Boise City's imaginary streets, the buyers found stakes in the ground and flags flapping in the wind. No railroads. No tracks. No plans for railroads. No fine houses. No businesses. The artesian well was a stockman's crude tank next to a windmill, full of flies. Worst of all, the company did not even own the land it had sold.

  The developers were arrested for fraud. Lurid was the word the government used to describe the lies of the town developers, J. E. Stanley and A. J. Kline. After a two-week trial, the pair was found guilty and sent to Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary. Kline died in his cell—a lesson apparently not passed on in the annals of American real estate.

  Boise City, without trees, railroad, or bankers' homes, somehow took shape nonetheless. It was closer to Colorado's capital of Denver, 299 miles north, than it was to its own statehouse in Oklahoma City, 340 miles to the east. But the founding principle of feisty fraud carried over long enough for the site to win designation as the Cimarron County seat, despite murder threats from rival towns. By 1920, Boise City had 250 residents, and the big county at the far end of No Man's Land was approaching 3,500 people.

  Hyperbole in service of Western settlement was certainly not limited to town developers. Railroads, banks, politicians, and newspaper editors all played a variation of the scheme—selling a windblown piece of ground that was supposed to increase in value as more people saw a fledgling town emerging from a larva of forlorn dirt. But Kline and Stanley were among the few people ever convicted of lying about the High Plains. The flattest, driest, most wind-raked, least arable part of the United States was transformed by government incentive, private showmanship, and human desire from the Great American Desert into Eden with a haircut. Settlement was a dare, on a grand scale, to see if people could defy common sense. During a Fourth of July celebration in 1928 at the highest point in Oklahoma, the 4,973-foot-high tabletop of Black Mesa, in the far northwest corner, the featured speaker, state senator W. J. Rizen, said, "The Panhandle of Oklahoma is destined to be the greatest wheat-growing country in the world."

  No Man's Land had been one of the last places in the United States where a person could hide, and nobody cared enough to come look for them, or to get lost, never to be found again. For nearly 350 years after Coronado marched through, the land remained unwanted.

  "Not a single landmark is to be seen for forty miles—scarcely a visible eminence by which to direct one's course," wrote Josiah Gregg while traveling between the Arkansas and Cimarron Rivers in 1831. Gregg was a meticulous note-taker, but he was exaggerating. The land bunches up at the western edge, near Black Mesa, and a few stunted pinon and cedar trees grow in the north-facing draws there. Gregg told a story about Captain William Becknell, the first to try a shortcut from the Santa Fe Trail in 1822 and angle through No Man's Land. Becknell and his thirty men ran out of water and wandered, near death, till they killed a bison and cut open its stomach, drinking fluids from the animal's insides to save themselves. For additional hydration, they cut the ears of their mules and drank the blood, Gregg wrote.

  Five flags had flown over No Man's Land. Spain was the first to claim it, but two expeditions and reports from traders reinforced the view that the land was best left to the "humped-back cows" and their pursuers, the Comanche, Kiowa, and Apache. Spain gave the territory to Napoleon. The French flag flew for all of twenty days, until the emperor turned around and sold it to the United States as part of the Louisiana Purchase. A subsequent survey put the land in Mexico's hands, an extension of their rule over Texas in 1819. Seventeen years later, the newly independent Republic of Texas claimed all territory north to Colorado. But when Texas was admitted to the Union in 1845, it was on the condition that no new slave territory would rise above 36.5 degrees in latitude, the old Missouri Compromise line. That left an orphaned rectangle, 35 miles wide and 210 miles long, that was not attached to any territory or state in the West, and it got its name, No Man's Land. The eastern boundary, at the one hundredth meridian, was where the plains turned unlivably arid, unfit for Jefferson's farmer-townbuilders.

  In the late nineteenth century, one corner of the Panhandle served as a roost for outlaws, thieves, and killers. The Coe Gang was known for dressing like Indians while attacking wagon trains on the Cimarron Cutoff. The Santa Fe Railroad pushed a line as far as Liberal, Kansas, on the Panhandle border, in 1888. Kansas was dry. And so a place called Beer City sprang up just across the state line: a hive of bars, brothels, gambling houses, smuggling dens, and town developers on the run. The first settlement in No Man's Land, Beer City lasted barely two years before it was carted away in pieces. Law, taxes, and land title companies finally came to the Panhandle in 1890, when the long, undesired stretch was stitched to Oklahoma Territory.

  The name Oklahoma is a combination of two Choctaw words— okla, which means "people," and humma, the word for "red." The red people lost the land in real estate stampedes that produced instant towns—Oklahoma City, Norman, and Guthrie among them. But the great land rushes never made it out to the Panhandle. No Man's Land was settled, finally, when there was no other land left to take.

  It was a hard place to love; a tableau for mischief and sudden death from the sky or up from the ground. Hazel Lucas, a daring little girl with straw-colored hair, first saw the grasslands near the end of a family journey to claim a homestead. Hazel got up on the tips of her toes in the horse-drawn wagon to stare into an abyss of beige. It was as empty as the back end of a day, a wilderness of flat. The family clawed a hole in the side of the prairie just south of Boise City. It was not the promised land Hazel had imagined, but it had ... possibility. She was thrilled to be at the beginning of a grand adventure, the first wave of humans to try to mate with this land. She also felt scared, because it was so foreign. The lure was price, her daddy said. This land was the only bargain left in America. The XIT property, just thirty miles to the south, could cost a family nearly $10,000 for a half-section. Here it was free, though there was not much left to claim. By 1910, almost two hundred million acres nationwide had been patented by homesteaders, more than half of it in the Great Plains. Hazel missed trees. She wanted just one sturdy elm with a branch strong enough to hold a swing. And she didn't want to live in a hole in the ground, with the snakes and tarantulas, and sleeping so near to the stink of burning cow manure. Nor did she want to live in a sod house, the prairie grass stacked like ice blocks of an igloo. Soddies leaked. Friends who had been in the Panhandle long enough to make their peace with it told the Lucas folks that if a person wore out two pair of shoes in this country, they would never leave. You just had to give this land some time to make it work.

  Hazel's family arrived in No Man's Land in 1914, the peak year for homesteads in the twentieth century—53,000 claims made throughout the Great Plains. Every man a landlord! But people were already fleeing the northern plains, barely five years after passage of the Enlarged Homestead Act. The northern exodus should have been a warning that the attempt to cover the prairie with "speckled cattle and festive cowboys," as General Sheridan had said, was a mistake. Places like Choteau County, Montana, lost half their population between 1910 and 1930, while Cimarron County, Oklahoma, grew by 70 percent and Dallam County, Texas (home of Dalhart), doubled its population during the same time. The killer winters—temperatures of minus forty in Montana froze farm animals in place—were not a problem in the southern plains, people told themselves. Just get your piece of the grassland and go to it.

  Family and their sod house, No Man's Land, date unknown

  The federal government was so anxious to settle No Man's Land that they offered free train rides to pilgrims looking to prove up a piece of dry land, just as XIT realtors had done. The slogan was "Health, Wealth, and Opportunity." Hazel's father, William Carlyle, known as Carlie, built a dug
out in 1915 for his family and started plowing the grass on his half-section, a patch of sandy loam. The home was twenty-two feet long by fourteen feet wide—308 square feet for a family of seven.

  Without a windmill, the Lucas family would not have lasted a day, nor would much of the High Plains been settled. Windmills came west with the railroads, which needed large amounts of water to cool the engines and generate steam. It was a Yankee mechanic, Daniel Halladay, who fashioned a smaller version of bigger Dutch windmills. The Union Pacific Railroad was his first big customer. Eventually, a nester could buy a windmill kit for about seventy-five dollars. Some people hit water at thirty feet, others had to go three times as deep. Some dug the hole by hand, a grueling task, prone to cave-ins; others used steam or horse-powered drills. Once the aquifer was breached, a single wooden-towered windmill could furnish enough water for most farming needs on a full section of land. The pumps broke down often, and parts were hard to come by. But nesters were convinced they had tapped into a vein of life-giving fluid that would never give out. Don't just look at the grass and sky, they were advised; imagine a vast lake just below the surface.

  "No purer water ever came out of the ground," a real estate brochure circulating through the Panhandle in 1908 claimed. "The supply is inexhaustible."

  In trying to come to terms with a strange land, perhaps the biggest fear was fire. The combination of wind, heat, lightning, and combustible grass was nature's perfect recipe for fire. One day the grass could look sweet and green, spread across the face of No Man's Land. Another day it would be a roaring flank of smoke and flame, marching toward the dugout. Hazel Lucas was petrified of prairie fires, and for good reason. A few years before the family arrived, a lightning bolt lit up a field in New Mexico, igniting a fire that swept across the High Plains of Texas and Oklahoma. It burned everything in its wake for two hundred miles. Fire was part of the prairie ecosystem, a way for the land to regenerate itself, clean out excess insect populations, and allow the grass to be renewed. The year after a fire, the grass never looked healthier. Cattle, planted on the land for only a few years, tried fleeing the big fires, but they were often burned or trampled to death. Nesters frantically dug trenches or berms around their homes, hoping to create buffer lines. Sometimes a rolling blaze skipped over a dugout; other times it snuffed the roof and smoked out everything else. Pushed by the winds, a prairie fire moved so quickly it was difficult for a person on horseback to outrun it.