The Worst Hard Time

by Timothy Egan

  But some people felt immune. Once, a preacher joined a postal carrier making his rounds in No Man's Land. The sky turned black and lightning flashed. Bolts struck the ground and electrified barbed-wire fences. The preacher cowered for cover. The carrier told him to relax. "God isn't that awful," he said. "Lightning will never strike a mailman or a preacher." Within ten years, God would change moods.

  When it wasn't fire, it was another element on the run in No Man's Land. The year the Lucas family arrived in the Panhandle, the worst flood in young Cimarron County's history terrorized a string of ranches and homesteads. Most of the year, the Cimarron River skulks meekly away to the east, a barely discernible trickle in midsummer. But in the spring of 1914, after a week of steady rains, the Cimarron jumped its banks and went on a rampage. The flood knocked out a dam that had just been completed, carried a thirteen-room ranch house into the river, and washed away numerous homes. Two children drowned.

  Even the entertainment could be traumatic. People would gather at makeshift rodeo stands near Boise City on Saturday afternoons to watch the cow dip. Cattle were herded into a chute and down into a vat of water. Once they hit the water, they were drowned by two cowboys, on either side of the vat, who held their heads down while the beeves bucked. Some of the children didn't like it—an amusement ride with sudden death at the end.

  The Lucas family stayed through the fires, the floods, and the peculiar social life because the land was starting to pay. Not as grassland for cattle, but as crop-producing dirt. Carlie dug up part of his half-section using a horse-drawn walking plow and planted it in wheat and corn. The Great War, starting in 1914, meant a fortune was about to be made in the most denigrated part of America, all of the dryland wheat belt. Turn the ground, Lucas was advised, as fast as you can.

  Within a few years, the family built a home above ground, rising from their dugout in line with thousands of other prospectors of wheat. They bought lumber, nails, siding, and roofing material from the rail town of Texhoma, forty miles southeast, and went about building a frame house, with living room, kitchen, bedrooms, fruit cellar, trim, shingles, and large windows. The door faced south, a necessity in No Man's Land to keep the northers from blowing cold into the new abode. Framing timber around the bright Oklahoma sky, the Lucas family dreamed of space enough to play music and cook without bumping into each other, or falling to sleep at night without having to scan the floor for snakes. But just as the new house was starting to take shape, a musclebound blow arrived one spring afternoon, strong enough to knock a person down. They fled into the old dugout next door. The wind screeched, tugging at the new house. It was a steady roar, not a gale. On the morning of the second day, they heard the awful clank of crumbling timbers. Hazel Lucas poked her head above the dugout and saw in a swirl of dust and wood chips that their new home was being carried upward and away with the wind. The storm took the entire house. After four days, the family went searching the prairie, looking for pieces of their home.

  Dugout homestead, Blaine County, Oklahoma Territory, 1894

  For all the horror, the land was not without its magic. The first Anglos in the Panhandle used to recite a little ditty:

  I like this country fine

  I think it's awfully good.

  For the wind pumps all the water

  And the cow chops all the wood.

  After a rain- or hailstorm had rumbled through, the sky was open and embracing, the breeze only a soft whisper against the songs of meadowlarks and cooing of doves. A prairie chicken doing its mating dance, its full-breasted plumage in a heave of sexual pride, was a thing to see. So was a pronghorn antelope coming through the grass, bouncing out of a wallow. Robin's egg blue was the color of mornings without fear. At night, you could see the stars behind the stars. Infinity was never an abstraction on the High Plains.

  Hazel Lucas would ride her horse Pecos over the prairie to visit with the James boys, one of the last big ranching families, whose spread touched parts of Texas and Oklahoma. There was Walter and Mettie and their kids Andy, Jesse, Peachey, Joe Bob, Newt, and Fannie Sue. The boys could ride, rope, and cuss better than anyone in Boise City, and the stories they told made a girl feel she was being allowed into a secret—and vanishing—world. Andy was a bit of a mysterious presence and had a swagger that drew people to him. He would disappear for five days at a time, then show up suddenly in Boise City.

  "Where you been, Andy?" Hazel asked him.

  "Riding fence."

  "What'd ya eat out there?"

  "Grasshoppers."

  "How do you eat a grasshopper?"

  "Just snap off his head, light a match, and stick it up his ass."

  "Yeah? How's that taste?"

  "Mighty crunchy."

  For the rest of her life, whenever Hazel saw Andy James, she would say to him, "Mighty crunchy."

  Hazel also learned to play basketball outside, wearing the black sateen bloomers of the Cimarron County High School girls team. The coach's Model-T was kept at courtside, to chase balls once the wind got a hold of them, or to light the court after dusk. Hazel was barely sixteen when she went to see the first track meet held in Cimarron County. She could not take her eyes off a fleet-footed boy who won several races. She had the crush bad on that good-looking kid, Charlie Shaw, who was tall, about six-foot-five inches. You could tell, all the Lucas cousins said, by the way they looked at each other that something was doing between them.

  In the fall of 1922, Hazel saddled up Pecos and rode off to a one-room, wood-frame building sitting alone in the grassland: the schoolhouse. It was Hazel's first job. She had to be there before the bell rang—five-and-a-half miles by horseback each way—to haul in drinking water from the well, to sweep dirt from the floor, and shoo hornets and flies from inside. The school had thirty-nine students in eight grades, and the person who had to teach them all, Hazel Lucas, was seventeen years old. In its first years, the schoolhouse lacked desks. Fruit crates, or planks nailed to stumps, did the job. After school, Hazel had to do the janitor work and get the next day's kindling—dry weeds or sun-toasted cow manure.

  Sod schoolhouse, Texas-Oklahoma Panhandle, 1889

  When the winds kicked up as always or a twitching sky threatened hail, she felt like she was back in the dugout, cramped and gasping for space. But when it was nice, she took the children outside and staged horse races. She taught them basketball. Once, she loaded up players in a wagon and galloped off four miles to play another team. But the sky turned ugly, growled, and broke in a fit of hail. The children started to cry. One horse panicked and bolted. Kids jumped from the wagon, hail storming down on them. Hazel Lucas leaped from the carriage seat to the back of the panicked horse, seized the bridle, and rode the horse to calm.

  All the while, she wondered about a life far away, in one of the bustling cities of the Midwest, or just a place where the routine of a day was not so full of random death. The Kansas City Star arrived by mail in Boise City once a week, and Hazel got a sense of how fast America was moving: flappers, gangsters, and stunts—two men tried to play airborne tennis while standing, strapped, to the wings of a biplane. In Cimarron County, most people didn't even have electricity, and many still lived in earthen dugouts or soddies.

  But no group of people took a more dramatic leap in lifestyle or prosperity, in such a short time, than wheat farmers on the Great Plains. In less than ten years, they went from subsistence living to small business-class wealth, from working a few hard acres with horses and hand tools to being masters of wheat estates, directing harvests with wondrous new machines, at a profit margin in some cases that was ten times the cost of production. In 1910, the price of wheat stood at eighty cents a bushel, good enough for anyone who had outwitted a few dry years to make enough money to get through another year and even put something away. Five years later, with world grain supplies pinched by the Great War, the price had more than doubled. Farmers increased production by 50 percent. When the Turkish navy blocked the Dardenelles, they did a favor for dryland w
heat farmers that no one could have imagined. Europe had relied on Russia for export grain. With Russian shipments blocked, the United States stepped in, and issued a proclamation to the plains: plant more wheat to win the war. And for the first time, the government guaranteed the price, at two dollars a bushel, through the war, backed by the wartime food administrator, a multimillionaire public servant named Herbert Hoover. Wheat was no longer a staple of a small family farmer but a commodity with a price guarantee and a global market.

  When he first came to No Man's Land, Carlie Lucas had hoped to make just enough from his half-section to feed his family. But within a few years of arriving, he was part of the great frenzy to turn over ground and get out as much wheat as possible to sell abroad. If he could produce fifteen bushels an acre on his half-section, that meant 4,800 bushels at harvest. It cost him about thirty-five cents per bushel to grow. At a selling price of two dollars a bushel, his profit was nearly eight thousand dollars a year. In 1917, this was a fortune. A factory worker on the Ford assembly line made only five dollars a day, about one-eighth the take-home pay of a prosperous wheat farmer. Imagine doing thirty bushels an acre, or double. And Hardy Campbell, through his epistles on dry farming, said any yeoman could do fifty bushels an acre, even without adequate rain. Still, this was something audacious. People had been farming since Biblical times, and never had any nation set out to produce so much grain on ground that suggested otherwise. If the farmers of the High Plains were laying the foundation for a time bomb that would shatter the natural world, any voices that implied such a thing were muted.

  "The real difficulty of the semi-arid belt is not the lack of rain," wrote Hardy Campbell in his Manual, which sold for $2.50, "but the loss of too much by evaporation, and this can be largely controlled by proper cultivation."

  What had been an anchored infinity of grassland just a generation earlier became a patchwork of broken ground. In 1917, about forty-five million acres of wheat were harvested nationwide. In 1919, over seventy-five million acres were put into production—up nearly 70 percent. And the expansion would continue in the decade after the war, even as there was no need for it. It was one of the occasional episodes in human history when fortunes were said to go only one way.

  "The uncertainties of 1919 were over," wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald, the most insightful chronicler of the hubris of the 1920s. "America was going on the greatest, gaudiest spree in history."

  For a young family casting about for a way to make good money out of nearly nothing to start, the dryland wheat game looked like an easy gamble.

  Indeed. The self-described wheat queen of Kansas, Ida Watkins, told everyone she made a profit of $75,000 on her two thousand acres of bony soil in 1926—bigger than the salary of any baseball player but Babe Ruth, more money than the president of the United States made.

  Hazel Lucas married the boy she had fallen for, Charles Shaw, when she was eighteen. They were both schoolteachers, but Charles wanted to try something else. They left the Panhandle for Ohio in the spring of 1929, driving up through the Midwest in their Model-T Ford. At one point, the young couple from a county without a stoplight found themselves in downtown St. Louis with a broken car, in a river of traffic. Horns honked, people cursed, and Charles and Hazel looked at each other and laughed. They made their way to Cincinnati, where Charles studied mortuary science. Hazel took to the city. She visited Cincy's National Zoo, parks, museums. By the end of summer, the Shaws were low on money, and they decided that Hazel should return to Oklahoma while Charles stayed on at the school. She had arranged for another teaching job, which came with extra duties as a school bus driver. Hazel took the train home, arriving in early September 1929, a time when the country was in a fever of fast moneymaking, and the Oklahoma Panhandle was busting its britches. Hazel was going to get a teacher's job that paid enough to save some money. She wanted to start a family, too. Stepping off the train in Texhoma, she walked a few steps away from the tracks and spun around, staring out in every direction at the big land, the soft light, with the smell of wheat loading from elevators. The sky, the horizon, the earth itself had no end. She knew she belonged in No Man's Land; the lonely prairie felt right.

  Women were scarce in No Man's Land, so much so that a newspaper advertisement was placed in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch by sixty-five "lonely men with dugouts and a willingness to work." One of the bachelors, Will Crawford, lived alone in his hole in the ground outside Boise City. He had come west from Missouri on the free train, but he had never found a bride and did not do much to prove up his land. Crawford was a rare sight: a fat man on the prairie. He was fatter than any man in three states, it was said. When children tried to guess his weight, he would never reveal the exact amount—somewhere between 300 and 700 pounds, he said. A farmhand, Will worked for all the food he could eat.

  The fat man sat for lunch at the table of his neighbors one day, consuming a meal of sausages, potato soup, and canned tomatoes. When he was done, he reached into the front pocket of his bib overalls and produced a slip of paper.

  What to think of this? He showed them the note:

  "Wanted, a real man. Sadie White, 419 Locust, Wichita, Kansas."

  Crawford's overalls were so big they had to be ordered special through the general store, which received them from the clothing factory in Wichita. Sadie worked in the factory and had been taken by the size of the garment. Will was curious about the note but afraid to write back; the postmaster's office was in the general store, and they might intercept the letter and tease him. He summoned all his courage and wrote to Sadie White, sending the letter from another location, in Texhoma. Months passed. Then during the wheat harvest, the big man was spitting watermelon seeds through his mustache after an enormous dinner, when he mentioned that he might build a house next to his dugout. It seemed odd; he had never before shown much ambition beyond what to have for lunch. Will complained that his dirt-floored hole just wasn't comfortable. Over the fall months, he built a basement with cement walls, and two rooms aboveground. He shingled the roof and painted the outside walls a bright color. Then Will disappeared for a week. When he returned, all of Cimarron County was clucking at the news: Big Will Crawford was married. He had taken a train to Wichita, and there he met and married Sadie White, the woman who had sewn the note in the biggest pair of overalls she ever made in the factory. They took up in the fat man's new house and made a go of it until the land dried up in the 1930s and the death dusters came and stilled the lives of people in No Man's Land.

  Will's closest neighbors were the Folkers, a family that came to No Man's Land with him on the free train. Fred Folkers, and his college-educated wife, Katherine, had left a rocky, fallow hillside in Missouri for the free dirt of the Oklahoma Panhandle. To Katherine, it was a prairie prison. Many nights, she cried herself to sleep; this place was so empty. The Folkers proved up a full section, 640 acres, planting trees and plowing the ground. The orchard was Fred's favorite creation, the trees sprouting pink in the spring, bearing heavy fruit in the fall. When he first put dozens of spindly, pathetic-looking sticks in the Panhandle dirt, the idea that this bundle of branches would ever mature to a huddle of thick-waisted fruit trees was preposterous. He planted cherry and peach trees, plum and apple, and, off to one side, berries that grow best in the maritime climate of the Pacific Northwest—huckleberries, gooseberries, currants. It did not matter that early spring and most of summer could pass with nary a teardrop from above; the Folkers had their underground lake, all that water brought to the surface by windmill pumps. The only way to irrigate his orchard was for Frederick to carry pails of water back and forth from his well to fruit trees.

  The Folkers had arrived with very little, like other nesters fleeing an Old World of senseless wars or a New World with a landless future. In No Man's Land, they were first-generation aristocracy. It was the same in Dalhart and Boise City and Texhoma, in Shattuck and Liberal and Garden City. People were establishing country clubs for the new farmer-businessmen, stringing electric lights
through towns and building swimming pools, one bigger than the other. By sheer will, they would force green on the dry land. The caution of John Wesley Powell, the one-armed Civil War veteran who warned against trying to stamp squares of traditional farms on the High Plains, was thrown to the wind. "No part of it can be redeemed for agriculture except by irrigation," Powell had written in his 1878 Report on the Arid Region of the United States. To do so, he concluded, would be destructive. Hah! In time, when the trees grew, and the town squares started to wear the years with a proper fit, there was no reason it couldn't look like Bloomington, Indiana, or Marion, Ohio, or so the proud homesteaders thought. In Garden City, Kansas, they dug a hole in the ground, 337 feet long by 218 feet wide, poured cement for weeks on end, and filled it with water. It was the world's biggest swimming pool, they boasted, in a place that had only a weak spring a few years earlier. About the same time, a man named John R. Brinkley ran for governor of Kansas, promising to bring a lake to every county in the state.

  With a horse-drawn plow, Fred Folkers produced barely enough to stay afloat. What changed everything for him, and other dryland farmers, was the tractor. In the 1830s, it took fifty-eight hours of work to plant and harvest a single acre. By 1930, it took only three hours for the same job. No longer did Fred Folkers or Carlie Lucas have to cut their wheat with a mule-drawn header, stacking it in piles to be threshed later. A tractor did the work of ten horses. With his new combine, Folkers could cut and thresh the grain in one swoop, using just a fraction of the labor. Folkers bought an International 22-36 tractor, a Case combine, and a one-way plow—a twelve-foot Grand Detour. The one-way plow would later be cursed as the tool that destroyed the plains because of its efficiency at ripping up grass. But for now it was a technological miracle. Folkers plowed nearly his entire square mile, and then paid to rent nearby property and ripped up that grass as well. By the late 1920s, his harvest was up to ten thousand bushels of wheat—a small mountain of grain. What's more, there was now an easy way to get the wheat of Fred Folkers and Carlie Lucas to the rest of the world. In 1925, a train finally arrived in Boise City, almost twenty years after the fantasy locomotives of the Southwestern Immigration and Development Company were promised.