The Worst Hard Time

by Timothy Egan

  Up in eastern Montana, towns that had been built thirty years earlier with the arrival of the railroad were folding. The northern plains homestead experiment was a bust, and no amount of government incentive or railroad promotional schemes could keep it going. But here in the southern plains, the rail lines were just coming to blank spots on the map. Folkers had to haul his wheat only a few miles to a grain elevator in Boise City and off it went—to Chicago, New York, Europe.

  The phantom town built on fraud, Boise City, was growing with every harvest. People gave up their horse-drawn wagons for Model-Ts, even if there were not enough roads to get around. Most of the year, people drove right over the hardened prairie. Here was a new Baptist church, a new Presbyterian church, a Catholic church for the Mexicans who lived out near the Lujan ranch. A clothier from just across the border, in Clayton, New Mexico, came to town and took orders for suits and dresses. Herzstein was the name. Simon Herzstein took two trips a year to New York and returned with outfits that could make a prairie couple look like a pair of dandies from the picture shows. He gave out shoe brushes to his customers, stamped with the words: "If it's from Herzstein's, it's correct."

  With tractors came mortgages. For a long time, banks had refused to lend to farmers west of the ninety-eighth meridian. It was fool's country, a devil's land of drought and dust. But a handful of wet years in the new century showed that caution was unwarranted. John Johnson's First State Bank in Boise City loaned money all over the county, as people gladly committed their property to paper to get more money to plow more grass and put more wheat in the ground. A new courthouse, with Roman columns, rose on the site of the little stockman's windmill that had posed as an artesian fountain in 1908. By 1929, Boise City had a theater, a hotel, a bookstore, a bank, a newspaper, a creamery, a few cafes, and a telephone office where people would call into an operator, asking to be hooked up to a neighbor. After a few minutes of hollering back and forth about idle gossip, they were.

  Flush with their newfound money, the Folkers invested in even bigger dreams. They made plans to take on more ground in booming No Man's Land. They ordered appliances from the Sears and Roebuck catalogue—the store even sold a complete house, which could be assembled from a kit—and put harvest money in the bank. Fred bought dresses for Katherine and his daughter, Faye. And finally, they built a big-shouldered house to replace the crumbling shack in which Katherine had cried herself to sleep so many nights over the last ten years. To the children, the shack had always seemed to be haunted. At night, Faye and her brothers heard scratching and clawing in the walls, like a ghost with long nails trying to get at them. It was centipedes, nesting in the walls. Faye could never sleep when the centipedes were at work. The shack was nothing but a heap of upright splinters: one-by-ten-inch planks nailed to two-by-four-inch studs, with wallpaper on the inside and tarpaper on the outside. For insulation, newspapers were pasted to the walls. Some nesters even arranged the papers in neat, horizontal rows, so they could read the fading news stories. When the sound of scratching inside the walls got too bad, Katherine grabbed her flat iron and took to the walls. As the centipedes died under the crush of her iron, they made a hissing sound.

  While the new house was still under construction, the Folkers lost the old house in a hailstorm—softball-sized, in the lexicon of sporting goods used to describe prairie roof-breakers. Nobody mourned the shack's collapse. The family now had two bedrooms, a living room, a big kitchen with a kerosene cook stove, and a basement large enough to hold a winter's supply of coal. For Faye's tenth birthday, in 1928, the family took her into Boise City to window-shop. She was bright and creative, with the kind of ambition that left people thinking she would probably not stay long in the flatlands.

  Take a look at that piano, Faye's daddy told her, passing a furniture store. Happy birthday—it's yours. The piano cost three hundred dollars—ten dollars down, ten dollars a month. With the piano came a teacher, who charged fifty cents a lesson. The same year, Frederick Folkers went to the car dealership, in Liberal, Kansas, and came home with a spanking new 1928 Dodge—a beauty, with four doors and room enough to carry the whole family. They parked the Dodge out in front of the new house and snapped a picture. The centipede scratching, the hissing of an iron on insect legs, was replaced by piano music that drifted out of the Folkers's new house and settled on fruit trees and the fresh-plowed fields of No Man's Land.

  In all the High Plains, a kind of giddiness took hold. There were big dances on Saturday nights, farmers jumping to a prairie jitterbug, the bootleg hooch flowing free. Cimarron County, the far end of No Man's Land, had 5,408 people by the end of the 1920s, and Boise City was a town of twelve hundred. People who had come to the Panhandle wanting only to own a small piece of something now realized that through easy loans, they could own a large piece of anything, and with tractors and threshers they could do the work of a wagonload of field hands. Occasionally, Fred Folkers said it all seemed to be happening too fast. Christ Almighty, the grasslands were being erased from the Great Plains, going the way of the bison and the Indian. If this ground were not meant for grass, what was it for? But maybe rains did follow the plow after all. Sure, Boise City was nothing but a criminal's dream at first, but now it had a railroad station, a new courthouse, a tractor dealership, a couple of nice places to eat, and a few grain towers, all surrounded by broken fields of golden wheat. There could be some truth to the pitch that the front line of civilization kicked water from the sky, because the 1920s brought wet years. The recent past told another story though. Droughts in the 1870s and 1890s had dissuaded other sodbusters from trying to turn the soil. But the railroad men and pamphleteers had promised that the simple act of tearing up the prairie sod would cause atmospheric disturbances, enough to vary weather patterns. Now that the prairie sod was fully torn up—by God, here was the rain.

  People were pouring into town, taking up rooms at the Crystal Hotel—suitcase farmers who had no intention of ever settling there. They wanted only to rent out a tractor and a piece of ground for a few days, drop some winter wheat into the fresh-turned fold, and come back next summer for the payoff. It was a game of chance called "trying to hit a crop." One suitcase farmer broke thirty-two thousand acres in southeast Kansas in 1921. Four years later, he plowed twice that amount. The banks seldom said no. After Congress passed the Federal Farm Loan Act in 1916, every town with a well and a sheriff had itself a farmland bank—an institution!—offering forty-year loans at six percent interest. Borrow five thousand dollars and payments were less than thirty-five dollars a month. Any man with a John Deere and a half-section could cover that nut. If it was hubris, or "tempting fate" as some of the church ladies said, well, the United States government did not see it that way. The government had already issued its official view of the rapid churning of ancient prairie sod.

  "The soil is the one indestructible, immutable asset that the nation possesses," the Federal Bureau of Soils proclaimed as the grasslands were transformed. "It is the one resource that cannot be exhausted, that cannot be used up."

  3. Creating Dalhart

  BAM WHITE FOUND a shack outside of Dalhart, and the man who owned it said he could put his family up there, grow anything he dared on the ground nearby, and split the proceeds with him. Sharecropping was better than wandering south in a wagon with half a team of horses, so the cowboy decided to give Dalhart a good long chance, even if crop-grubbing was no life for a man of the open range. It seemed a shame that the old XIT grasslands were still being carved up, but cattle weren't paying, and the ranches were disappearing by the day. The rains came steadily in the spring in those years, 1926 through 1929, and with wet years, everyone forgot about the dry ones and said the weather had changed—permanently—for the better. It was also said you could grow anything on land that had been so accursed. The family raised turnips, some weighing three pounds or more, which seemed to belong on the High Plains. The Whites loaded up their wagon and took the root vegetables to town, where they sold them to the grocer
; it gave them just enough, after paying the landlord his share, to free Bam White for a few days to play the fiddle or scout again for ranch jobs. There were three kids between him and Lizzie. While living in Dalhart, they had had a baby girl, but she looked bad when she greeted her first minute, not breathing at all, purple. She was stillborn. Lizzie White could not shake the feeling that this land was no good for them, and maybe they should have kept moving south. But Bam White was a tomorrow man who fit right into this Next Year Country. Even as they buried the stillborn baby, White's gut told him this town was going somewhere.

  Optimism was contagious. Dalhart had a country club now, out past the steam laundry on a dirt road next to the Rock Island Railroad tracks. Further out, beyond the baseball park, the Number 126 house was roaring night and day. Girls came in from Denver and Dallas, sidled up nice or danced a tune to the player piano before slipping away to one of the two big rooms where a man could get a poke and be on his way. Boots on or off, both were options at the Number 126 house. They sold beer that didn't taste like warm spit and let a customer sometimes take two girls for the price of one if he was a regular and didn't smell like field manure.

  Doc Dawson bought himself another two sections of land and thought about planting it in cotton. Cotton was supposed to pay even more than wheat. It dusted some in those years—sandstorms, which were tolerated as one of the little snit-fits of the prairie. The sandstorms were light-colored and never seemed a threat, but they could blow for days, tearing up the eyes and fouling the tractor engine. When John Dawson came home from college in 1926, the Doc took him out to his land and told the boy how this country was going to make them rich. He stooped over, ran the dirt through his hands, gave it a good sniff. But the cotton never took hold, and after two failed crops, the Doc despaired that he did not have anything to show for his share of the richest land on earth when everyone else on the High Plains was building a pile, either from oil or wheat or from fleecing the people who came scouting for oil or prospecting in wheat. Even that damn movie man down near Lubbock was setting himself up to make a fortune. Hickman Price came to the Panhandle and said, well, if it's factory farms that are going to make the wheat pay here, let's get to it. He had made his money in films, but here, he told people, there were even bigger riches available. By 1929, he had fifty-four square miles, nearly 35,000 acres, wheat coming off the land like Model-Ts. It was the Henry Ford model brought to agriculture, he bragged, econ-o-me of scale. Do the math, friend. The movie man said he could produce his wheat for forty cents a bushel, and if it sold for $1.30, he could bring in upwards of a million dollars a year. In five years' time, from 1924 to 1929, acreage in the Texas Panhandle that was plowed under for wheat grew from 876,000 to 2.5 million—a 300 percent increase.

  The boys down at DeSoto's, Uncle Dick Coon and all his card-playing cronies, told the Doc he should stop fooling around with cotton, and don't even try the oil biz—just get himself a couple good years of wheat while the price was still decent. Maybe prices would fall, but they would have to take a mighty plunge in order for a wheat man not to make anything.

  Even the last cowboys were giving up on grass. The James boys had been forced by bankruptcy to sell off a big section of their ranch outside Dalhart. They held onto another piece in the 1920s, between Boise City and Dalhart, but word had it that the land would soon be up for sale, in small lots. In desperation, Andy James tried to hit a vein of oil, to find one strike that would keep the family on the ranch. They borrowed again from a bank that already had taken back much of the ranch and hired out a drill that went down, two hundred, five hundred, a thousand, fifteen hundred, eighteen hundred feet until the drill bit snapped and still no oil to save the James boys. Bam White wandered over to the James ranch, watching with other cowboys as the last place to run cattle on a big range of God's best sod went to the bankers. Bam never made it past second grade, but his instinctual smarts told him it was not right—all this good grass going under—and he wondered how it had come to this for a cowboy in the country meant for men on horses. Andy James looked so sad then, a broken man in a time of fast fortunes. He shook his head and wiped his brow, his face all leathered from the sun and wind, his powerful shoulders held stiff, and sometimes just said nothing at all. Or he kicked the ground and cursed, looking out at the tractors tearing up the grassland, even in the darkness, using headlights.

  This grass was never meant to be plowed, James told his fellow cowboys, drinking black coffee that the boys would lace on occasion with hooch. It wasn't never supposed to be nested or cut up. Cattle could fatten so easy on the bluestem, and it was a shame it couldn't pay anymore. A goddamn shame. The grass was pure biomass; an acre, without help, could bring a rancher two thousand pounds of forage for his cattle, a single section added up to more than a million pounds of nature's finest food for herbivores. A decade earlier, at the start of the Great War, the James brothers had the biggest working ranch left in the Panhandle, over 250,000 acres spread north into Cimarron County and west into New Mexico. But even then the end was drawing near, with beef prices falling on surplus cattle after the plains was stocked with too many animals. The cattle era had lasted not even as long as the Comanche run of the land after their treaty was signed. People felt sorry for Andy James; he was heading out with history's backwash, poor son of a buck.

  Uncle Dick Coon still kept a hundred-dollar bill inside one pocket, but he was making so much money the C-note was like small change. On his land outside of town, Uncle Dick raised prized bulls, for show and breeding. Inside of town, he owned the finest buildings on the main street, Denrock, including all the places that kept the juices flowing, like the DeSoto and a drugstore where pharmacists filled prescriptions for whiskey. Medicinal whiskey. The DeSoto Hotel was processing fine-dressed pilgrims faster than Uncle Dick could keep the floors polished. White-gloved doormen greeted visitors who came to smell money as it was being minted.

  Into this confident, muscle-flexing town in 1929 walked John L. McCarty. He looked like a young Orson Welles, dark-haired, intense and athletic, with a silver tongue that translated even better on paper. He bought the Dalhart Texan, became its editor and publisher, and made plans to turn it into the loudest, most influential daily newspaper in the Texas Panhandle. McCarty saw himself as a town builder with a pen. He was twenty-eight, and Dalhart had just over four thousand people. The town and the editor were born the same year. Less than fifty years earlier, the Census found zero population—not a single soul!—living in the four counties of the Texas Panhandle's far corner. Now the Rock Island Railroad emptied newcomers every week from the East, and the Fort Worth & Denver line brought them in from points north and south. They were coming by wagon, car, railroad. Even airplanes were landing on a strip of dirt outside Dalhart.

  McCarty tried to rouse Dalhart's townsfolk to greatness. These folks were strong men and women, lucky to be living in a town still wet around the edges, a town born to big things. McCarty loved the Felton Opera House, the fine food they served at the DeSoto, the suits he could buy through Herzstein's, the boys who tipped their hats to him at the Cozy Corner, the ladies who mentioned in forced modesty their latest trips to the Gulf or California for write-ups on page two of the Texan. He was the loudest cheerleader at baseball games, where the Dalhart nine took on Clayton, Boise City, or Dumas; their failure was a civic letdown. He felt personally responsible for Dalhart's future. He could sound like a booster with blinders, but McCarty had some literary flourishes and was judicious in citing classical scholars or gimcrackery from American wise men. About once a week, his column ran next to Will Rogers on page one of the Texan, and folks told him he was the better writer. McCarty was no flimflam man, but rather someone who bought into the vision of Dalhart, City on the High Plains.

  People came to the High Plains now because they had missed out on earlier land grabs, land rushes, land betrayals, and land auctions. They had missed the best homestead land, the best stolen Indian land, the best railroad grant land, the land that was
quickly taken in the first Homestead Act of 1862 and the Enlarged Homestead Act of 1909. What had started with a rousing slogan that thousands marched to in the 1856 presidential campaign of John Fremont—"Free Soil, Free Men, Fremont!"—was down to the ugliest dirt in the country. Already much of the earlier homestead land, planted in wheat or corn, was worn out, not producing as it once did. Of the roughly two hundred million acres homesteaded on the Great Plains between 1880 and 1925, nearly half was considered marginal for farming. But even by the 1920s, there was still a chance for a family to make history: people who had descended from a beaten-down part of the world, people whose daddy had been a serf, a sharecropper, a tenant, and even slaves, castaways, rejects, white trash, and Mexicans could own a piece of earth. "Every man a landlord" meant something. Historians had been herded into thinking that the American frontier was closed after the 1890 census, that western movement had effectively ended just before the close of the last century, that settlement had been tried and failed in the Great American Desert. But they overlooked the southern plains, the pass-through country. In the first thirty years of the twentieth century, it got a second look.