by Timothy Egan
Aug 17
Bad luck—destingy [sic]—(call it what you will) has seemed to follow us since 1932 & this year will be little better. We could not pay back taxes & interest & as the horses are all gone now & we have no income and not one cent in reserve—So what?
The next week, Hartwell and his wife set off for Denver to find work. The money Verna made washing at the hotel was not enough to keep them on the farm. In the city, they stayed with friends who had lined up a job for Verna as a maid at a doctor's house. There was no work for Hartwell and no room for him at the doctor's house. The farmer said goodbye to his wife and returned to Inavale. The separation was supposed to be temporary. The dust, the drought, the fractured farm had broken the last thing they had: their bond. It was the first time they were apart in twenty-six years of marriage. Hartwell moped around his farm, talking to himself and writing in his diary, without even a horse or hog to keep him company. He played music, and at times he was so low he cried at the sight of one of Verna's dresses or a half-opened can of peaches.
"I can hardly call it home anymore. I can't write how I really feel about that."
Oct 7
I wrote to Verna. It seems so long since she was here. Yet it is only a week! How will it seem if the days go on into weeks, the weeks into months, the months into...
Nov 2
I did a rash thing today & started for Colo & when I got as far as McCook I changed my mind & came home. I just didn't have the money to go on.
Nov 24
The first thanksgiving since 1912 when Verna & I haven't been together. Will we ever live together again?
Dec 19
I never saw fields any drier. Everything is filled with dust.
Dec 21
I went up & took some pictures of abandoned farms N. of here (I intend to put them in a book) in the forenoon. Little is left up there of a once prosperous country. Drouth has all but obliterated a fairly prosperous farming region. Vacant houses, tumble-down buildings, weed-grown fields are all that remain.
Dec 24
Very dry everywhere. I raked the N. side of our yard in the forenoon. I swept and dusted in the afternoon. I trimmed the tree and lighted it in the evening, so it was lighted when Verna came up from the depot. She got home at 10 p.m.
Verna stayed a week, then returned to Colorado and her maid's job at the doctor's house. She made forty dollars a month and sent her husband five dollars every two weeks. Hartwell started 1939 still on the farm in Inavale but alone, without seed, horses, cattle, or hogs. To stave off foreclosure, he sold his farm machinery—getting nineteen dollars for a two-row lister, his biggest sale. He sometimes thought of going to town to play music, or even to dance, but he never did. Once, he took a train to Kansas City and saw a burlesque show.
"The girls danced and posed with nothing on," he reported. "But 4H can do that."
The tug of failure was too strong; his life was on a course he could not reverse. But he was still not ready to give up. A friend loaned him a mule and some seed, and he made plans to plant corn again. His heart was torn by loneliness.
"We lived here 26 years together before Nebraska weather & economic conditions finally ruined and separated us," he wrote at year's end.
Feb 3
I used to look forward to spring this time of year, but now—I don't know what to do. I never have been cornered like I am now.
Feb 4
A cold mean wind all day ... I doubt very much if Verna & I will ever have a home of our own again. I wouldn't even guess what is ahead of us.
Feb 5
I have felt lost lately—not knowing where to turn or what to do. In fact, if one hasn't 'got' anything, there is not much he can do.
Feb 23
I got a letter from the Federal Land Bank saying they were foreclosing on our place. So our last place will soon be gone.
May 27
A chilly, driving N.W. wind. I finished planting corn on the W. bottom in the afternoon, (probably for the last time). An outdoor picture show in the evening but pretty cool to sit out and watch it.
July 10
The same clear, glaring sky & vicious blazing killing sun. Cane is about dead, corn is being damaged; it will soon be destroyed. Those who coined the phrase 'There's no place like Nebraska' wrote better than they thought. In Nebraska, you don't have to die to go to hell.
Aug 4
Practically no one comes here now. Of those who used to ask so diffidently 'Is Verna here?' not one comes around any more. They have vanished like last year's crop of turnips.
Aug 5
Nearly everything is destroyed.
Sept 13
Today is a terrible day of S.W. wind, dust & heat. One can't really do much afternoons owing to the blast of wind & dust. I raked up what little cane there was worth cutting, but there is very little.
Sept 18
There are no dances here anymore—nothing but silence, emptiness, 'respectability.'
Sept 30
September, 1939 was one of the driest ever known, the Weather Bureau says in 40 years. Almost continuous hot winds.... there is less corn even than last year.... Hitler, Russia, France and England are now supposed to be at war.
Oct 13
Well today is my birthday again. They seem to come altogether too often. Verna sent me a dollar & I went to the hotel to get my dinner.
Nov 14
Everything is a reek of dust. It is in your clothes, you taste it; feel it.
Dec 12
Well, there is not a great deal to report. Winter, in Inavale, is just staying, just living. But I don't look for or expect anything going on any more.
The bank took the land that Hartwells had owned since 1909. Hartwell was allowed to stay in the house for another year, as a rent-paying tenant. He found part-time work on a government road crew. Verna stayed in Denver, still working as a maid. After being apart from her husband for two years, she returned for Christmas. Hartwell ended his diary with a poem, attributed to a woman from Ridgewood, New Jersey, Eleanor Chaffee. He attached the poem to the last page of his diary, without additional comment.
We had a crystal moment
Snatched from the hands of time,
A golden, singing moment
Made for love and rhyme.
What if it shattered in our hands
As crystal moments must?
Better than earthen hours
Changing to lifeless dust.
25. Rain
THEY WORKED THROUGH the hottest days of summer, stitching a flag forty-nine feet long by twenty-nine feet high, the biggest in the world. Every musician in the Texas Panhandle was summoned to fall in line, forming another superlative: the largest single marching band ever assembled on American soil—2,500 instruments. Amarillo had never looked so good. All was in place on the afternoon of July 11, 1938, for President Roosevelt's visit to the southern plains. He chose Amarillo, headquarters for Operation Dust Bowl, because it was the only city of any size in the broken land and because Bennett had told him to go out, have a look, see how farmers were holding the land down, taking what he had started and making it their own.
The crowd was enormous, nearly a hundred thousand people in a city with less than half that population. They jammed into Ellwood Park under uncertain skies and lined the streets for three miles back to the station. At 6:45 P.M., a train pulled into Amarillo from the east. Word went out: he's here! The crowd stirred and a ripple of cheers followed. The wind was gathering force, and the light seemed to fall out of the sky sooner than it should have. The heat dissipated quickly. As clouds thickened, Amarillo's leaders worried that a duster was about to dump a load on the leader of the Western World.
Some people had driven for two days on drifted roads to get a glimpse of the president. He was not one of them, but many felt that this crippled man from New York had kept his promise: he had not forgotten them. The flatland was not green or fertile, yet it seemed as if the beast had been tamed. The year had been dry, just like the s
ix that preceded it, and exceptionally windy, but the land was not peeling off like it had before, was not darkening the sky. There were dusters, half a dozen or more in each of April and May, but nothing like Black Sunday, nothing so Biblical. Maybe, as some farmers suggested, Bennett's army had calmed the raging dust seas, or maybe so much soil had ripped away that there was very little left to roll. Amarillo had begged the government to send its CCC soil-saving and tree-planting crews to the Panhandle, and when they came, they were greeted like firemen arriving at a blaze. Rows of spindly trees—little more than sticks in the ground—now ran through the land, nearly forty million saplings, 3,600 miles of living hope, planted within the most tattered parts of Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas. In addition, farmers were paid a stipend to list their soil and plant grass alongside the work done by the CCC. Nearly a million acres were under contract as part of Bennett's blueprint to rescue the land. Bennett hoped that seven million acres would eventually be replanted in grass, a prairie reborn in "that delicate miracle the ever-recurring grass," as the poet Walt Whitman called it.
Elsewhere in 1938, the recovery and the energy of the New Deal had run out of steam. More than four million people lost their jobs in the wake of government cutbacks, and the stock market fell sharply again. Some of the gloom that enveloped the country at midterm in President Hoover's reign was back. In the Dust Bowl, the fuzz of a forced forest and the re-tilling of tousled dirt did not stop the wind or bring more rain, but it was a plan in motion— something —and that was enough to inspire people to keep the faith. As Will Rogers said, "If Roosevelt burned down the Capital we would cheer and say, 'Well, we at least got a fire started, anyhow.'" The High Plains had been culled of thousands of inhabitants. In No Man's Land, the plague, as nesters called it, had killed or forced out nearly one family in three. It was almost as bad in the Texas Panhandle. But as the dirty decade neared its end, the big exodus was winding down. The only way that folks who stayed behind would leave now, they said, was horizontal, in a pine box.
Melt White had found his way back to the place where his daddy was buried, next to the old XIT on the outskirts of Dalhart. He bought a colt with his savings from picking cotton and took his horse out for a run every day, scouting for a place where he could dig himself a toehold. There was going to be water available soon, all over the Llano Estacado, water from below. People were drilling deep and tapping into the main vein of that ancient, underground reservoir of the Ogallala Aquifer, as big as the grassland itself, they said. These new boomers, a handful of men in town, wanted no part of Bennett's soil-conservation districts. They wanted money to pump up a river of water from the Ogallala, pass it through a tangle of pipes, and spit it out over the sandpapered land. They would grow wheat and corn and sorghum, and they would make a pile, using all the water they wanted, you just wait and see. They talked as if it were the dawn of the wheat boom, twenty years earlier. Melt thought they had not learned a thing from the last decade. The High Plains belonged to Indians and grass, but few people in Dalhart shared his feelings.
Could the soul be returned to a corpse left to the winds? Could Comanche ever ride free again, lords of the tattered plain? Could bison ever find a home on land that had given up its grass? Could the turf that evolved over eons, tailored by nature's calibrations to take fire, drought, eternal wind, and cold into its life cycles, ever be restitched to sterile ground?
The land all around Roosevelt's parade route showed signs of terminal disorder. How to explain a place where black dirt fell from the sky, where children died from playing outdoors, where rabbits were clubbed to death by adrenaline-primed nesters still wearing their Sunday-school clothes, where grasshoppers descended on weakened fields and ate everything but doorknobs? How to explain a place where hollow-bellied horses chewed on fence posts, where static electricity made it painful to shake another man's hand, where the only thing growing that a human or a cow could eat was an unwelcome foreigner, the Russian thistle? How to explain fifty thousand or more houses abandoned throughout the Great Plains, never to hear a child's laugh or a woman's song inside their walls? How to explain nine million acres of farmland without a master? America was passing this land by. Its day was done.
Roosevelt had first tasted prairie dust in 1934, when it blew into the White House. Now he was at the source. The rain started just after the president's train pulled into Amarillo. What are the odds of that? Hundred-to-one, local reporters said. It came in showers at first, the tight clouds frayed at the bottom, and then developed into a downpour. People strained to hold the big flag in place, but it grew heavy as it took on the weeping skies. They wanted the president to see the biggest flag in the world before it broke under the weight of water. Roosevelt rode slowly in an open car, through the rain, down the three-mile length of town to the park. He was hatless, and water splattered off his glasses and ran down his nose, but he kept his political face forward, jaw out, smiling and waving. The rain pooled in the streets, and people stood in fast-rising puddles, their shoes wet, to get a glimpse of the president. When he passed by the big flag, Roosevelt ordered the car to stop. He saluted the seamstresses standing near their creation, and the young men trying to hold the flag above ground. Music still poured forth from the world's biggest marching band, even as the instruments were pelted. Now the giant flag began to sag; the young men could not keep it from drooping. The stars and stripes bled away from the 150-square yards of cloth onto the wet street, bled purple.
At Ellwood Park, there was no shelter for the honored guest. It had been dry for six years; no one expected a downpour in mid-July. No one even brought an umbrella. Roosevelt was helped out of the car and up to a grandstand. He stood, using the heavy metal braces to lock his knees in place. The crowd roared, everyone on their feet. He was their savior, and he did not betray their trust in him. Some of his experts had told him that it had been a monumental failure to settle this part of the world and that all the conservation measures and tree planting could not bring life back. People had killed this land by their own greed and stupidity—and, yes, hubris—and it could not be restored. Let it die. If Roosevelt believed this, he never let on. Standing in the rain, hair wet and suit drenched, he looked radiant.
"I think this little shower we have had is a mighty good omen."
Thunderous cheers rose, lasting several minutes. It could have been the Texas high school football championship, for the roar. Yes, sir, a good omen. What else could this land throw at them? What fresh hell could there still be? The rain pounded the crowd as the last of the big flag's color leaked onto the street, purpling the water like food dye in a creek. After the cheers and applause settled, Roosevelt resumed his speech. As he got into it, he took on the nester's chip, the righteous anger of the victim.
"I wish more people from the South and the East could visit this plains country," he said.
Yes, sir, Mr. President—we're not all dead, people said to each other. Damn straight. Tell it to the world!
"If they did you would hear less talk about the great American desert. You would hear less ridicule of our efforts to conserve water and restore grazing lands and to plant trees." He told the crowd how their topsoil had blown all the way to his family home on the Hudson and how people in the East did not understand these nesters, but he would never give up on them.
Roosevelt had always believed in the power of restoration. He was also starting to believe that the Dust Bowl could have been prevented. He had taken to heart some of the conclusions of the Great Plains committee, and he saw a way out in Operation Dust Bowl and his own tree-planting design. What happened on this hard ground was not a weather disaster at all; it was a human failure. A year earlier, in a speech at the dedication of Bonneville Dam on the Columbia River, Roosevelt said if only Americans had known as much thirty years ago as they knew today about care of the arid lands, "we could have prevented in great part the abandonment of thousands and thousands of farms in portions of ten states and thus prevented the migration of thousands of destitute f
amilies."
The president said nothing about hindsight on this day, however: he was all sunshine in the rain. "We seek permanently to establish this part of the nation as a fine and safe place which a large number of Americans can call home."
He praised the nesters for their guts and sprinkled half a dozen compliments on local pols before departing with a wave and one last flash of the smile and strong chin. Then it was back to the train, a quick ride to get out of the rain, and away, never to return to the High Plains, away to a world war, fought by some of the same young men straining to hold the flag on the wet streets of Amarillo, away to a day when the Dust Bowl would be forgotten, the flat land left to the winds, the towns shriveled and lost, the last survivors bent and broken, telling stories of a time when the sky showered the land down on them, not knowing if people believed them but not giving a damn if they did.
Epilogue
THE HIGH PLAINS never fully recovered from the Dust Bowl. The land came through the 1930s deeply scarred and forever changed, but in places it healed. All told, the government bought 11.3 million acres of dusted-over farm fields and tried to return much of it to grassland. The original intent was to purchase up to 75 million acres. After more than sixty-five years, some of the land is still sterile and drifting. But in the heart of the old Dust Bowl now are three national grasslands run by the Forest Service. The land is green in the spring and burns in the summer, as it did in the past, and antelope come through and graze, wandering among replanted buffalo grass and the old footings of farmsteads long abandoned. Some things are missing or fast disappearing: the prairie chicken, a bird that kept many a sodbuster alive in the dark days, is in decline, its population down by 78 percent since 1966. The biggest of the restored areas is Comanche National Grassland, named for the Lords of the Plains, which covers more than 600,000 acres, much of it in Baca County. Plans are underway to reintroduce bison to the shortgrass prairie, as was done in tallgrass preserves in other parts of the Great Plains.