The Worst Hard Time Part 2

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 pa.s.sed. 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 bas.e.m.e.nt with cement walls, and two rooms aboveground. He s.h.i.+ngled 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 pa.s.s 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 establis.h.i.+ng 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. Report on the Arid Region of the United States. To do so, he concluded, would be destructive. To do so, he concluded, would be destructive. Hah! 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. 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 gra.s.s. 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 gra.s.s 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.

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 gra.s.s 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 a.s.sembled 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. n.o.body mourned the shack's collapse. The family now had two bedrooms, a living room, a big kitchen with a kerosene cook stove, and a bas.e.m.e.nt 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, pa.s.sing 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 dealers.h.i.+p, 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 Sat.u.r.day 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 gra.s.slands were being erased from the Great Plains, going the way of the bison and the Indian. If this ground were not meant for gra.s.s, 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 dealers.h.i.+p, 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 G.o.d, 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 pa.s.sed the Federal Farm Loan Act in 1916, every town with a well and a sheriff had itself a farmland bank-an inst.i.tution!-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 a.s.set that the nation possesses," the Federal Bureau of Soils proclaimed as the gra.s.slands 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 gra.s.slands 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. 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 gra.s.slands 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 d.a.m.n 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 d.i.c.k c.o.o.n 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 gra.s.s. 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 G.o.d'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 gra.s.s 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 gra.s.sland, even in the darkness, using headlights.

This gra.s.s 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 G.o.dd.a.m.n shame. The gra.s.s was pure bioma.s.s; 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 d.i.c.k c.o.o.n 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 d.i.c.k 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 d.i.c.k 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, 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. 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. 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 cla.s.sical scholars or gimcrackery from American wise men. About once a week, his column ran next to Will Rogers on page one of the 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 cla.s.sical scholars or gimcrackery from American wise men. About once a week, his column ran next to Will Rogers on page one of the Texan, 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. 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 pa.s.s-through country. In the first thirty years of the twentieth century, it got a second look.

"The last frontier of agriculture," the government called it in 1923. Southern families, field hands, Scots-Irish and Welsh usually, came in steady waves, fleeing exhausted land for a prairie untouched. The Scots-Irish had left Ireland and the north of Britain in the eighteenth century and settled on thin soil on either side of the Appalachian spine before spreading out to the South and Midwest. They were cannon fodder in the Civil War, many left landless. People from the new cities of Oklahoma, out of work when oil prices plummeted, came as well. Mexicans were drawn by jobs on irrigated beet farms in Kansas and Colorado. When young men started looking around Kentucky or Arkansas in 1910 and were told there was nothing for them but a life laboring for someone else, they pointed to the Texas Panhandle or No Man's Land of Oklahoma and said goodbye, see ya on the farm. My farm. And more than any other group, they came from a faraway part of Russia: thousands of people who had been adrift for centuries, thrown to the wind. When they arrived in Omaha or Kansas City, the scouts, land merchants, and railroad colonists sent them on to the High Plains.

It was a different story up in the northern plains, where people were cursing the railroads for perpetuating a fraud that broke many a family. They had taken a gamble, stripped away the gra.s.s, put in grain outside places like Miles City, Montana, and Marmarth, North Dakota. Then came a few dry years, a killer winter or two, and the wheat glut from the rest of the plains. Just like that, life was gone, main streets shuttered, homesteads left to Front Range chinooks. Some towns along the northern railroad lines folded barely a generation after they were hatched. But in the southern plains, people welcomed the railroads with open arms and big festivities, as if nothing had happened up north. History might repeat itself, but few bothered to make such a warning.

Through his column, John McCarty exhorted Dalhart to take no small steps, praising visionaries like Uncle d.i.c.k c.o.o.n. They needed a real hospital. They needed a second auto dealer, a second bank. Riding outside of town on his newspaper rounds, watching as clouds of dirt trailed the tractors tearing up the old Llano Estacado, it did not matter to McCarty that there was not a river or stream anywhere to be seen, that there was not a lake or any surface water.

"Americans are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of the land," said the new president, Herbert Hoover, who took office in 1929. He had won in a landslide, breaking the Democratic hold on the solid South, taking the prairie states with him.

The tractors rolled on, the gra.s.s yanked up, a million acres a year, turned and pulverized; in just five years, 1925 to 1930, another 5.2 million acres of native sod went under the plow in the southern plains-an area the size of two Yellowstone National Parks. This was in addition to nearly twenty million acres of prairie that had already been turned. Only four small farms existed in Dallam County, Texas, in 1901, covering barely a thousand acres; by 1930, a third of the county was in cultivation.

"This is the best d.a.m.ned country G.o.d's sun ever shone upon," McCarty declared in the pages of the Texan, Texan, and among those who nodded in agreement were people trying to learn the English language by reading the newspaper. The Germans from Russia knew what it was like to live in a place where G.o.d's sun gave out. and among those who nodded in agreement were people trying to learn the English language by reading the newspaper. The Germans from Russia knew what it was like to live in a place where G.o.d's sun gave out.

4. High Plains Deutsch BY THE SUMMER OF 1929, the United States had a food surplus, and every town along the rail lines of the southern plains sprouted a tower of unsold wheat, stacked in piles outside grain elevators. There was a glut in Europe as well, after Russia resumed exporting its wheat. As trains approached Liberal, Guymon, Texhoma, Boise City, or Dalhart on the straight lines across the High Plains, the wheat mounds were the first things to appear on the horizon, towers of grain that n.o.body wanted. It was a sign of prosperity but also a warning of things to come. The balance was tipping. Prices headed down, below $1.50 a bushel, then below a dollar, then seventy-five cents a bushel-a third of the market high point from just a few years earlier. Farmers had two choices: they could cut back, hoping supplies would tighten and prices would rise, or they could plant more as a way to make the same money on higher output. Across the southern plains, the response was overwhelming: the farmers tore up more gra.s.s. They had debts to meet on those 6 percent notes, debts for new tractors, plows, combines, and land purchased or rented on credit. The only way for someone who made ten thousand dollars in 1925 to duplicate his earnings in 1929 was to plant twice the amount. And so the tractors took to the buffalo gra.s.s like never before, digging up nearly fifty thousand acres a day in the southern plains in the final years before the land started to break people. What had been prairie turf for thirty-five thousand years was peeled off in a swift de-carpeting that remade the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma, big parts of Kansas, Nebraska, and southeast Colorado. There was no worse time to plow up the gra.s.sland than in the fall, when it would be exposed for months, subject to the winds of late winter and early spring-the blow season. To leave that much land naked was a gamble, and many farmers knew it. 1929, the United States had a food surplus, and every town along the rail lines of the southern plains sprouted a tower of unsold wheat, stacked in piles outside grain elevators. There was a glut in Europe as well, after Russia resumed exporting its wheat. As trains approached Liberal, Guymon, Texhoma, Boise City, or Dalhart on the straight lines across the High Plains, the wheat mounds were the first things to appear on the horizon, towers of grain that n.o.body wanted. It was a sign of prosperity but also a warning of things to come. The balance was tipping. Prices headed down, below $1.50 a bushel, then below a dollar, then seventy-five cents a bushel-a third of the market high point from just a few years earlier. Farmers had two choices: they could cut back, hoping supplies would tighten and prices would rise, or they could plant more as a way to make the same money on higher output. Across the southern plains, the response was overwhelming: the farmers tore up more gra.s.s. They had debts to meet on those 6 percent notes, debts for new tractors, plows, combines, and land purchased or rented on credit. The only way for someone who made ten thousand dollars in 1925 to duplicate his earnings in 1929 was to plant twice the amount. And so the tractors took to the buffalo gra.s.s like never before, digging up nearly fifty thousand acres a day in the southern plains in the final years before the land started to break people. What had been prairie turf for thirty-five thousand years was peeled off in a swift de-carpeting that remade the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma, big parts of Kansas, Nebraska, and southeast Colorado. There was no worse time to plow up the gra.s.sland than in the fall, when it would be exposed for months, subject to the winds of late winter and early spring-the blow season. To leave that much land naked was a gamble, and many farmers knew it.

The price of wheat may have been falling, but it could not spoil one American story. George Alexander Ehrlich sat at a wedding table in September 1929 and told his grandchildren what it had been like in the bad years on the Volga River in Russia, in the village of Tcherbagovka. Some of his nine children were around him as well. They were at church in Shattuck, Oklahoma, the one place where a person named Schoenhals or Hofferber did not have to pretend to be somebody else. Shattuck is just across the Texas state line, about seventy-five miles east of Dalhart. Ehrlich spoke with the accent that had evolved in a generation's time in the panhandles: a very old style of German, with a sprinkling of Russian, spiced with the dialect of Texas-Oklahoma, where two syllables were never used when one would do. Save your breath, folks said: you might need it someday. Yep.

He told his family about being chained to horses in barns in the Russian countryside. George used to travel with his father, a leather tanner, learning the trade. One of the tricks his father taught him was a way to deter horse thieves. At night, George and his father locked the horses' legs to their ankles. They slept that way in the barn, horses and Ehrlichs, bound by shackles. George would have followed his father's footsteps into the tanning trade if it were not for the draft notice he received from the Russian czar on his sixteenth birthday. The Ehrlichs knew what happened once a boy left the village: he was never seen again. Often, the czar's army would not even do the family the service of sending a death notice. To avoid this service, they would have to leave Russia. In 1890, the Ehrlichs boarded a s.h.i.+p out of Hamburg, an immigrant boat with enough supplies to last twenty days. It was supposed to take only two weeks to get to New York. Midway into the voyage, a wind came up with sideways rain and high waves, rising in heaving swells, forty feet, swamping the boat. They had sailed into a late season typhoon, and it played with the s.h.i.+p as if it were a bathtub toy: it was knocked and tossed and slapped. All hands retreated to a lower cabin, where they cowered, listening to the wood beams strain and the winds scream and the s.h.i.+p fall apart. Don't worry, the captain said, the deck is sealed; the boat is unsinkable. On the second day of the storm, the s.h.i.+p's mast snapped and crashed into the water, but it did not break clean. The boat listed. The mast was snagged in the ocean, tipping the immigrants' s.h.i.+p at such an angle that water poured in and swamped the deck. The captain sent out an SOS and told everyone to prepare for death.

As George told this story-the founding narrative of the Ehrlichs in the New World of Oklahoma-more of his children came around to his table, and they were joined by other adults as well. The older people knew the story, but it was worth hearing again, the way George told it. They poured wine and quaffed beer and ate the spicy, smoked sausages. More food, everyone. For five days in advance, the women of Shattuck, Oklahoma, had been cooking for this wedding, and the scent of fresh-made wurst and strudel drifted out the church to the fields. In the German settlements on the High Plains, there was no more defiant celebration of group survival than a wedding. The rest of the year, the Anglos could make fun of their clothes, the sheriff could call them in for questioning, the merchants could refuse them entry into stores, the children could mock their accents, the farmers could laugh at their planting methods, and other immigrants could deride them as "Roos.h.i.+ans." But the wedding day on this Sunday in September 1929 belonged to the Germans from Russia. Through an improbable journey of 166 years, they had bounced from southern Germany to the Volga River region of Russia to the Cherokee Outlet of Oklahoma. The Russlanddeutschen Russlanddeutschen were not Russian nor were they fully German. Hardened by long exile, state cruelty, and official ridicule, they wanted only to be left alone. The treeless expanse of the southern plains was one of the few places in the United States that looked like home. were not Russian nor were they fully German. Hardened by long exile, state cruelty, and official ridicule, they wanted only to be left alone. The treeless expanse of the southern plains was one of the few places in the United States that looked like home.

"A queer looking set they are," the Hays City Sentinel Hays City Sentinel in Kansas had described some Volga Germans as they pa.s.sed through, a generation earlier, surely one of the most exotic species on the Great Plains. "They are here; they are there; and at every corner they may be seen jabbering about this and that and no one knows what. Their presence is unmistakable; for where they are, there is also something else-a smell so pungent and potent as to make a strong man weak." in Kansas had described some Volga Germans as they pa.s.sed through, a generation earlier, surely one of the most exotic species on the Great Plains. "They are here; they are there; and at every corner they may be seen jabbering about this and that and no one knows what. Their presence is unmistakable; for where they are, there is also something else-a smell so pungent and potent as to make a strong man weak."

At the wedding, women served a dish of cabbage that had been shredded by wooden kraut cutters, mixed with ground pork and onion, wrapped in bread dough, and baked. Another table was laden with Kase noodle, made with thick cottage cheese and onion tops. b.u.t.terball soup was steaming and rich. A pig's skull had been rendered, boiled again, and transformed into hog's head cheese. Chickens were roasted; tubers peeled, boiled, crowded into tanks of potato salad. The women milled their own grain and from that, using eggs from their henhouses and milk from their barns, baked dozens of cakes and pies. They brought stewed apples and pickled watermelons as well. Men did not cook. Men made beer-strong, thick, yeasty. Men made wine, using grapes that arrived by train from California or were grown on arbors on a protected side of a barn. Men killed pigs and made sausage, the organs chopped with salt, pepper, and garlic, stuffed into casings of large intestines and smoked.

These nesters preferred high-top filzstiefel filzstiefel shoes with soft interior linings to cowboy boots, and featherbeds to American mattresses. No house was without schnapps and wurst. In church they sang " shoes with soft interior linings to cowboy boots, and featherbeds to American mattresses. No house was without schnapps and wurst. In church they sang "Gott is de liebe" and made such a month-long fuss over Christmas that customs in America changed as well. They were a culture frozen in place in 1763 and transplanted whole to the Great Plains. Without them, it is possible that wheat never would have been planted on the dry side of the plains. For when they boarded s.h.i.+ps for America, the Germans from Russia carried with them seeds of turkey red-a hard winter wheat-and incidental thistle sewn into the pockets of their vests. It meant survival, an heirloom packet worth more than currency. The turkey red, short-stemmed and resistant to cold and drought, took so well to the land beyond the ninety-eighth meridian that agronomists were forced to rethink the predominant view that the Great American Desert was unsuited for agriculture. In Russia, it was the crop that allowed the Germans to move out of the valleys and onto the higher, drier farming ground of the steppe. The thistle came by accident, but it grew so fast it soon owned the West. In the Old World, thistle was called perekati-pole, perekati-pole, which meant "roll-across-the-field." In America, it was known as tumbleweed. which meant "roll-across-the-field." In America, it was known as tumbleweed.

The Russlanddeutschen held onto their religion, their food, their dress, their rituals, their epic family narratives, and their seeds of grain. In America, they learned about baseball, jazz, the tractor, and the bank loan.

They were known as tough-nutted pacifists, a migratory people whose defining characteristic was draft-dodging. The German Mennonites from near the Black Sea, conscientious objectors from the beginning, certainly were opposed to war on principle. But many of the other Germans from Russia would kill without flinching, showing their warrior skills in American uniforms when they shot their own former countrymen during the two world wars in the twentieth century. What they would not do is fight for the Russian czar or-worse-fight for the Bolsheviks. They had a promise, dating to a manifesto of July 22, 1763, by Catherine the Great, offering homestead land, tax breaks, cultural autonomy, and no military conscription. When the promise was broken 110 years later, they closed up entire villages and fled to America. Catherine, they always felt, was one of them, a German-born empress who married into Russian n.o.bility just after she turned fifteen. By the age of thirty-three, she had dethroned her husband, Peter, and became ruler of Russia. A forceful monarch, Catherine reigned for nearly forty years and was as crucial-indirectly-to settlement of the American Great Plains as the railroad.

Catherine believed that Russia could use fewer Russians and more Germans. A German peasant was not as slovenly as a Russian peasant. Early on, she worried about the frontier on both sides of the middle Volga River, near the cities of Samara and Saratov, in what was then southeastern Russia. She wanted a buffer against Mongols, Turks, and Kirghiz, who roamed and raided the steppe territory much in the way that Apache and Comanche controlled the High Plains. Agricultural colonies, even with people who were not Russian, would bring stability. Catherine's manifesto promised free land, no taxes for the first thirty years of a colony, and no military service for male heads of family and their descendants. The manifesto was aimed at all of Western Europe except Jews, who were expressly prohibited from accepting the offer. In the poor villages of southern Germany, where families were broken by the bloodshed and poverty of the Seven Years' War, Catherine's representatives found their colonizers.

"We need people," Catherine said, "to make, if possible, the wilderness swarm like a beehive."

Americans like to think that theirs was the first country to open its land to the tired, poor, and opportunistic, to grant religious freedom and property to those who had been tossed aside in older lands. But well before manifest destiny carried tides of pilgrims to the American West, Russia offered its own Big Rock Candy Mountain-a treeless, wind-buffed mantle of ground that could have been the High Plains but for the big river in its midst. In the Volga region, every adult male could claim about thirty acres, and that land would go back to the community upon death of the owner. No taxes would be levied for thirty years. No military service. No restrictions on religion.

"Polygamy would be of great use in increasing the population," Catherine offered, a suggestion the Germans never followed up on until some of them joined the Mormon church a century later. Dozens of villages sprang up in the middle and lower Volga. They were obsessive about keeping dirt from the house; cleanliness was the highest of virtues. If someone spit watermelon seeds onto the street, a punishment of ten lashes followed. Laws required the villages to be clean, the streets swept at least once a week. Each married couple had to plant twenty trees. Upon marrying, the young couple lived with the bride's family until land was reallotted upon the patriarch's death. Their blood enemy were the Kirghiz, a Tartar tribe whose members had grazed their livestock on the steppe, and later honed plundering into a warrior art.

The Kirghiz sacked Scha.s.selwa on the Volga in 1771, riding into town in full war cry, faces painted, lances forward. They burned the church, raped women young and old, grabbed babies from their mothers. Houses were torched, plundered, and the granaries emptied of their food. The kidnapped women and boys were sold as slaves in Asia. To this day, a good ole boy in the Oklahoma Panhandle named Schmidt or Heinrich can turn ashen and clench-fisted at the mention of Scha.s.selwa. It burns in the memory of a Volga German as Little Big Horn embitters a Sioux or mention of Cromwell's march through Ireland can inflame a Gaelic soul.

By 1863, a century after Catherine's manifesto, there were nearly a quarter-million Germans living on either side of the Volga River. Another group, primarily German Mennonites, had populated higher ground near the Black Sea. Between obsessive street cleaning and house sweeping, the Germans sang. On cold Russian nights, song warmed the stone walls of churches, and it was one of the things that most impressed outsiders. What the colonists on the Volga would not do is become Russian, and this ultimately led to their exile. Russians had grown increasingly resentful of the Germans in their midst, with their snug villages, big harvests, nationalistic pride, and continued exemption from military service. Why special privileges for them?

In 1872, Czar Alexander II revoked Catherine's promises, declaring that German-speaking Russians had to give up their language and sign up for the army. He raised taxes and took away exclusive licenses to brew beer. Both were fighting causes. For American railroads, fighting constant debt and the fallout of a speculative bubble, the czar's orders could not have been more fortuitous. Drought and a gra.s.shopper plague ravaged the American Plains in the early 1870s.

"In G.o.d we trust, in Kansas we bust" was the slogan on banners draped on wagons of people who had tried to grow something and had given up. On marginal lands in Kansas and Nebraska, farmers were walking away and denouncing the railroads for promoting fraud. Facing bankruptcy, the railroads found their salvation on the steppes of southern Russia. Their agents in the immigration racket had some experience with Germans and saw them as good clients: they traveled in groups, paid on time, and were considered hard working and thrifty. Some railroads practiced selective ethnic shopping. Burlington printed brochures in German, for example, but not French or Italian. At the same time, reconnaissance groups of Germans were returning to the Volga with firsthand accounts of the land in the middle of America. They liked what they had seen of the Canadian prairie, the Dakotas, and all the way down the plains into the Indian Territory of Oklahoma. It was brutally hot, when it wasn't cold enough to freeze eyelids shut. It was treeless, windswept, and free. The Promised Land-all over again, just like Russia.

Beginning in 1873, villages folded up and left for the Great Plains. Katherinenstadt, Pfeifer, Schoenchen, and others became near ghost towns. The Germans boarded small boats on the Volga to Saratov. From there, it was a train ride to a North Sea port where they took immigrant vessels to New York, Baltimore, or Galveston and boarded trains for the flatlands. In American ports, many were amazed to see a black person for the first time. Some Germans arrived with little more than a yellowed picture of Catherine the Great and a note pinned to their coat, indicating a family or destination. Before long, in places like Lincoln, Nebraska, or Ellis County, Kansas, more German was heard in the streets than English. In the 1870s, about 12,000 Russian Germans came to Kansas; within fifty years, 303,000 would populate the Great Plains. Often the new towns were given the name of the villages they had left behind. In Kansas, Germans established Lieben-thal, Herzog, Catherine, Munjor, Pfeifer, and Schoenchen, which meant "a little something lovely."

"No one thinks of drouth and gra.s.shoppers-everyone is happy and energetic," the Chicago Tribune Chicago Tribune reported in a typical dispatch on the kinetic Germans in 1876. They plowed the gra.s.s and planted turkey red on land that others had not dared to farm. What struck some of the American yeomen about these Russian Germans was that they liked to sing, and they kept the floors of their simple houses clean enough to dine on. Dust inside the house was something they would not tolerate. reported in a typical dispatch on the kinetic Germans in 1876. They plowed the gra.s.s and planted turkey red on land that others had not dared to farm. What struck some of the American yeomen about these Russian Germans was that they liked to sing, and they kept the floors of their simple houses clean enough to dine on. Dust inside the house was something they would not tolerate.

George Ehrlich turned eighteen on his journey across the Atlantic in 1890. As he continued with his story at the wedding, he told about his emotions on the immigrant boat: scared, yes-a week into the sailing, he regretted leaving home. His money was strapped to a lower leg, and all his possessions fit into one bag. Part of his family had gone one way to Ellis County in an earlier migration, while others stayed behind, hoping they could hide from the czar's conscription police. George received his draft notice at the same time that a terrible drought hit the Volga region, another nudge to go to America. When the wind of the hurricane got ahold of the s.h.i.+p's mast and dragged it into the water, he thought he would never see American soil. The mast was broken about ten inches from the bottom. The longer it dragged in the water, the more the s.h.i.+p listed. The typhoon raged, seas engorged, wind and heavy rain clawing at the s.h.i.+p. Another SOS went out. Nothing in response. They were all going to drown in the mid-Atlantic. Another German-George knew him only as a Catholic boy-offered to crawl out on the mast and try to saw it off. The Captain said it would kill him, but if the boy wanted to give it a try-G.o.dspeed. They tethered the boy to a rope, handed him a saw, and sent him on his way. He s.h.i.+mmied out, the sea heaving, salt spray sweeping over him, inching along the downed mast. When he was far enough along the beam, he started sawing. He cut through rope cables and oak until his hands were numb. At last, the mast broke away. As the beam fell to the sea, the boat righted itself. Now the Captain ordered all the immigrants to bail. The s.h.i.+p had only one working propeller; the other was broken by a cable that had snapped in the storm. The boat limped on, steadily west, away from the grip of the typhoon. In New York, it was announced as lost at sea.

Almost two months after leaving Hamburg, the immigrants arrived in New York Harbor, their food gone, many of them desperately ill. George Ehrlich landed in America on New Year's Day, 1891.

Back at the wedding, it was time for toasts. To Catherine the Great, of course. And to America. They raised gla.s.ses of schnapps and the spritzy white wine made by the Germans in Oklahoma and thanked G.o.d for their good fortune. The accordions and dulcimers came out. They danced the Hochzeit, which was like the fox trot, only faster. The wheat harvest was going to be the biggest ever. In Shattuck and just across the border in the Texas towns of Follett and Darrouzett, the Volga Germans were shedding some of the thrift their forebears had practiced, buying new tractors, Fordsons and t.i.tans, taking out loans from banks to get still more land. Plant more wheat. Fast!

After arriving in the plains, George Ehrlich had stayed with relatives in LeHigh, looking for work. While there, he missed the rush of 1893 in Oklahoma, when the Cherokee Strip was opened and more than 100,000 people dashed to claim a piece of six million acres of formerly Indian ground. Six years later, Ehrlich heard there were still a few sections left in the old Indian Territory, well west of the good land. For many Germans in Kansas, this was the final chance to get a share of America. In the fall of 1900, George and twenty other men traveled from Kansas to Shattuck, scouting for free land. Close to town, everything was taken, staked by Smiths and Richardsons and Winters and Sherills. George took off on foot, heading for a distant rise to the west.

"I'll throw my hat in the air if I find what I like," he said. "If not, I'm going back to Kansas." George walked toward the rise. At the base of the small hill, six miles out of town, he found thick gra.s.s, rippling in the wind, and a p.r.o.nghorn antelope grazing. He put his claim on a quarter-section of rich gra.s.s at the base of the hill. Paradise, Paradise, he called it. he called it.

Back in Kansas, George made his peace with his family and prepared to leave, along with hundreds of other Germans. They rounded up their cattle, their chickens, their horses, packed kraut cutters and Bibles, accordions and songbooks. The train was stuffed with farm animals and Bekkers, Borns, Spomers, Haffners-so full that the conductor ordered several people off. It would not move with the weight, he said. Some of the children were hiding under the skirts of their mothers to avoid being counted. They pleaded: this was their last hope. They had fled from places in the world that most Americans did not know existed-could not find on a map-and still were without a home. Oklahoma was their last chance, as Dalhart was to the cowboy Bam White, as No Man's Land was to the Lucas and Folkers families.

When the train arrived in Shattuck, the Germans were stunned by what they saw. Oklahoma looked like h.e.l.l. The land was black and charred. The air was full of smoke, the smell putrid. Across the way, the gra.s.s of what was to be their new farms was burned, and for miles on the horizon there was nothing but sharp, black bristles. The Indians-mainly Cherokee-who had been promised this land for eternity had left in a fiery fury. They had been betrayed at least three times by the American government. This latest land grab, which opened some of the last chunks of Cherokee Nation territory to homesteading, was agreed to by several tribal leaders, who accepted a promise of 160 acres a person in return for giving up the larger land base. But other Indians thought they were robbed. The Comanche felt the same way. Their small reservation was opened to settlement at the same time, leaving the Lords of the Plains with little but brochures from the government on how to become farmers. As the Indians walked away from the land, they burned everything in their wake, torching the gra.s.s. Maybe it would scare the Germans back to Russia.

On this bewhiskered and blackened land, the Volga Germans would try to recreate what they had in Russia. The second day in Shattuck, a blizzard hit Oklahoma. It snowed for two days. The Germans camped near the train station but their animals strayed into the storm. They spent the next week collecting the beasts, but some died in the chill, with no gra.s.s to eat. Shopkeepers in Shattuck refused to sell to the Germans; others tried to pa.s.s an ordinance prohibiting the language from being spoken in the city limits. It seemed odd to the Anglo ranchers that these singing, beer-making, strangely dressed people hurried about their business as if predestined to the southern plains.

But the new German villages on the Oklahoma prairie were no stranger than other colonies of outcasts popping up on the High Plains. Oslo, Texas, a few miles to the west, was supposed to be Norway in brown. Oslo was founded by Anders L. Mordt, late of Kristiania, Norway. Scandinavians belonged in the Dakotas, people told Mordt when he showed up in Guymon, Oklahoma, in 1909 and set up his land office. Mordt had other ideas. He vowed to build one of the biggest Norwegian colonies in the United States on empty ground just across the Texas border. He secured a hundred sections on a site he promised would soon have a rail line running through it, and he bought advertis.e.m.e.nts in Norwegian language newspapers in the United States. "Buy now before the price goes up," went one advertis.e.m.e.nt in a 1909 issue of Skandivaven. Skandivaven. "Plenty of rain and the grains look good." The Nors.e.m.e.n came, about two hundred families. They erected a schoolhouse and a Lutheran church that was to be crowned by a copper bell s.h.i.+pped from Norway. The bell would chime over land that n.o.body named Grimstad or Torvik had ever before tried to call home, where meals of lefse and lutefisk would break the routine of beef and barley. Alas, the new church bell went down with the t.i.tanic. Oslo was doomed by lack of rain and no rail line. A drought in 1913 broke the colony, and Mordt declared bankruptcy in a summer when not a drop of rain fell and temperatures reached 112 degrees. Oslo disappeared, though the Lutheran church still remains on the grounds of the old colony. "Plenty of rain and the grains look good." The Nors.e.m.e.n came, about two hundred families. They erected a schoolhouse and a Lutheran church that was to be crowned by a copper bell s.h.i.+pped from Norway. The bell would chime over land that n.o.body named Grimstad or Torvik had ever before tried to call home, where meals of lefse and lutefisk would break the routine of beef and barley. Alas, the new church bell went down with the t.i.tanic. Oslo was doomed by lack of rain and no rail line. A drought in 1913 broke the colony, and Mordt declared bankruptcy in a summer when not a drop of rain fell and temperatures reached 112 degrees. Oslo disappeared, though the Lutheran church still remains on the grounds of the old colony.

The Germans stayed with the land because their nearly two centuries in Russia had taught them how to live in a treeless place. George Ehrlich's first job in Oklahoma was as a ranch hand. To learn English, he carried a notebook in his back pocket, and asked the other cowboys for help, pointing out animals.

"There's cow." Spell it, please. Spell it, please. And George would write c-o-w in his book. And George would write c-o-w in his book.

"There's a prairie chicken." And George would scribble p. c-h-i-c-k-e-n.

"And you're a Kraut."

George burrowed into a side of the hill, building a dugout, the first home. He married a fellow Volga German, Hanna Weis, put in rows of wheat and corn on 160 acres, raised a few cows for milk. He also started breeding horses. The Ehrlichs had a girl, then another baby girl, then a third girl, and a fourth girl-each of them barely one year apart-before they moved out of the dugout. George built a frame house. They had yet two more girls. The seventh child was a boy-William George Ehrlich, who was called Willie. Then came two other girls, and a second boy, George Ehrlich, Jr. Now there were ten children. During World War I, the Ehrlichs were nearly run out of Shattuck. George used to invite the schoolteacher to his home on weekends. Early in the war, the teacher saw a picture of the Kaiser in Ehrlich's house, next to a portrait of Catherine the Great. She reported it to authorities. Two days later, police surrounded the Ehrlich homestead. The house was searched, turned inside out.

You are spy, they told him.

Spell it, please. S-P-Y. S-P-Y.

Ehrlich and eleven other German immigrants were taken to Arnett, the county seat. Word was, they would be hanged as traitors. Around midnight, the police came to the jail and herded Ehrlich and his neighbors out, headed for Woodward, a bigger town just to the east, to appear before a federal judge. It was January, the night air cold, and Ehrlich nearly froze from hypothermia on the long ride, handcuffed in the back of a truck. About 2 A.M., A.M., Judge T. R. Alexander appeared, bleary-eyed. The police explained that they had rounded up a pro-German cabal. One of the Germans, who was r.e.t.a.r.ded, started sobbing, blubbering in his native language. A guard told him to shut up-if he heard another Kraut word out of any of them, he would cut their hearts out. He flashed his knife. Judge T. R. Alexander appeared, bleary-eyed. The police explained that they had rounded up a pro-German cabal. One of the Germans, who was r.e.t.a.r.ded, started sobbing, blubbering in his native language. A guard told him to shut up-if he heard another Kraut word out of any of them, he would cut their hearts out. He flashed his knife.

"George Ehrlich," the judge said, repeating the name several times. "What are you doing here?"

The judge remembered Ehrlich from an earlier appearance, when he came to Woodward for citizens.h.i.+p proceedings.

"What are you doing here?" the judge asked again.

"I cannot talk," Ehrlich answered, in his hybrid English-German. "This guard will stab my heart out."

"You talk to me," Judge Alexander told him. "Now what are you people here for? It's the middle of the night."

"Pit-schur."

"What's that? A picture?"

"Yah."

An officer produced the picture that Ehrlich kept in his house-Kaiser Wilhelm and his family in formal pose.

"That's a beautiful picture," the judge said, then turned to the police. "Is that all you got against these people?"

"They're pro-German. They're hurting the war effort. Spies, for all we know."

The judge turned to the Germans from the Volga. "How many of you are supporting America in the war?"

All hands went up. Ehrlich reached into his pocket and produced two hundred dollars' worth of government stamps issued to support the war effort. A friend produced war bonds. The judge looked at the sheriff and asked him how many of his his of