The Worst Hard Time Part 7

"What're we gonna do, Mama?"

Lizzie White could not muster a teaspoonful of optimism for her children.

"It's up to your daddy," she said. "I can't live like this anymore."

Between selling his skunk hides and a few odd jobs, Bam White spent most of his time in 1935 with old XIT cowboys. They talked about holding a reunion of the biggest ranch in the Lone Star State. Maybe stage a rodeo, pool some cash in town for a purse. Bam no longer dreamed of hiring on at a ranch. Place where he'd worked when he first came to Dalhart, Mal Stewart's spread west of town, had blown away. It was all sand, like most of the old XIT. The way the cowboys kept their tomorrow days alive now was to rope off a section of Denrock Street on a Sat.u.r.day night and hold a square dance. Bam didn't care for dancing anymore; every joint in his body cried with some ache or another brought by a lifetime of breaking horses and chasing cattle. What he did now was call the dances, setting the time with the musicians.

Bam White spent other days kicking around on what was left of the James's place. Old Andy James, his heart was broken by the death of his family's grand slab of Texas. For so long, the James boys had the run of the Llano Estacado. They were part of the country, a proud family. The patriarch had come to the gra.s.slands in 1898 but died before he could stake his claim. The boys and the widow lived in a two-room dugout before establis.h.i.+ng a ranch that went from north of Dalhart to south of Boise City-second in size only to the XIT. Their diamond brand marked cows that had been fattened on the thickest carpet of mid-America. And the stories these boys could tell: skinning cattle by hooking a team of horses to the hide was one that always made people's eyes light up. They had lived through gra.s.s fires that rolled over the prairie like devil's breath and witnessed half a dozen times when the Cimarron River swelled up and raged through the country. More than once, blizzards killed off half their herd, and somebody was always sick or bleeding from a run-in with barbed wire after too much corn whiskey.

Now the James ranch was in tatters. Much of it had been sold to keep the bankers at bay after cattle prices collapsed in the last decade. The paper-chasers were one thing, but the James boys could not fight the dust storms. Andy James never got sick much and never complained; once, he had a few teeth pulled by a dentist with only the numbing aid of a bottle of hooch. But the black blizzards got to him that year, and it affected everyone who was close to him. The swagger was gone even from his son, young Andy, the horseman who used to brag to Hazel Lucas about eating his "mighty crunchy" gra.s.shoppers. Bam had never seen a cowboy so blue as old Andy. Everybody's ranch was in the same condition, blowing away.

A meeting was called in the Dalhart Courthouse. About 150 men and women who used to ranch, or still held t.i.tle to land that had been good gra.s.s for cattle, packed the room. Andy sat and listened while complaints were stacked high. Then he stood to give his piece. His family, he reminded everyone, had come to the High Plains at the start of the new century and initially chose four sections of land-2,560 acres-of this country's sod because of one thing: the gra.s.s. There were no farmers when the James family started their ranch. The whole area was covered with grama, curly mesquite, and bluestem that were waist-high in wet years. Andy James's daddy said the land would never be plowed up. A season's time on the James ranch was all a person needed to fall in love with the gra.s.sland. Over the years, Andy had seen places with more trees, places with more mountains, places with more water, more people, all the things that the Panhandle didn't have, but he always came home to the ranch because it was paradise. And even though the family lost much of their spread in the cattle bust, their soul was still in the land. Andy hated what the farmers had done, tearing up this good earth. He hated the nesters for digging straight lines in open pastures and prospecting for wheat like drunken miners in a gold rush, and then for walking away from it and letting it blow. What they'd done was a crime against nature. But Andy could not live with hate and regret; it wasn't right, this bile and bitterness, and it kept him up at night. Not long ago, Andy went out to the ranch to have a good long look. It sickened him. The cottonwood trees planted by his mother-dead. The gra.s.s that had stretched from sunrise to sunset-gone, not a blade in the ground. Fences smothered by dust. Roads buried under drifts. Tumbleweeds and sand piled as high as the courthouse, a castle of dirt.

"This is a terrible way for us to treat our land," he said at the meeting. He hacked up the prairie silt until his windblown face was red and he doubled over in pain.

There followed a couple of hisses from some nesters. They aimed the gothic death stare at Andy. Does he think he's got a monopoly on righteousness? Others started clapping and whistling: yeah, boy, you tell 'em. Andy James had spoken a truth. He ended with a call to listen to the government men, give 'em a chance. Yes, it was not a cowboy's way to depend on somebody else, especially the government. But this was their only hope, this soil conservation idea that Big Hugh Bennett was trying to get people to agree on. Bennett's men had proposed turning a big stretch of swirling prairie in Texas into a demonstration project of how to hold down the earth, the largest such project in the country. But it would require a majority of people in the county to approve of the plan. If things went right, they might get gra.s.s back in a few years' time. And with gra.s.s, cattle would follow. The country might spring back to life.

"Bulls.h.i.+t!" came a shout.

But Andy James had won over the crowd. They elected him and Mal Stewart, the rancher who had hired Bam White, to write a letter to Bennett in Was.h.i.+ngton and let him know they were good to go. Bennett had told Congress that fifty-one million acres were so eroded they could no longer be cultivated. It would take a thousand years to rebuild an inch of topsoil. What could be done-now-was all theory. But theory was better than another day in the howling dirt. Texas was a unique disaster, for the programs Big Hugh had up and running elsewhere were all designed to stem water erosion. Wind was the problem of the High Plains. The two cowboys sent a letter: folks in the Panhandle had agreed to do something about the airborne earth in Texas. Just show us how.

In early April the two black men who had been sitting in the Dallam County jail for three months were brought back to the courthouse for trial. The railroad agent again told how he found the men, on the coldest of nights, looking for food and shelter, and looking in a place that happened to be property of the Rock Island Railroad. The judge asked the men if this was true and they said, yes sir, we were hungry and cold and saw that little haven of warmth and food and we pushed open the door and helped ourselves to something. With this admission, the judge found the pair guilty of criminal trespa.s.s and sentenced them to 120 days in jail. But again he wanted one more thing.

"Dance," the judge said. The two men obliged, and as the Texan Texan reported the next day, the tap-dancing Negroes made for a good laugh for judge, prosecutor, and the Rock Island Railroad agent. reported the next day, the tap-dancing Negroes made for a good laugh for judge, prosecutor, and the Rock Island Railroad agent.

The paper's editor, McCarty, had become frustrated by the image that the rest of the country was getting of his beloved High Plains. He could never build an empire on sand. His cheerleading had not lagged through dusters that tore at the town like crows feeding on a corpse. He ran a double-spread picture of his town looking its Sunday best. "Beautiful panoramic view of Dalhart shows it as a city of homes where living is a real pleasure," he wrote. The real estate ads were more honest than the journalism. People offered to swap their land for a truck. One realtor wrote: "We've had h.e.l.l here, and it has been no place for suckling babes or tender-hearted softies."

To McCarty, it was bad enough that people had sent a telegram to Was.h.i.+ngton a year earlier, begging for help, saying they were "fighting desperately to maintain our homes, schools, churches." That brought the kind of attention that McCarty could not stand, making his neighbors look like failures. Fox Movietone News had been around for a couple of weeks, filming mountainous dusters as they swept through the High Plains on an almost daily basis, with maps pinpointing Dalhart and Boise City as the dead center of the worst storms, based on charting of windblown soil done by the government men. It was McCarty's nightmare: his town held up as a howling wasteland on thousands of movie screens across America, a netherworld for the lost. The black blizzard that covered Dalhart in half an inch of what looked like dirty snow was captured by the Movietone News crews and sent out to theaters, where the pictures played before regular features like The Gay Divorcee. The Gay Divorcee.

McCarty buried news of that storm deep inside the paper in a single column, and instead promoted a plan of action. The Texan Texan announced a rabbit roundup to exceed all others for slaughter. A few days later, six thousand rabbits were killed as people spread out over a wide swath of penned land. This time guns were allowed and there was "an ammo truck for anyone who runs short," as the paper reported. And if this wasn't evidence that the people of Dalhart were not going to pa.s.sively sit by and accept the fate of transient land, there was more to come. Using his column, called "Cactus, Sage and Loco," McCarty put the best face on the dark winter of 1935. These Movietone News features going out of Dalhart were a slander, he said, as toxic as idle gossip. announced a rabbit roundup to exceed all others for slaughter. A few days later, six thousand rabbits were killed as people spread out over a wide swath of penned land. This time guns were allowed and there was "an ammo truck for anyone who runs short," as the paper reported. And if this wasn't evidence that the people of Dalhart were not going to pa.s.sively sit by and accept the fate of transient land, there was more to come. Using his column, called "Cactus, Sage and Loco," McCarty put the best face on the dark winter of 1935. These Movietone News features going out of Dalhart were a slander, he said, as toxic as idle gossip.

Earlier, during the cold snap that had driven the two black drifters to seek warmth, McCarty wrote that the worst was over. But a month later, an even colder norther rolled through, and the temperature fell to six degrees Fahrenheit. At the same time, a monstrous dust storm broke the routine of smaller dusters. It blanketed all of the Texas and Oklahoma Panhandles, southern Colorado, and southwest Kansas. Dalhart was hammered. The dust was coa.r.s.er and heavier than the usual flour-light silt. It felt like gravel. It shattered windows and swooshed down chimneys and ran along the walls and buried the streets like a winter blizzard. In the morning, footprints and car tracks were imprinted in the dust. A baby boy, aged eighteen months, died one day after that storm.

"A TRIBUTE TO OUR SAND STORMS": McCarty declared it was time to stop treating the dusters like a Biblical plague, time to give them praise. The newsreel people and the traveling reporters from the big city dailies and the magazines-they had it all wrong. The dust storms were majestic, in their way, even beautiful, he wrote. Instead of cowering in the sand, people should look skyward in wonder. Some of his readers thought McCarty had gone mad.

"Let us praise nature and the powerful G.o.d that rules nature," he wrote. "Let us in centurion tones boast of our terrific and mighty dust storms and of a people, a city and a country that can meet the test of courage they afford and still smile." He urged citizens of Dalhart to "view the majestic splendor and beauty of one of the great spectacles of nature, a panhandle dust storm, and smile even though we may be choking and our throats and nostrils so laden with dust that we cannot give voice to our feelings."

The new approach was welcomed by those who were sick of being told that the end was near. The idea that nesters should never have broken the southern plains and planted towns was absurd, McCarty felt. He scoffed at the suggestion of Secretary of the Interior Ickes that people should be relocated to land less hostile to human habitation. A person needed only to go inside the Mission Theater, ignore the lies from the newsreels, and see what this country was really like. There, the movie Cimarron, Cimarron, a tale of the Oklahoma land rush (filmed in Hollywood), was playing. It featured heroic sodbusters more to McCarty's liking. Outside the theater, these dusters were part of a freakish spell of weather-an epic trial, yes-but the Texas Panhandle would come back, strong, and look like the admirable place in the movie. McCarty's tribute generated more mail and publicity than anything he had written in his six years as editor of the a tale of the Oklahoma land rush (filmed in Hollywood), was playing. It featured heroic sodbusters more to McCarty's liking. Outside the theater, these dusters were part of a freakish spell of weather-an epic trial, yes-but the Texas Panhandle would come back, strong, and look like the admirable place in the movie. McCarty's tribute generated more mail and publicity than anything he had written in his six years as editor of the Texan. Texan. The complimentary letters were prominently displayed, including one that compared McCarty to some of the greatest American writers of all time. The complimentary letters were prominently displayed, including one that compared McCarty to some of the greatest American writers of all time.

"Your composition in Friday's paper styled 'A Tribute to our Sandstorms,' in my humble opinion is one of the most beautiful specimens of elegant rhetoric I have seen in contemporary literature. The beautiful imagery, choice figures and excellent diction of this article are beyond question. The reverent spirit which pervades the whole, and the poetic appreciation for nature are worthy of its excellent style. One would search long and with great care before finding in Hawthorne, Poe or Irving paragraphs of greater literary merit."

Unfortunately the letter was unsigned, leaving the impression that McCarty himself had penned the anonymous tribute to his praise of savage dusters. But McCarty was on to something. He had tapped into the resilience of people who wanted to do something other than club rabbits, pray for rain, and wait for the gates of h.e.l.l to open for them.

"I enjoy a storm," McCarty wrote a week after the defiant column. "I like to see old gnarled and scarred trees silhouetted against the sky, defiant of the winds, ready for any storm that may come. I like to see men and women, scarred with the battles of life, proven on its toughest testing ground and ready for all that comes their way."

From the worst conditions came the strongest men, he concluded. "Our country has been beaten, swept, scarred and torn by the most adverse weather conditions since June, 1932. It is bare, desolate and damaged. Our people have been buffeted about by every possible kind of misfortune. It has appeared that the hate of all nature has been poured out against us." He made light of Easterners who whined when the big duster dropped its load on the population centers in May 1934-"scaring the wrist-watch cavemen of the East to death."

From praise of the dust storms, McCarty moved on to praise of the people who endured the storms. Yes, Americans were soft, as he said last Fourth of July, except for these High Plains nesters. They were no wrist.w.a.tch cavemen.

"A TRIBUTE TO OUR PEOPLE": "Spartans! No better word can describe the citizen of the north plains country and of Dalhart," he began this piece. "Bravery and hards.h.i.+p are but tools out of which great empires are carved and real men made Spartans."

The "Spartans" seemed to respond. People from five counties in the Texas Panhandle met in Dalhart in March, holding a "rally to fight dust," as the Texan Texan put it in a headline. put it in a headline.

"More than 700 st.u.r.dy Panhandle citizens, wind-whipped and dust-covered, voted to stand by their guns and once more make this county blossom as the rose," the newspaper said. How to make it blossom was a question left unanswered. Hugh Bennett had received the telegram sent by the cowboys, and his soil conservation service now had a blueprint to hold the land down. The project would cover only a fraction of the three million acres in the Panhandle that were badly torn up. But they had started something, which was better than sitting by idly as the sky carried their homesteads away.

The larger battle was not over the beauty or savagery of sand, or the endurance of the people, but what to ultimately do with the land and the families living in its midst.

"It is not a pretty picture but there is a certain satisfaction in staying with it," McCarty wrote.

People had been lured to one of the last open s.p.a.ces left on the American map by extravagant claims of water and prosperity. Was it too late to simply call them back, to admit that the nesters had been duped and the land raped? McCarty thought that by turning the argument around-by saying that dust storms were nature at its glorious extreme and the people living amid them virtuous-he could keep the towns intact. The government was still considering how-or even if-the prairie gra.s.s could be st.i.tched back in place. McCarty was against any attempt to re-gra.s.s or depopulate the southern plains. Such ideas, he said, could only come from "armchair farmers." A Spartan would stay put.

McCarty's boosterism could not hold the storms back, nor curb the danger to people who felt like miners trapped in a deep shaft, nor stop the deaths. The plague took more lives of the Spartans. A week after the Rally to Fight Dust, a young Dalhart mother, Murrel Sanford, died of dust pneumonia. She was twenty-six and left behind a baby who was dying of the same ailment. Four feet of dust on the main road into Dalhart from the south trapped cars, preventing them from getting back into town. Other drifts completely buried abandoned farmhouses. Another black blizzard reduced visibility in town to a single block. It was not quite dark, but the streetlights were on, and the town was wrapped in an eerie haze. In mid-March, another child died in Dalhart, just a few days after his first birthday, of dust pneumonia. McCarty's paper played up dusters in other states, while minimizing the ones in his town. He reported how a hundred families a month were fleeing Cimarron County, just over the state line to the north.

"Even wagons were pressed into use as the coughing, choking humans fled before the fury of the stifling dust," the paper reported on April 11. At times, McCarty seemed to gloat in the storms of others-dust schadenfreude.

"KANSAS TAKES LEAD.

DISASTROUS STORMS SURPa.s.s TEXAS VARIETY".

Wire service photos showed shoppers in Kansas, otherwise fas.h.i.+onably dressed, with dust masks over their mouths, and dead, skeletal cattle, looking like fossils in the sand. And it was true: the dust in Kansas was falling in heaps; a team of soil scientists calculated that during the storms of March and April 1935, about 4.7 tons of dust per acre fell on western Kansas during each of the blizzards. The tonnage not only crushed trees, broke windows, and dented the tops of cars, but the ceilings of houses were collapsing as well. The pressure was not on pitched roofs but on the flat ceiling inside, beneath the roof, after dust filtered in and settled. The head of the Kansas State College of Agronomy said not even steady rain could save the parched wheat lands in southwest Kansas. The land was too far gone. The recent dusters in Dalhart, McCarty's paper explained, were the fault of all this swirling earth from other states.

"FOREIGN DUST PROVES PANHANDLE IRRITANT": "It is the dust blowing in from other states, notably Nebraska, Iowa and Colorado, that is irritating the nose and throat of Panhandle residents," the story reported. The Spartans of Texas were a stronger breed than the dust victims of other states. "The sand and dust storms are worse in Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado and other states than they are here or else they are a bunch of sissies up there bawling their eyes out because of a new experience which grew old to most of us in our childhood," McCarty wrote.

By April, McCarty was at his most defiant. He ran a front-page challenge: "GRAB A ROOT AND GROWL."

Dalhart citizens, he wrote, had endured "the furies of h.e.l.l turned loose." But the worst was over. He had predicted the same thing in February, and several times in the previous year, 1934. But now he had a feeling in his gut that better times were ahead, and he wanted his tomorrow people to act like it.

"Sure, things are tough, the dust is terrible, the wheat is gone, the prospect for a row crop is diminis.h.i.+ng and all h.e.l.l's broke loose but we know what is back of this county. We know what it will do when it gets half a chance. We know that it will rain again and the High Plains always bounces back like Antaeus of mythical fame, stronger after each fall."

To McCarty the dusters were an adventure. "Grab root and growl-hang on and let's see how this all comes out."

A growling could could be heard in town, from stomachs. Dalhart, located in the southern half of the American breadbasket, could barely feed itself. More people sought refuge in the kitchen that Doc Dawson was running out of his old sanitarium building. Some days, two hundred people waited in line: Mexicans who lived in the shanties near the Rock Island roundhouse, drifters who had just stepped off the train, and longtime Dalhart residents who had not seen a paycheck in three years. The Doc made his big pot of beans and brewed up five gallons of black coffee. Doors opened in late afternoon. People had to remove their hats, wash their hands, and after eating, clean their tin plates in a communal hydrant. n.o.body could go through the line more than once. This daily queue of gaunt, emaciated people was not what Uncle d.i.c.k c.o.o.n had envisioned when he decided to build his empire in Dalhart. But d.i.c.k had a soft spot for people broken by dust and poverty, even as his foreclosure actions moved through the courts, and he did not leave the house without his hundred-dollar bill inside his pocket. He never forgot the horror of Galveston, the town buried by a wall of water twenty feet high, winds of a hundred and fifty miles an hour that shredded houses, more than six thousand people killed, their bodies strewn for miles, their homes reduced to matchsticks. Uncle d.i.c.k was the Dalhart Haven's quiet backer. With d.i.c.k's money, the Doc was able to buy dried beans, potatoes, and coffee. Otherwise, the Doc himself might have been waiting in line, tin plate in hand, in another town. He and his wife had nothing left. be heard in town, from stomachs. Dalhart, located in the southern half of the American breadbasket, could barely feed itself. More people sought refuge in the kitchen that Doc Dawson was running out of his old sanitarium building. Some days, two hundred people waited in line: Mexicans who lived in the shanties near the Rock Island roundhouse, drifters who had just stepped off the train, and longtime Dalhart residents who had not seen a paycheck in three years. The Doc made his big pot of beans and brewed up five gallons of black coffee. Doors opened in late afternoon. People had to remove their hats, wash their hands, and after eating, clean their tin plates in a communal hydrant. n.o.body could go through the line more than once. This daily queue of gaunt, emaciated people was not what Uncle d.i.c.k c.o.o.n had envisioned when he decided to build his empire in Dalhart. But d.i.c.k had a soft spot for people broken by dust and poverty, even as his foreclosure actions moved through the courts, and he did not leave the house without his hundred-dollar bill inside his pocket. He never forgot the horror of Galveston, the town buried by a wall of water twenty feet high, winds of a hundred and fifty miles an hour that shredded houses, more than six thousand people killed, their bodies strewn for miles, their homes reduced to matchsticks. Uncle d.i.c.k was the Dalhart Haven's quiet backer. With d.i.c.k's money, the Doc was able to buy dried beans, potatoes, and coffee. Otherwise, the Doc himself might have been waiting in line, tin plate in hand, in another town. He and his wife had nothing left.

The Red Cross organized a shoe drive. They asked people to go through their closets, find shoes that were too small, too tattered-it did not matter. They collected several hundred pairs in a hotel room at the DeSoto donated by Uncle d.i.c.k. A Mennonite cobbler was enlisted. Old belting material was picked up at the railroad depot, and tire casings were collected. Over several weeks, the shoes were torn apart and put back together, with fresh soles. Dalhart now had daily beans and remade shoes for the asking. It was enough to hold people in place while the government men figured out some way to hold the soil in place. But what they really needed was rain. By March, less than half an inch of precipitation had fallen for the year. 1935 was shaping up as a drier year than 1934, which had been the most arid on record in many parts of the High Plains.

Town leaders solicited ideas on how to force moisture from the sky. One popular method was to kill a snake and hang it belly-side up on a fence. In southwest Kansas, dead snakes were hung for miles on barbed wire, their white-scaled stomachs facing the brown sky. They baked in the sun until crisp. No rain came. A better method, more scientific according to the rain peddlers, was aerial bombing. The concussion theory dated to the first century A.D., when the Greek moralist Plutarch came up with the notion that rain followed military battles. Napoleon believed as much and fired cannons and guns at the sky to muddy up the ground between him and his attackers. Civil War veterans who wallowed in cold slop believed that ceaseless, close-range artillery fire had opened up the skies. In the late 1890s, as the first nesters started to dig their toeholds on the dry side of the one hundredth meridian, Congress had appropriated money to test the concussion theory in Texas. The tests were done by a man named Dyrenforth. He tried mightily, with government auditors looking over his shoulder, but Dyrenforth could not force a drop from the hot skies of Texas. From then on, he was called "Dry-Henceforth."

Government-sponsored failure didn't stop others from trying. A man who called himself "the moisture accelerator," Charles M. Hatfield, roamed the plains around the turn of the century. A Colonel Sanders of rainmaking, Hatfield had a secret mixture of ingredients that could be sent to the sky by machine. In the age before the widespread use of the telephone, it was hard to catch up with the moisture accelerator after he had fleeced a town and moved on.

In 1910, the cereal magnate C. W. Post became obsessed with commanding rain down on a swath of West Texas land that he owned. Post was hoping to plant a model community, hundreds of small farms, on two hundred thousand acres he had purchased with the family fortune. It was flat, featureless, sunbaked. And if G.o.d couldn't give his land rain, Post figured he could grab it himself. He became an expert on rainmaking, if a self-proclaimed one. A disciple of the concussion theory, Post ordered his ranch hands to make a kite strong enough to carry up to two pounds of dynamite. The cowboys were taken aback. Kites? Yes. He wanted 150 of them. Post was going to give the concussion theory its best chance at proving out-by carpet-bombing clouds from kites. The failures in the past, he believed, were due to poor delivery systems. Post took the train down from the Midwest and examined what his ranch hands had rigged up for him. The kites seemed st.u.r.dy enough. He loaded six of them with dynamite. But just as Post was getting ready to launch his aerial agitators, it started to rain. Hard. He and his men dove for cover. The next year, 1911, he returned with a new plan. This time, no kites. He had procured several small howitzers such as those used by the Army and tailored them for rainmaking. At his command, charges were fired into the sky. The clouds thundered with explosions. Nothing. No rain fell. Post died two years later, his Texas sod still empty of model homes, still dry, the concussion theory just that.

By the time of the 1930s drought, older nesters recalled the rich, steady rains that fell twenty years earlier-twenty-five inches and up, every year-and again attributed that to the daily bombardments in Europe. If they could not bring the big guns to the High Plains, they could attempt something on a smaller scale. The experiences of Napoleon, Dry-Henceforth, and the cereal magnate had been lost on town leaders in Dalhart. They were desperate.

The hat was pa.s.sed around Dalhart, as was done with a dubious plan to find a final solution to the rabbit problem. Hard as it was to give even two bits to the rain effort, it was the kind of investment that could save a farm or a business if it paid off. Uncle d.i.c.k was among the first to buck up. He flashed that C-note, making some think he was going to pay the lion's share, before he put it back in his pocket and found a smaller denomination. A rainmaker named Tex Thornton was hired to squeeze the clouds. Thornton's specialty was explosives; he promised that a combination of TNT and solidified nitro-glycerin would do the trick. It had been tried at Council Grove, Kansas, and broke the drought, Tex claimed. Tex was paid three hundred dollars. Of course he would have to get the dynamite and TNT high enough into the clouds to do any good, and for that, he would need a little more money. The hat was pa.s.sed again. They paid him another two hundred dollars. People in town made plans for a street dance. Everyone was invited to a potluck picnic, music from some of the old XIT cowboys, a big celebration to welcome back rain. Tex Thornton promised vertical water by the first week of May. Dalhart was on its feet.

15. Duster's Eve SHE STARTED TO COUGH that winter, a baby's ragged hiccup, and it never stopped. Though Hazel Shaw had sealed the windows and doors and draped an extra layer of wet sheets over the openings, the dust still found Ruth Nell in her crib. It was oily and black some mornings, covering the baby's face. Her lips were frothed and mudded, her eyes red. She cried and coughed, cried and coughed. Hazel lubricated her tiny nostrils with Vaseline and tried to keep a mask over her face, but the baby coughed or spit it off. A doctor took tests, listened to the hurried heart. Ruth Nell was diagnosed with whooping cough. You should probably leave, for the life of your baby, the doctor advised. that winter, a baby's ragged hiccup, and it never stopped. Though Hazel Shaw had sealed the windows and doors and draped an extra layer of wet sheets over the openings, the dust still found Ruth Nell in her crib. It was oily and black some mornings, covering the baby's face. Her lips were frothed and mudded, her eyes red. She cried and coughed, cried and coughed. Hazel lubricated her tiny nostrils with Vaseline and tried to keep a mask over her face, but the baby coughed or spit it off. A doctor took tests, listened to the hurried heart. Ruth Nell was diagnosed with whooping cough. You should probably leave, for the life of your baby, the doctor advised.

South forty miles in Texhoma, Loumiza Lucas was tucked under quilt layers inside the family home. The matriarch of the Lucas clan, Hazel's grandma, was coughing hard, just like the baby. Loumiza was eighty years old, a widow for twenty-one years, with nine children, forty grandchildren, thirty great-grandchildren. There was yet no Social Security.

"It is hard to be old and not have anything," a widowed North Dakota farmer's wife wrote the president in 1934, in a letter that was typical in its pleading tone. "I have always been poor and have always worked hard, so now I am not able to do any more. I am all worn out but am able to be around and I thank G.o.d that I have no pains."

Loumiza was in pain. The dust filtered into her home like a toxic vapor. She stopped eating. She grew weaker. Every time she brought her teeth together she tasted grit. Her bedroom was a refuge but not a pleasant one. It was a dusty hole in a homestead. She could not be moved because the risk of travel exposed her to the wind-borne sand. Her family begged her to eat. She withdrew deeper under the pile of quilts. The windows were sealed so tightly that light from her beloved land was completely blocked. It did not matter: she hated what No Man's Land had become. It was better to remember it as it was when she came into this country, arriving by covered wagon to Texhoma, and north to a half-section of their own, her and Jimmy, in the free kingdom of No Man's Land. That high bluestem in the corner of the county, tall as the reach of a scarecrow, that carpet of buffalo gra.s.s, and Lord what the rains could do in a good year-it was what the land was supposed to look like.

Grandma Lou seemed more worried about her youngest great-granddaughter, the baby Ruth Nell, than her own health. She waved off the questions about her diminis.h.i.+ng spirit and asked about Ruth Nell, and she prayed. She clutched the one Bible she had carried throughout her life, a tattered thing that had traveled across time and terrain. As the dusters picked up, some of Lou's friends and even some of her own family believed the terrible storms were a fulfillment of Biblical prophecy-a sign of the final days. But Lou knew better. There was nothing in her Bible that said the world would end in darkness and dust.

Two days before Ruth Nell's first birthday, Hazel and her husband decided to flee, breaking the family apart for the health of the baby, as the doctor had recommended. They had to get out now or risk the baby's life. This year, 1935, had been one duster after the other and April showed no sign of letup, no rain in the forecast, four years into the drought. At the end of March, black blizzards had fallen for twelve straight days. During one of those storms, the wind was clocked at forty miles an hour or better-for a hundred hours. The Boise City News Boise City News said it was the worst storm in the history of the county. Schools closed, again. An emergency call went out: come get the children and take them home. The schools would reopen when it was safe. Boise City looked ghostly, shuttered from the storms, hunkered down like an abandoned outpost in the Sahara. All the windows were cloaked in brown. Cars that had shorted out on the static were left in roads or ditches, and they soon were covered and became lumps in the sand. said it was the worst storm in the history of the county. Schools closed, again. An emergency call went out: come get the children and take them home. The schools would reopen when it was safe. Boise City looked ghostly, shuttered from the storms, hunkered down like an abandoned outpost in the Sahara. All the windows were cloaked in brown. Cars that had shorted out on the static were left in roads or ditches, and they soon were covered and became lumps in the sand.

Hazel hurried along her plan to get Ruth Nell out of Boise City. She arranged to stay with her in-laws in Enid, Oklahoma, well to the east. But just as they were ready to depart, a tornado touched down not far from Enid, the black funnel dancing around the edges of the very place where Ruth Nell was to find her refuge. It was a gruesome thing, ripping through homes, throwing roofs to the sky. Now what-stay or go? Hazel and Charles felt they had no choice but to go. It was more dangerous living in Boise City, and if they waited much longer, they might not get out of town. The coffee-box baby haunted Hazel, the little blue-faced infant left in the cold who had died of dust pneumonia.

Sheriff Barrick said the roads out of town were blocked by huge drifts. The CCC crews would no sooner dig out one drift than another would appear, covering a quarter-mile section of road. A caravan of Boise City residents who had tried to leave earlier in the week with all their belongings loaded into their jalopies was pinned down at the edge of town, and they were forced to return. The volume of dirt that had been thrown to the skies was extraordinary. A professor at Kansas State College estimated that if a line of trucks ninety-six miles long hauled ten full loads a day, it would take a year to transport the dirt that had blown from one side of Kansas to the other-a total of forty-six million truckloads. Better days were not in the forecast.

Digging out fence posts, Cimarron County, Oklahoma, 1936 Hazel made it south to Texhoma, where she and Ruth Nell could ride the train to the eastern part of the state. If the baby could take in some clean air for a few weeks, living with her grandparents, she might shake this horrid cough. The journey to Enid was not easy. A few weeks earlier, a train full of CCC workers slid off the dust-covered tracks and rolled, killing several young men. Hazel's train sputtered its way east, stopping frequently so the crews could shovel sand from the tracks. Hazel tried to stay positive, but it looked awful outside: all of the Oklahoma Panhandle blowing and dead, no life of any form in the fields, no spring planting, no farmers on the roads. By the time mother and daughter made it to Enid, the baby's cough was no better. Her little stomach must have been in acute pain from the hacking, and she might have fractured a rib from coughing, for the baby cried constantly. At times, Hazel cried along with her and prayed intensely, hoping for relief. Arriving in Enid, Hazel rushed Ruth Nell to St. Mary's Hospital. The doctors tried to clean out her lungs by suctioning some of the gunk, but the baby would not settle. She coughed and cried, coughed and cried. The doctors confirmed Hazel's fears-Ruth Nell had dust pneumonia. She was moved into a section of the hospital in Enid that nurses called the "dust ward." The baby's temperature held above 103. She could not hold down milk from a bottle; it came back up as spit and grime. The doctors wrapped the baby's midsection in gauze and loose-fitting tape, as a way to hold in place the fractured ribs and diminish the pain in the stomach muscle. Still, Ruth Nell coughed and cried, coughed and cried.

"You must come," Hazel phoned her husband from the hospital in Enid. "Come now. Ruth Nell looks terrible. I'm so afraid."

Charles got in his car and plowed through the dust, trying to make his way east. Just getting to Guymon, one county over, proved hazardous. He had his head out the window the whole way, as he had done a year earlier during Ruth's birth, but this time the sand blinded him. He wore goggles and a respiratory mask but they clogged quickly and he was forced to remove them both. Once the car veered off the road and tipped, and it seemed like he was going to crash it again. He decided to drive along the ditch, with two wheels below grade and the other two wheels on the road. It was the only way to move forward through the haze and be sure of his direction. It was nearly three hundred miles to Enid, a drive of two days, moving slowly along the ditch. He kept going at night, with the headlights on. In order to drive halfway in the ditch, Charles had to bring up the chain that usually dragged below the car because it picked up too much debris-mostly dust-encrusted tumbleweeds. Without the chain, though, his car had no way to ground the static. What he needed was a lull between dusters. He got his wish during the first hundred miles. But midway into his journey, he drove into a duster and the static shorted his car. He was stranded.

He kicked the vehicle, coughed up a fistful of gunk, and shook the sand from his hair. He lubricated his nose with Vaseline and waited for the duster to pa.s.s, imagining his baby girl gasping in the hospital. After nearly an hour, the black blizzard dissipated, and Charles was able to restart the car.

By the time Charles made it to St. Mary's Hospital, he was covered in dirt, his face black. He went to the dust ward. Hazel was crying. Ruth Nell had died an hour earlier. She knew by the look on the doctor's face when he came to her with his hands up.

"I'm sorry-your baby is dead."

Back in No Man's Land, Hazel's Grandma Lou stopped coughing. She had been running a fever for several days and could not hold down food.

"How's the baby?" she asked. "How is Ruth Nell? Any word?"

Her son had not heard. Loumiza turned away and closed her eyes. She would not see the homestead green again, would not see any more of the starving land. She slipped under layers of quilt and took her last breath, dying within hours after her youngest great-grandchild fell. The family decided to stage a double funeral for baby Ruth Nell and the Lucas family matriarch. They would hold a ceremony at the church in Boise City, then proceed out of town to a family plot for burial on Sunday, April 14, 1935.

16. Black Sunday THE DAY BEGAN as smooth and light as the inside of an alabaster bowl. After a siege of black and white, after a monotonous jumble of grit-filled clouds had menaced people on the High Plains for seasons on end, the second Sunday in April was an answered prayer. Sunrise was pink with streaks of turquoise, a theatrical start. The air was clear. The horizon stretched to infinity once again, the sky scrubbed. There was no wind. The sun infused every gray corner with a spring glow. Nesters crawled out of their dugouts and shanties, their two-room frame houses and mud-packed brick abodes, like soldiers after a long battle. For once, they did not have to put on goggles or attach the sponge masks or lubricate their nostrils before going outside. They stretched their legs and breathed deep, blinking at the purity of a prairie morning, the smell of tomorrow again in the air. The land around them was tossed about and dusted over, as lifeless as the pockmarked fields of France after years of trench warfare. Trees were skeletal. Gardens were burned and limp, electrocuted by static from the spate of recent dusters. Still, the day had enough promise to remind people why they had dug homes into the skin of the southern plains, and some dared to entertain a thought on this morning: perhaps the worst was over. as smooth and light as the inside of an alabaster bowl. After a siege of black and white, after a monotonous jumble of grit-filled clouds had menaced people on the High Plains for seasons on end, the second Sunday in April was an answered prayer. Sunrise was pink with streaks of turquoise, a theatrical start. The air was clear. The horizon stretched to infinity once again, the sky scrubbed. There was no wind. The sun infused every gray corner with a spring glow. Nesters crawled out of their dugouts and shanties, their two-room frame houses and mud-packed brick abodes, like soldiers after a long battle. For once, they did not have to put on goggles or attach the sponge masks or lubricate their nostrils before going outside. They stretched their legs and breathed deep, blinking at the purity of a prairie morning, the smell of tomorrow again in the air. The land around them was tossed about and dusted over, as lifeless as the pockmarked fields of France after years of trench warfare. Trees were skeletal. Gardens were burned and limp, electrocuted by static from the spate of recent dusters. Still, the day had enough promise to remind people why they had dug homes into the skin of the southern plains, and some dared to entertain a thought on this morning: perhaps the worst was over.

Where to start? Windows were unsealed and opened wide, the heavy, dirt-laden sheets removed. Some windows had been sealed so tightly with wind-hardened dust that they would not budge. It was spirit-lifting to actually let clean air and suns.h.i.+ne inside. Going room to room with a scoop shovel, it was easy to fill a large garbage can with dirt. Roofs had to be shoveled, ceilings as well. Some ceilings had collapsed. Many were sagging. People cut holes overhead, crawled up, and pushed dust through the opening. Bed sheets, towels, clothes could be washed and allowed to dry in this sun, and they would smell of the plains on its best day. Outside, the cows would get a good scrubbing and drink from holding tanks without taking in grit. The cows looked so worn down, having lost patches of hair to the dust, their skin raw and chapped, their teeth chipped by chewing sandpaper with every meal, their gums inflamed. Chickens were due a run of the yard, fluffing sand out of their feathers. A horse might get its nostrils cleaned and find a stretch where it could gallop without sinking up to its knees in drifting sand.

A "grand and glorious" rabbit drive, as the Boise City News Boise City News called it, was back on after a month-long delay because of dusters. A preacher had warned people they should not club rabbits on the Sabbath, that they would rouse the Lord to anger. But today the weather was flawless, a chance to kill maybe fifty thousand rabbits. And it seemed to some nesters like the perfect way to vent their frustration over a collision of bad days-forty-nine dusters in the last three months, according to the weather bureau. called it, was back on after a month-long delay because of dusters. A preacher had warned people they should not club rabbits on the Sabbath, that they would rouse the Lord to anger. But today the weather was flawless, a chance to kill maybe fifty thousand rabbits. And it seemed to some nesters like the perfect way to vent their frustration over a collision of bad days-forty-nine dusters in the last three months, according to the weather bureau.

Roy b.u.t.terbaugh, a musician by trade-sax and clarinet-who had bought the Boise City News Boise City News on a lark a few years earlier, thought it was time to leave behind the bonds of this broken earth. He wanted to fly. The dusters had made him claustrophobic. Oh, to stretch out, to get above the dead ground and float in the blue and the suns.h.i.+ne. A friend had a little single-engine airplane at the edge of the town, next to the dirt strip that served as a runway. It did not take much to talk b.u.t.terbaugh into going for a spin in the clean air. on a lark a few years earlier, thought it was time to leave behind the bonds of this broken earth. He wanted to fly. The dusters had made him claustrophobic. Oh, to stretch out, to get above the dead ground and float in the blue and the suns.h.i.+ne. A friend had a little single-engine airplane at the edge of the town, next to the dirt strip that served as a runway. It did not take much to talk b.u.t.terbaugh into going for a spin in the clean air.

Church sounded right. This was Palm Sunday-a week before Easter, the start of the holiest time on the Christian calendar. G.o.d had to be in a forgiving mood or else why would the day be so wondrous? With weather like this, No Man's Land needed only a couple of good rainstorms and fields would once again be fertile, said a minister in his Sunday sermon in Boise City. But they had to pray in order for this to happen. Some who wanted to go to church were too embarra.s.sed by how they looked. Little Jeanne Clark, who had just left the hospital in Lamar after a long bout of dust pneumonia, only had dresses made of sackcloth, with the onion brand names printed on the side. She could not go to church in such a thing; the other children would laugh at her.

In Baca County, Ike Osteen did extra ch.o.r.es around the dugout. After being cooped up so long in the pocket of home, Ike had a burst of energy. The dusters had been so thick through February and March that the half-section looked unfamiliar. He was seventeen now, a young man with an itch to get on with life. He wandered about the 320 acres of Osteen family ground, trying to find a familiar landmark. The orchard was dead and covered. A dune, perhaps six feet high at the top, had formed along the length of the tree line. It looked like a wave frozen in place. He saw prints in the sand from jackrabbits and heard a sound that had just arrived for the first time this withered spring-birdsong. Where would they nest? Maybe find a corner of the barn that had not been dusted. The garden s.p.a.ce, where the Osteens had grown lettuce, tomatoes, carrots, sweet potatoes, and corn for popping, was under a drift grave. Implements and machines were buried. Ike found the tops of cultivator wheels and a horse-drawn buggy used by his late daddy. But only the tops. He thought of digging them out, but he would need more help than he could get from his two sisters and brother in the dugout. And where had all the topsoil gone? What state now held the Osteen farm? In places where dunes had not piled up, Ike found a couple of arrowheads. As he picked at the hardened dirt, he thought it might be an Indian burial ground, laid bare by the winds. He could see the outline of graves, and they made him wonder what the Comanche would do if they rose from the dead and found the buffalo gra.s.s gone and the land destroyed.

Using the scoop shovel, Ike cleared away enough sand to reveal the doors into the fruit cellar. His brother hauled water inside for baths. With the windows open on a windless day of perfect clarity, everyone in the dugout could get a good soak without worrying about the water going brown. After it cooled, the bathwater was not wasted. It was used to nurture an elm tree, just about the only thing still alive on the Osteen homestead. The outhouse was a roof above the sand. Drifts piled nine feet high against the walls. At least the dugout was not completely buried. Over at Roy Beightol's farm, a few miles away, the house had been drowned by dusters, and the family forced to flee. Only the s.h.i.+ngles of the roof were visible.

After he had cleared a path from the dugout to the outhouse, Ike turned his attention to the Model-A, which he called Old Henry. After shorting out in a duster, Henry had not been driven for some time. It was all Ike could do to keep it from being buried during the month of March. Ike took a flat contact file to burned spots on the points in the distributor. He wore them down enough so that the engine fired. Now he had a way to get back to school. Of late, because of the difficulty of riding a mule or driving Old Henry to the Walsh High School, Ike had been staying all week in the village; he and his buddy Tex Acre were boarding with his grandma in Walsh. He came home only on weekends. For twelve years, Ike and Tex had been best friends, and the wonder was that they were still in school. All the times the train pa.s.sed by, carrying their dreams out of Baca County, it had been hard to resist. They had to get through just April and May, and then they would be free. Ike picked up Tex and drove over to Pearl Glover's house to give her a ride back to school as well.

Black Sunday, southern Colorado They all agreed: it was the best day of the year. s.h.i.+rtsleeve weather, temperature in the eighties. The three high school seniors drove with the windows down, the warm air in their faces, the spotless sky overhead. They talked about getting their gym back and resuming practice for the senior play. The Walsh High School gym had been a makes.h.i.+ft hospital for a month now, run by the Red Cross. But with the weather so nice and only the slightest breeze out of the southwest, Ike, Tex, and Pearl expressed hope that their gym would become a theater again.

About eight hundred miles to the north, people in Bismarck, North Dakota, started calling the weather bureau. A high-pressure system had been sitting over the Dakotas, and it was tussling with a cold front that had barreled down from the Yukon. With the clash of warm and cold currents, the air turned violent. Winds screamed over the gra.s.slands, carrying dust so heavy that visibility was less than a hundred yards. The Dakotas had been pummeled by numerous dusters during the Dirty Thirties, but this one was bigger and stronger, packing a tremendous load of sand. In two hours' time, temperatures plunged more than thirty degrees, heralding the cold front's advance. By midmorning, the windblown soil slid down over South Dakota and was advancing on Nebraska. The weather bureau was flooded with questions: What happened to the sunlight?

Why is it so dark?

Was this a twister? A series of twisters? Something new and horrible?

Where did it come from? What was the forecast? Where was it going? How long would it last?

Will we get enough air?

What should we do? Flee? Hide?

The weathermen were as confused as the callers. The storm that had moved out of the Dakotas a year earlier and blanketed New York, Was.h.i.+ngton, and s.h.i.+ps at sea gained strength because it rode the jet stream and its high-level winds to the east. This duster was moving south with the cold front, but it was darker by far than anything ever seen before on the prairie. Some people compared it to a wall of muddy water, boiling up and then down on the earth. No air reconnaissance had picked it up; the nearest weather bureau measurement plane, used in the daily forecast of 1935, was out of Omaha, hundreds of miles east.

An a.s.sociated Press reporter from Denver, Robert Geiger, was traveling toward No Man's Land with photographer Harry Eisenhard on that Sunday morning. The route took them from Denver to the southeast, away from the mountains, over the high, browned prairie, through Arapahoe, Elbert, Lincoln, Cheyenne, Kiowa, and Prowers Counties, to Baca. They planned to go on to Boise City, Guymon, and Dalhart. There had been nothing to indicate a ma.s.sive duster was on the way, but black blizzards were nearly impossible to forecast. The newsmen were simply looking for more anecdotes about the storms that were killing the southern plains. With black blizzards blowing through almost daily, Geiger's stories were getting good play across the nation. The pictures sent out by the wire service during that winter and early spring told as much, if not more, than Geiger's prose: people with masks and flashlights, navigating the perils of small-town main streets, cars dodging the drifts and haze of a country road, storefronts boarded up, schools closed, cattle lying dead in the dust.

When the big roller crossed into Kansas, it was reported to be two hundred miles wide, with high winds like a tornado turned on its side. In Denver, temperatures dropped twenty-five degrees in an hour, and then the city fell into a haze. The sun was blocked. That was just the western edge of the storm. The front end charged into Kansas carrying soil from four states. Near the town of Hays, where Germans from Russia had settled fifty years earlier, a small boy who had been playing in the fields with a friend dashed for home. He got lost in the midday blackness; confused, he circled back. The next day he was found dead. He had suffocated, half a mile from home.

A telegraph inquiry around 2:30 P.M. P.M. came by Morse code from northern Kansas to the railroad depot in Dodge City, Kansas, about 140 miles northeast of Baca County. came by Morse code from northern Kansas to the railroad depot in Dodge City, Kansas, about 140 miles northeast of Baca County.

"Has the storm hit?"

The reply came a few minutes later, tapped from the Dodge City depot.

"My G.o.d! Here it comes!"

Dodge City went black. The front edge of the duster looked two thousand feet high. Winds were clocked at sixty-five miles an hour. A few minutes earlier there had been bright suns.h.i.+ne and a temperature of eighty-one degrees, without a wisp of wind. Drivers turned on their headlights but could not see ahead of them, or even see the person sitting next to them. It was like three midnights in a jug, one old nester said. Cars died, their systems shorted out by the static. People fled to tornado shelters, fire stations, gyms, church bas.e.m.e.nts. There was a whiff of panic, not evident in earlier storms, as a fear took hold that the end was near. A woman in Kansas later said she thought of killing her child to spare the baby the cruelty of Armageddon. A weather bureau station agent wrote in his journal that the duster extended east and west for as far as the eye could see. It was lighter at the top, coal black at the ground. As it advanced, it seemed to recirculate, picking up fresh dirt and then slamming it down, in rolling fas.h.i.+on.

Ed Stewart of Elkhart, Kansas, ran outside and mounted his camera at the edge of town, pointing it north. As the biggest duster ever seen rolled into town, he clicked off a series of pictures. In the first frame of the sequence, the storm moves up behind Elkhart. Houses and small outbuildings and a car or two are visible in brilliant sunlight. They are dwarfed by the thick, heavy clouds creeping up behind them. Above the rolling front, the sky is still clear, highlighting the contrast. In the next frame, the clouds turn ink black as they swallow the town. By the middle frames, only telephone poles in the forefront are still visible; they soon disappear. The last pictures show a darkness of deep winter night-hole-in-the-ground black. The AP team, riding just ahead of the duster, was also getting pictures, but their shots were taken farther away from the front. The AP team drove into Baca County and headed for Boise City.

Just below Elkhart, in the northern fringe of No Man's Land, several hundred people were ma.s.sed in a field for the rabbit drive that had been promoted by the Boise City News. Boise City News. They had driven from Guymon and Boise City, and many came not out of civic duty but hunger. With cattle gone, no wheat in the ground, chickens running blind and hungry, people in No Man's Land had started to can rabbit meat to store in their cellars, along with the pickled tumbleweed. If meat was sealed tight in the canning jars, it would keep. The rabbit drive drew a huge crowd. People moved the animals along a V against a fence into a pen, where they were clubbed with bats, chains, and wrenches. They had driven from Guymon and Boise City, and many came not out of civic duty but hunger. With cattle gone, no wheat in the ground, chickens running blind and hungry, people in No Man's Land had started to can rabbit meat to store in their cellars, along with the pickled tumbleweed. If meat was sealed tight in the canning jars, it would keep. The rabbit drive drew a huge crowd. People moved the animals along a V against a fence into a pen, where they were clubbed with bats, chains, and wrenches.

Black Sunday, southern Colorado Ike Osteen was five miles away from his homestead, with Tex and Pearl, when he noticed rabbits and birds fleeing south. This he had never seen: a desperate migration, the birds screeching by his car, the rabbits in a sprint, all headed in the same direction. It was curious because there still was no wind, and the early afternoon was as luminous as the morning had been. He looked north and east, scanning the horizon of the broken land of Baca County on a rare day when a person could see into forever. Then he saw it, a few minutes past 4 P.M. P.M.