IN THE WINTER OF 1935, everybody in the Osteen dugout had a cough, raw throat, and red eyes that itched at all times, or trouble getting their breath. The family—Ike, his brother, and two sisters, and the widow living inside a divot in the prairie of Baca County—had tried to seal their home, stuffing rags into wall cracks, gluing strips of flour paste-covered paper around the door, taping the windows and then draping damp gunnysacks over the openings. Wet bed sheets were hung against the walls as another filter. But all the layers of moist cloth and flour paste could not keep the wind-sifted particles out. The dugout was like a sieve. When their Red Cross masks got so clogged it was like slapping a mud pie over the face, they rigged up sponges to breathe through, but the general store in Springfield couldn't keep up with the demand and ran out of sponges. The plow that Ike had used to make money in the wheat boom was almost completely buried. Going to the outhouse was an ordeal, a wade through shoulder-high drifts, forced to dig to make forward progress. They tried parking the old Model-A on different sides of the dugout or atop the dunes as a way to keep it from getting buried. In March, the worst dusters yet came from the north. The storms blocked the sun for four days, although it was never completely dark, and packed winds strong enough to knock a person down. It forced the Osteen family inside for three of those days and smothered the Model-A. Ike listened to the incessant crackling of static electricity around the windmill. Poking his head out of the hole, he saw currents running down the windmill and along a wire—a blue flame. Wasn't nothing; his friend Tex Acre said the static at his place was so strong it electrocuted a jackrabbit. Saw it with his own eyes.
With each new duster, hope that the Osteen half-section could deliver some measure of relief to the family slipped away. For days, they were not sure on what side of the horizon the sun rose and on what side it set. A black blizzard in February carried such a punch it knocked telephone poles down. By the spring, Osteen's mama wanted only to see her son get through school, and then move to town. Ike was holding on, trying to attend school on the days when the storms would allow his mule to stumble through the sifting dunes. Sometimes he would ride all the way to the schoolhouse only to find it closed on account of the dusters. Every school in the county was closed for a week in March. At one school, children were trapped just before the afternoon school bell, unable to go home. They spent the night holed up behind the thin walls of the wood-frame building, cold and hungry. Stories like that made parents give up on school. It was too risky, and they did not see any reason for it. Life's ambitions and dreams had dried up; people held to a few, desperate desires—a longing to breathe clean air, to eat, to stay warm. School was a luxury.
Ike considered dropping out. There was supposed to be work on a government road job, paving a line across southern Baca County into New Mexico, work that a boy could get if he could lie about his age. He also thought of hopping aboard the train and heading west, seeing what California was all about. He and Tex Acre had talked about lighting out for some place that had trees and water. But Ike's mother said it would break her heart if he left before making it out of high school. She needed at least one child to bring some light into the dugout. He signed up to help with the senior play, Mail Order Bride, staying after school in the tiny gym to work as a stagehand. But in mid-spring, just days before dress rehearsal, practice came to a sudden halt—the play was off. Cots were hauled into the school gym and placed in tight rows. The Red Cross was converting the gym into an emergency hospital. It soon filled with wheezing, fevered people, including some of Ike's classmates. Nine people died. One of the victims was seventeen, Ike's age, a classmate who had hoped to graduate with him that spring.
One dirt-filled day blended into another. Starting on the first day of March, there was a duster every day for thirty straight days, according to the weather bureau. In Dodge City, Kansas, the Health Board counted only thirteen dust-free days in the first four months of 1935.
People were stuffed with prairie topsoil. In a report delivered to the Southern Medical Association, Dr. John H. Blue of Guymon, Oklahoma, said he treated fifty-six patients for dust pneumonia, and all of them showed signs of silicosis; others were suffering early symptoms of tuberculosis. He was blunt. The doctor had looked inside an otherwise healthy young farm hand, a man in his early twenties, and told him what he saw.
"You are filled with dirt," the doctor said. The young man died within a day.
Prairie dust has a high silica content. As it builds up in the lungs, it tears at the honeycombed web of air sacs and weakens the body's resistance. After prolonged exposure, it has the same effect on people as coal dust has on a miner. Silicosis has long been a plague of people who work underground and is the oldest occupational respiratory disease. But it takes years to build up. In the High Plains, doctors were seeing a condition similar to silicosis after just three years of storms. Sinusitis, laryngitis, bronchitis—a trio of painful breathing and throat ailments—were common. By the mid-1930s, a fourth condition, dust pneumonia, was rampant. It was one of the biggest killers. Doctors were not even sure if it was a disease unique from any of the common types of pneumonia, which is an infection of the lungs. They saw a pattern of symptoms: children, infants, or the elderly with coughing jags and body aches, particularly chest pains, and shortness of breath. Many had nausea and could not hold food down. Within days of diagnosis, some would die.
Desperate parents pleaded with the government men to help their families escape. Their children were being strangled by dust. In a month, a hundred families in Baca County gave up their property to the government in return for passage away from land that was killing them. Roosevelt had not yet settled on a plan to relocate people, but there was money available, in piecemeal relief efforts, to help folks forced to move.
The Red Cross declared a medical crisis across the High Plains in 1935, opening six emergency hospitals, including the one in Ike's school gym. But in the homesteads of Baca County, No Man's Land, and southwest Kansas, many people in dire need of care could not get to the medical centers. Secondary roads to withered farms—none of them paved, most of them barely graded—were impassable in the first months of 1935 because of blowing drifts. And the chill was a force of its own. February was the coldest in forty years. People were stuck in drafty, dust-swept homesteads, meat-locker cold, coughing dirt into their pillows. Fighting for their lives, the sick rode mules or horses over the chop of the dunes to the hospitals. In Beaver County, adjacent to Cimarron, three hundred people were diagnosed with dust pneumonia. Nearby in Liberal, Kansas, nine people who came into the medical facility died of the same thing. In March, one out of every five people admitted to all hospitals in southwest Kansas said they were choking on dust. The next month, more than 50 percent of admissions were for dust-related respiratory ailments.
Jeanne Clark, whose dancer mother had left New York for the High Plains to get help for her own respiratory ailments, came down with a high fever, chills, and chronic cough in her home just north of Baca County. She was put in the emergency hospital in Lamar, Colorado, in a room with wet bed sheets draped over the windows. The former haven for lungers had turned lethal. Jeanne's mother had begun to look for a way out of this maelstrom. She had gone from Broadway's bright lights to a small town where she was starved for light and a clear day, and had been thinking of ways to get back to New York when her little girl came down sick. Jeanne was an only child. The doctor said they did not know if she would live to see Easter Sunday 1935. She slept most of the day, awakened occasionally by her father's cigar smoke. She loved seeing her daddy, but the smoke made her scream.
The Red Cross advised people not to go outside unless they had to and then only with their respiratory masks. Even rail travel was hazardous. A train from Kansas City to Dalhart had to stop several times when passengers complained they were choking. The train came to a halt, idling in an effort to let the dust settle enough so that people could scoop out the passenger cars. Another train in Kansas was derailed when it plowed into a dune that had formed in just a few hours. Despite the Red Cross warning, people hadto go outside. They lived outdoors; the outdoors lived with them. It was one and the same. They had no choice. High Plains nesters were more intimate with the elements than perhaps any other people in the country. They knew black dust came from Kansas, red from eastern Oklahoma, a yellow-orange from Texas. And sometimes all of Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas seemed airborne at once: black, red, and orange converging. The sunlight that filtered through these dusters took on eerie hues—sometimes even green. People knew that when the wind blew from the southwest, the duster to follow would go through a range of colors—everything but the golden light they remembered from the first days of breaking the sod. If the dust clouds were high from the south, somewhat thin, they would take the shape of moving mesas, topping out at better than two miles above the ground. And when dusters came from the north, the clouds boiled up like thunderheads and usually carried a heavy load. These black northers were the most hated. Life in the galloping flatlands was a pact with nature. It gave as much as it took, and in 1935 it was all take.