DRIFTERS, LUNATICS, AND BANKRUPT shopkeepers filled the courtrooms in Dalhart. On many days, the slow grinding of the law against people who could no longer stay afloat was the only business in town. Uncle Dick Coon took title to a pool hall that was one of the oldest hangouts in town, foreclosing on a debt of $612. The court awarded Coon four pool tables, four domino tables, twelve chairs, five cue racks, four sets of dominoes, and two cigar cases. Banks foreclosed on red bulls and black steers, on tractors, combines, water tanks, windmills, light fixtures. Simon Herzstein tried but could not find a way to reopen his store in town. By 1935, Herzstein was three years behind on city taxes. He had stayed open through days when not a single shirt sold before finally calling it quits. After Herzstein was foreclosed on $242 in back taxes, the City of Dalhart had title to a piece of space long-occupied by the leading clothier on the southern plains. It became another empty hole in a sagging town.
The sign at the edge of Dalhart—"BLACK MAN DON'T LET THE SUN GO DOWN ON YOU HERE"—was strictly enforced. In February, a norther came through the High Plains, sending the mercury plummeting to seven degrees. The hazy, arctic air hung on for a week. When two black men got off the train in Dalhart, hungry and nearly hypothermic, they looked around for something to eat and a place to get warm. They found a door open in a shed at the train depot. Inside was some food and shelter from a cold so painful it burned their hands and feet like a blowtorch.
"TWO NEGROES ARRESTED": the Dalhart Texan reported how the men, aged nineteen and twenty-three, had sniffed around the train station, looking for food. They were cuffed, locked up in the county jail, and after a week brought out for arraignment before a justice of the peace, Hugh Edwards. The judge ordered the men to dance. The men hesitated; this was supposed to be a bond hearing. The railroad agent said these men were good for nothing but Negro toe-tapping. The judge smiled; he said he wanted to see it.
"Tap dance," Edwards told the men.
"Here?"
"Yes. Before the court."
The men started to dance, forced silly grins on their faces, reluctant. After the tap dance, the judge banged his gavel and ordered the men back to jail for another two months.
As the ground took flight through the middle years of the Dirty Thirties, the courts had to contend with a new type of mental illness—the person driven mad by dust. Texas, like most states, had a civil procedure for committing people to involuntary confinement in a state institution. County courts had jurisdiction. A young judge, Wilson Cowen, impaneled a jury of six to hear a story that was common on the High Plains: a young woman found wandering the streets, muttering incoherent pleas. Cowen was deeply troubled by these insanity trials. He had been elected in the summer of 1934, despite his youth (he had just turned thirty) and his inexperience (he had been in Dalhart for only five years). While running forjudge, Cowen roamed all over Dallam County and saw firsthand how the dirt-packed winds were taking the life out of the place. He drove for days without seeing a single green thing. He saw farmhouses without a chicken or cow. He saw children in rags, their parents too frightened of dust pneumonia to send them to school, huddling in shacks shaped into wavy formations on the prairie, almost indistinguishable from the dunes. He had been a judge less than a year when he was assigned the case of a mother of young children, the thirty-five-year-old widow found on the streets. Bankrupted by the wheat bust, the woman had lost her husband to dust pneumonia, leaving her without a man or a penny to her name. Her children were hungry, dirty, coughing, dressed in torn, soiled clothes. Their house was nearly buried, and inside centipedes and black widows had a run of the place. The worst thing was the wind. It never stopped. One day, the woman simply snapped.
"Dust is killing me!" the woman shouted. Her voice echoed through the redbrick fortress of the Dallam County Courthouse.
Cowen tried to talk to her about what had happened and the steps she could take to recover. The judge told her about the relief house, just opened in town, Doc Dawson's operation. The Doc was broke. All the money he made at the sanitarium had been put into the land, and the land gave back nothing. What was left for him was service, the impulse that had driven the Doc all his life. With a donation from Uncle Dick, he opened a soup kitchen known as the Dalhart Haven, serving hot beans from a big pot and black coffee, sometimes hot. Dunes were spreading all around the Panhandle, sifting and lengthening, transforming the old XIT lands to desert before the eyes of a panicked citizenry. The Doc's ambition had ebbed to a few goals: live through the dusters, keep the soup kitchen running.
And so Judge Cowen suggested to the shrieking woman, perhaps she could find temporary relief at Doc Dawson's Dalhart Haven.
"Dust is killing me!" she shouted again. "It's killing my children."
Privately, the judge told friends some hope existed if only the government men could find a way to tame the dunes and if the skies could spare some rain. Cowen was encouraged by talk among some of the government men about trying to control the prairie with contour plowing. Conservation —that was the new word coming from Big Hugh Bennett. He had sent one of his soil scientists to Dallam County, and the man told farmers they had been "practicing suicidal production" on the land. If the government was going to help, people would have to promise, in writing, to change their ways, would have to act as one. But getting a community consensus looked like a hard thing to do at a time when most people were still in shock at the collapse of their lives and their beloved piece of Texas dirt. This tomorrow land was running out of tomorrow people.
"Dust is killing us all! God help us."
The court heard how the woman's shack was nearly a tomb under the topsoil, and her children were close to suffocating. An expert told the judge that the woman had lost her ability to care for her children or herself. After half a day's deliberation, the jury agreed. Resisting the tug on his heart, Judge Cowen signed a certificate committing the mother to the insane asylum at Wichita Falls, Texas. Her children were given to the state. Cowen was thirty-one years old when he heard that case. More than fifty years later, it still bothered him.
There were times in the two-room shack shared by five members of Bam White's family that Lizzie White nearly snapped as well, when the pain was too much. The shack had no electricity, no running water.
"The wind," she would say, shaking her head, a haunted look on her face. "Oh, the wind, the wind."
They worked and ate by the light of a kerosene lamp. Keeping the dust out was impossible. Even fresh-cleaned clothes, hanging outside to dry on the line, were at risk. When a duster rushed through, she had to hurry and get the laundry off the line, because there was usually just enough oil in the blowing sand to soil the clothes. Lizzie swept five, six times a day. She had her boys shovel dust in the morning, after it piled up outside the door. Sometimes a big dune blocked the door, and the boys had to crawl out a window to get to it. The dust arrived in mysterious ways. It could penetrate like a spirit, cascading down the walls or slithering along the ceiling until it found an opening. Of course she taped windows and doors, draped everything in wet sheets, turned the pots over, covered the sink. But there it was floating in the kerosene lamp's light, after supper, free-floating. Just the sound of the prairie wind could make her stomach tight, for she knew what would follow. And the sight of her children, these hungry kids, their noses never clean. She kept them out of school on days she feared they might get caught in a blinding duster. The dust pneumonia scared the life out of her. Her sister, who lived to the south, had caught it. Came up with the fever and powerful body aches and had trouble breathing, as if her air passages had been cut off. Came up with the coughing all night and day till she broke three ribs. Fever shot up, and then she died before she could find her way to one of the emergency hospitals.
Young Melt's job was to tend the garden, hauling water in pails to a square of ground out by the side of the shack. It was not much to look at, except for the watermelons. They grew big and green, and the Whites counted the days until they could cut one open and submerge their faces in the sweet, wet fruit. Midsummer, amid a string of dusters, the static electricity was crackling like firecrackers. In the evening, when the dust clouds drifted through, Melt went outside to check the garden. He had watered it that morning, but now it was dead, killed by the electric currents of the duster; the leaves were black and the vines collapsed. The static had singed the foliage of the watermelon plants.
Not long after the garden died, the children came home and found Lizzie White buckled over in a corner. She was crying, her face in a towel. The boys looked into their mama's red eyes, felt the towel moist with hot tears.
"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 Saturday 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 grasslands in 1898 but died before he could stake his claim. The boys and the widow lived in a two-room dugout before establishing 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 grass 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" grasshoppers. 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 title to land that had been good grass 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 grass. 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 grassland. 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 grass 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 grass back in a few years' time. And with grass, cattle would follow. The country might spring back to life.
"Bullshit!" 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 Washington 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 trespass 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 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 hell 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 Washington 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.
McCarty buried news of that storm deep inside the paper in a single column, and instead promoted a plan of action. The 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 passively 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 coarser 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 god 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, 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. 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 hell 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 wristwatch 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 hardship 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 put it in a headline.
"More than 700 sturdy 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 spaces 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 grass could be stitched back in place. McCarty was against any attempt to re-grass 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 SURPASS TEXAS VARIETY"
Wire service photos showed shoppers in Kansas, otherwise fashionably 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 hell 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 diminishing and all hell'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 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. Nobody could go through the line more than once. This daily queue of gaunt, emaciated people was not what Uncle Dick Coon had envisioned when he decided to build his empire in Dalhart. But Dick 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 Dick was the Dalhart Haven's quiet backer. With Dick'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 Dick. 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 God 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 sturdy 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 passed 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 Dick 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 passed 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.