BOB GEIGER'S DISPATCHES and Harry Eisenhard's images ran in newspapers everywhere, providing words and pictures for a story that many urban dwellers still could not believe: midnight at noon, a duster that wiped out the sun! Earlier black blizzards had gone unrecorded, bringing horror to the prairie and chipping away at lives but known only to people stuck in the isolation of the High Plains. And for the first time, a term entered the nation's lexicon. It came from another of Geiger's dispatches, a throwaway phrase that was part of a larger point he wanted to make.
"Three little words, achingly familiar on a Western farmer's tongue, rule life in the dust bowl of the continent—if it rains." The three little words did not stick as much as the two, and thereafter, headline writers, politicians, and newsreels referred to the airborne part of the southern plains by its new name: the Dust Bowl.
In the first days that followed Black Sunday, people tried to explain it. The weather pattern that produced the storm was not out of character, especially for early spring. A mass of polar air had moved south from Canada, colliding with the dome of high pressure over the plains. As the heavier colder air pushed down a prairie lane, it drove the winds and caused the extreme, sudden drops in temperature. The winds were part of the landscape—always had been. Ever since the first Anglos dug a blade into the grass, they made jokes about the lashing currents. Newcomers wondered if it blew all the time. The standard answer was that the wind would shriek for ten days and then blow like hell for another five. The drought was in its fourth year, and it was the worst in at least a generation's time. But long dry periods were as much a part of the Great Plains as the grass itself. What was different in 1935 was that the land was naked. If the prairie had been held in place by adequate ground cover—grass, or even the matted sprouts of wheat emerging from winter dormancy—the land could never have peeled away as it did, with great strips of earth thrown to the sky. There were ancient dunes all over the plains, such as Nebraska's Sand Hills, but they were anchored by grasses like prairie sand reed, native species that were a perfect fit for a big neighborhood of tough winds and unforgiving sun. The soil had been so pulverized by the dusters of 1933, 1934, and early 1935 that it was easy to lift. And fresh-formed dunes added reinforcement for Black Sunday clouds. With every new reach for the ground, the storm became heavier, thicker, darker.
By Monday, the remains of Black Sunday were blowing east and south into the Gulf of Mexico, greatly dissipated at last but still carrying enough prairie residue to postpone daily life, if only for a few hours. For days, Congress had been sitting on Hugh Bennett's plan to save the Great Plains from itself. He wanted money and human support to go well beyond the scope of the demonstration projects that were up and running. He wanted something permanent, to ensure against wipeouts and to try and restore the grass. There were plenty of doubts, even as Bennett attempted to make his case like a trial lawyer in final argument. Witnesses testified about towns with a foot in the grave, farms abandoned, land that had not produced a crop in four years, families sick and hungry, schools closed, and the only hope a miracle from the president or rain from stingy skies. Bennett had been trying to draw a big picture, to impart some sense of the magnitude of the collapse of the plains. It was not just black blizzards, starving cattle, and an exodus of hollow-eyed people. The human stories, each sad in their own way, were part of a larger tragedy: the collapse of a big part of mid-America. One hundred million acres had lost most of its topsoil and nearly half had been "essentially destroyed" and could not be farmed again, Bennett said. Think about the size, Bennett said: an area stretching five hundred miles north to south and three hundred miles east to west was drifting and dusted; two thirds of the total area of the Great Plains had been damaged by severe wind erosion—an environmental disaster bigger than anything in American history.
Within the Roosevelt Administration, there were conflicting views on what was happening. A Harvard geologist told the president that an irrevocable shift in nature was underway, that the climate itselfhad changed, the start of a cycle that would take a hundred years or more and leave the southern plains a "desert waste," as Secretary of the Interior Ickes noted in his diary. The Agriculture Department said the cycle was shorter—this was the fourth year of a projected fifteen-year epoch—and classified it as a severe drought, not a shift in climate or geology. Still, a dry period of that duration could mean dozens, maybe hundreds, of towns in Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado, New Mexico, Texas, and Oklahoma would disappear, falling off the map as quickly as they had been stapled to it. It could mean that a big section of the United States that had once been labeled the Great American Desert would revert to its earlier designation. The cattle slaughters and payments to prevent people from planting more wheat had brought prices up, but government-subsidized scarcity had done little to restore the overall farm economy. The system was broken, just like the land. The debate was whether to start from scratch, with radical new methods of farming, or to give up on the southern plains altogether. Roosevelt was still fascinated by the idea of planting millions of drought-tolerant trees in the dusted-over flatlands, creating a huge protected zone. He was waiting for the report on its feasibility. The shelterbelt project could be a noble calling, Roosevelt argued, for a payroll of young, uniformed CCC workers motivated by an almost wartime urgency to save America's heartland, giving it the "lungs" of a transplanted forest.
Ickes continued to make the case against offering people more incentive to keep farming the Dust Bowl. At times, Ickes was an idealist, the designated dreamer of the New Deal. "Utopian goals? Utopian indeed," he said in response to a reporter's question two years into the administration. "We are a spiritual people, and life for us would not be worth living if we did not have this urge to reach for what will always seem beyond our reach." But he was also a practical pol, schooled in Chicago's street-tough trenches. His sharp elbows belied his scholarly look. As interior secretary, he was emperor of the outdoors, in charge of a public domain nearly the size of Germany. In his view, the land was spent; the drought was simply the deathblow. It was hard to tell people that their earnest agricultural toil had brought them great woe but Ickes did, even when his bluntness got him in trouble. He also went after politicians who were using New Deal relief plans to build regional empires. The Kingfish, Senator Huey Long from Louisiana, had told Ickes he could "go slap down to hell" for criticizing him. Ickes's response was in character:
"The trouble with Senator Long is he is suffering from halitosis of the intellect," he said. "That's presuming Emperor Long has an intellect."
Hugh Bennett took a different tack, using country charm and playing off the sheet music of history. Big Hugh was one part science and one part showboat. He had backed off trying to shame people into action and no longer singled out the United States as the biggest abuser of the land the world had ever known. Using the public-works dollar, people could build ponds and holding tanks. They could form community farming districts where everyone would agree to practice a strict set of conservation rules, rotating crops, fallowing land, abandoning tear-up-the-earth methods of plowing. They could stop the spread of dunes by building natural barriers. Big Hugh had come a long way in the two years since Roosevelt hired him. At first, the government looked at the wreckage of the plains in the same way it viewed the great Mississippi River flood of 1927, or a tornado or hurricane, for that matter—a natural disaster requiring relief. The Red Cross and the government worked to get people out of harm's way, to provide cots, food, shelter. In 1933, Bennett had been given five million dollars in relief funds to jump-start his fledgling Soil Erosion Service—a temporary agency with a limited scope: relief. But as the dusters picked up in ferocity, Bennett was one of the first in Washington to try and convince people it was not just another natural disaster or an epic drought. It seemed like something caused by man, a by-product of hubris and ignorance on a grand scale. Maybe some of it could be reversed. But to do so, people would have to think anew about how they used the land. It could not be done in a piecemeal fashion.
Bennett worked Congress, trying to persuade them to create a permanent, well-funded agency to heal the land. He wanted there to be local control, with the first nudge coming from Washington. In his mind, every farm community would set up a soil conservation district and look at their region as part of the fabric of local ecology. Big Hugh was an imposing figure, notes stuffed in his pockets, hair uncombed, blue eyes bulging, his glasses coming on and off as he waved his big, dirt-soiled hands, citing everything from Pliny's descriptions of Roman terracing in Natural History to Thomas Jefferson's recommendations on contour plowing. There was much skepticism about spending tax money on such a venture. Weren't there enough New Deal public works and farm relief programs to help those sorry folks stuck in the High Plains? Yes, but Bennett wanted money specifically for a plan to hold the ground down for generations to come. It had to go beyond relief and triage. But didn't this go against the grain of the yeoman farmer? The sod was broken by strong men, working alone, who never got a dime or half a thimble of advice from some agency operating out of Washington, D.C. They were the toughest sons of bitches on the planet. What could some soil expert from the city know that a nester who had poked his ground for fifty years didn't know?
"If God can't make rain in Kansas," one congressman asked, "how can the New Deal hope to succeed?"
Bennett conceded that FDR had no plans to take on the work of God. His idea was much simpler: change human behavior, not the weather. "One man cannot stop the soil from blowing," he said. "But one man can start it." He also noted that the people in the desperate zone were begging for guidance. These tough farmers were on their knees, hands extended to Washington. Here was a telegram from ranchers in Dallam County, Texas, asking for a soil erosion project. Here were others from Kansas, Oklahoma, Nebraska. Just show us the way, they pleaded.
Still, many politicians thought other parts of the country needed more help. More than two million people had found government public works jobs, which paid a minimum of twelve dollars a week, putting bandages on the wounds of American life. But nearly twenty-five million were still without regular income, relying on part-time jobs, private charities, or black-market income. For African Americans, the unemployment rate was 50 percent. Throughout the South and in some places in the North, notes were posted on job sites that read, "No jobs for niggers until every white man has a job." It took an executive order from Roosevelt in May 1935 to open up the public works ranks to all races. Nationwide, per capita income had fallen from $681 in 1929 to $495 in 1934. The ranks of landless farmers had swollen to an unmoored army. Between 1930 and 1935, there were 750,000 bankruptcies or foreclosures on farms. In the tenant-farmer areas in the South, New Deal scarcity payments stuffed the pockets of landowners but forced sharecroppers onto the open road. Shattered lives littered the land from sea to sea. Why should the dust-ravaged plains get special attention?
Others thought the nesters of the southern plains were too dumb, too inbred, too thick to deserve more help. "They are simply, by God's inscrutable will, inferior men," wrote H. L. Mencken, one of the most influential columnists in the land. The best thing to be done would be to sterilize them, he said.
Bennett had been in touch with weather stations in the South. Black Sunday had changed everything. The storm's detritus—or perhaps it was a new duster—was moving east, picking up dirt in other states, even if it no longer had enough force and density to blot the sun. Bennett had been scheduled for another round of testimony before the Senate in midweek. After checking with the progress of the eastbound roller, he asked for a delay. The storm that blanketed New York and Washington one year earlier had been an eye opener. As Bennett told an aide, "When people along the eastern seaboard began to taste fresh soil from the plains two thousand miles away, many of them realized for the first time that somewhere, something had gone wrong with the land."
He wanted them to get another taste. On Friday, April 19, five days after Black Sunday, Bennett walked into Room 333 of the Senate Office Building. He began with the charts, the maps, the stories of what soil conservation could do, and a report on Black Sunday. The senators listened, expressions of boredom on the faces of some. An aide whispered into Big Hugh's ear. "It's coming."
This prompted a broad diversion, more on Pliny and Jefferson, jokes about his own farm and how hard it was to maintain the place. Keep it up, the aide told Bennett again, it will be here within an hour, they say.
Bennett told how he learned about terracing at an early age, about how the old ground on his daddy's place in North Carolina was held in place by a simple method that most country farmers learned when they were young. And did he mention—yes, again—that an inch of topsoil can blow away in an hour, but it takes a thousand years to restore it? Think about that equation. A senator who had been gazing out the window interrupted Bennett. "It's getting dark outside."
The senators went to the window. Early afternoon in mid-April, and it was getting dark. The sun over the Senate Office Building vanished. The air took on a copper hue as light filtered through the flurry of dust. For the second time in two years, soil from the southern plains fell on the capital. This time it seemed to take its cue from Hugh Bennett. The weather bureau said it had originated in No Man's Land.
"This, gentlemen, is what I'm talking about," said Bennett. "There goes Oklahoma."
Within a day, Bennett had his money and a permanent agency to restore and sustain the health of the soil. When Congress passed the Soil Conservation Act, it marked the first time any nation had created such a unit. Immediately, 150 CCC camps were reassigned from the Forest Service to Bennett's renamed Soil Conservation Service to augment the few troops he already had on demonstration projects. They would work "to the task of ending the waste of our land," as Roosevelt said, dispatching his restoration army. In all, about 20,000 people were sent to the southern plains. They came from the cities, from universities, from farms in other parts of the country. The president signed the act before April had ended, the worst month for those stuck in the blowing dirt.
But the administration was of two minds about what to do, for Roosevelt also created, at the same time, the Resettlement Administration. The purpose was to give loans, averaging about seven hundred dollars a family, for people to start anew or to buy land for the same purpose. Though he was still reticent about encouraging a massive exodus, Roosevelt signed Executive Order 7028, granting federal authorities the power to buy back much of what it had given away in homesteads over the previous seventy-three years. The executive order was a stunning reversal of everything the government had done with the public domain since the founding of the republic. To some people who had staked their lives to land once heralded by the government as a source of "health, wealth and opportunity" and remembered when it paid for trainloads of nesters to the agricultural frontier of the arid lands, it smelled like one thing—a push to depopulate the plains.
In Dalhart, John McCarty took a fresh vow, in public: this will not stand! His anger burned through his prose and carried his voice. If they want to kick us out—we'll show them! McCarty announced formation of the Last Man Club, himself as president, open to anybody who agreed to stay put. No matter how hard the dust blew, no matter how deeply people were buried in sand, they would not retreat. His people were Spartans. They would hunker in their dust bunkers "until hell freezes over," he said. And then they would skate on the ice over hell. He printed enrollment cards that read:
Barring Acts of God or unforeseen personal tragedy or family illness, I pledge myself to be the Last Man to leave this country, to always be loyal to it, and to do my best to cooperate with other members of the Last Man Club in the year ahead.
A person signed their name at the bottom, next to McCarty's signature, and was given a number. Last Man Number One was Ealy Moore, a rawhide-skinned former XIT trail boss now reduced to telling stories about the long-gone grass. Uncle Dick Coon, now said to be the only wealthy man left in town, was Last Man Number Two. The third man to join was Texas governor James V. Allred, who had been enrolled by Uncle Dick on a visit to the capital. It was a political stunt, but it worked, spreading the word of this defiant band of nesters in the middle of the Dust Bowl. Doc Dawson, destitute, suffering from ill health, running the soup kitchen, was Last Man Number Four. It wasn't just geezers, McCarty noted. Wilson Cowen, the young judge, was Last Man Number Thirty-One. If this elite group of citizens, Spartans whose mark on the land was as clear as the stakes originally planted by the Comancheros a hundred years earlier, wasn't evidence of the iron will of those in the middle of the Dust Bowl, what more proof could a person ask for?
A week after Black Sunday, banners went up around town: "RALLY TONIGHT—LAST MAN CLUB." McCarty's speeches were filmed by newsreels and sent to theaters across the country. He still looked like a young Orson Welles, with his athletic build and shock of dark hair. Behind him was a larger banner of the Last Man Club.
"Are we gonna stay here till hell freezes over?" he thundered.
"Yes!"
"I ask you again: how long are we gonna stay here?"
"Till ... hell ... freezes ... over!"
The cheers spilled onto Denrock Street, where the dirt from Black Sunday had yet to be shoveled away, and onto cars stuffed with children, dishes, pots and pans, a few rickety chairs, and other belongings, families fleeing the lethal dust. Even as Judge Cowen joined the Last Man Club, he knew many people had to leave town or face death. "Exodusters," they were called. One Dalhart family asked the judge if he might buy them a tire to get them on their way. Other families with a cup or a hat in front of their belongings begged for gas money to launch them west. But hadn't they heard about the signs at the California border, warning Exodusters to turn back, that there was no work in California? Maybe. But there wasn't anything to hold a person to Texas, either. In Texas, per capita annual income was $298—half as much as California. Judge Cowen ordered a Dalhart filling station to grant people leaving town ten gallons of gasoline—worth about $1.90—and one secondhand tire. The offer was open to Dallam County residents only. It was the least they could do, the judge said, for somebody who had survived the blowing dirt of the last four years.
Over poker and drinks at the DeSoto Hotel, people carped at the handout of gas and tire. Deserters, they called those who packed up and left. No guts. Why should Dallam County give them anything? The people who decided to stick it out, to grab a root and growl with McCarty, were fired up by all the attention that came to the Last Man Club. They were Spartans—goddamn right!—but they had one big question: what would they do while growling?
For starters, they could kick some rain from the clouds. Tex Thornton, the former wildcatter, now full-time rainmaker, had his tool kit of explosives, his payment from the city, and was ready to start bombing the skies to bring moisture down on the Panhandle. He certainly had the endorsement of McCarty, who believed that all the shortgrass prairie really needed was a little rain and then the country would rise again.
"If you get a chance, meet Tex Thornton," McCarty wrote. "Tex handles this soup TNT and nitro-glycerin like it was so many sticks of wood. He is a real fellow."
McCarty urged people to join his Last Man Club quickly.
"I'm going to close the membership list with the first big rain because after we get a genuine soaker everybody will be wanting to stay and those who have gone away will want to come back."
His writing served a dual purpose, for McCarty was not only editor of the Texan, but he was now also director of the Chamber of Commerce, which had hired Thornton. Tex was waiting for just the right conditions before he worked his meteorological magic. By early May, he was ready and set up operations four miles out of town. The first evening, with a curious crowd watching, Thornton fired off his TNT rockets, one charge every ten minutes or so. Some of them carried as much as ten sticks of dynamite. The wind and dust blew as usual, obscuring Tex himself as he went through his rounds. After a few hours, people trickled home. In town, people could hear the thunder from Thornton's pyrotechnics well into the night. Doc Dawson wandered outside every half an hour, craned his neck, looking to the sky. Wind and dust. No rain.
The next day, Tex resumed his bombing. A smaller crowd showed up this time. Tex fired off a couple of duds, which blew up in the ground, creating his own dust storm that chased the crowd away.
"Gotta work on that," he said. "Needs some tinkering."
The fireworks continued through the afternoon and into the evening. Dawson strolled around town, taking in the sorry state of Dalhart as it tried to rally itself with aerial bombings and a Last Man Club. The acts of defiance felt good, but the town looked pathetic—no leaves on bare trees, dunes piled high on the sides of buildings, houses chipped to gray wood, the sand plowed like snow at the edge of town. Dawson would "howdy, neighbor" to people he had known since he pulled into the startup town in 1907, and they would "howdy" back. But a second exchange usually ended in details of something dark: news of a loved one suffering from dust pneumonia, a looming bankruptcy. People were at their breaking points. Almost everyone was sick with a variation of duster lung siege.
Thornton started up again the third day in the afternoon. Towns east of Dalhart complained that Tex was only sending more dust their way and asked him to stop.
"Just about got it right," Tex said.
The sky took on a beige look, which deepened to cinnamon brown as the wind carried a fresh duster into town. Tex aimed his explosives at the dust clouds, firing round after round until the thickening duster forced him into retreat at the dinner hour. After supper, with the winds taking a breather, Thornton was back at it. He attacked the sky until nearly midnight. The crack crack of explosives kept the Doc and most of Dalhart from sleeping. Dawson wandered outside in his nightshirt, held his hands palm-side up. Wind and dust. No rain. The sky looked eerie, light flashing at the base of dust clouds from the big calcium flares that Tex had sent up.
On day four, Tex Thornton rested. The forecast, as indicated by the barometer, called for colder temperatures, little moisture in the air—nothing fat enough to bomb. As for his failure to date, Tex said he needed only a bit of refinement. The problem was that he had to get his explosives directly into the belly of the clouds. He produced small gas balloons for precise aerial delivery and announced resumption of the rainmaking tomorrow morning, at a new location out of town. Tex tethered his balloons to a kite string, loaded them with bombs, and set them aloft. He came equipped with a special dust suit and mask, designed to keep him in place no matter what the sky threw back at him.
As the temperature dropped, low clouds moved in. There were reports of snow in Clayton and other parts of New Mexico, just to the west. Tex continued firing at the sky until dark. That night a light dusting of snow fell, one tenth of an inch. McCarty was ecstatic. It snowed the next day as well, changing to sleet with warmer temperatures. Of course, it also snowed in Denver, Albuquerque, and Dodge City, places that had not felt a rumble from the hands of Tex Thornton. Still, a grateful citizenry thanked the rainmaker from Amarillo. He had done his job. Some even thought the drought was over. They massed that night for a final rally on behalf of the Last Man Club.
"How long are we gonna stay here?" McCarty asked.
"Till hell freezes over!"
"That's right. Till hell freezes over!"
Tex tipped his hat, packed up his weather balloons, his nitro, and his TNT, and went on his way. "I did the best I could," he said. "I'm mighty glad for the people of Dalhart."
Optimism did not follow the snow flurries forty-eight miles north into Boise City. The town was reeling after Black Sunday, stripped bare. A few days after Hazel Shaw buried her baby, she returned home to the empty funeral home and the one-bedroom apartment. The crib haunted her. The church across the street glared back, housing an angry God. Grandma Lou finally had been laid to rest in Texhoma after the funeral procession had retreated back to Boise City, hunkered down for the night, and then resumed the march to her grave the next day. All things in No Man's Land, the landmarks of Hazel's life, had lost their meaning. She felt alone, staggered by depression. The questions, tinged with guilt, played over and over: Could she have done something to save Ruth Nell? Should she have tried to flee earlier? Why did they stay in Boise City so long, with the power of the storms building every day, the dirt so deadly?
The wind found any openings, carrying fresh black and brown powder into the apartment, rekindling the doubts. She busied herself with chores, but at times she simply broke down. It seemed useless: the repetitive tasks of cleaning a surface or a curtain or a floor that would sprout a new growth of prairie whiskers within half a day. She drove to homesteads of other Lucas family members and got further depressed. The roads were a hazard. But she felt so claustrophobic, so cornered; she had to see some green, to find clear sky, to escape the trapped enclosure of the dusted apartment. There was nothing that spring to indicate the new season: not a sprout or sprig of new life. The dead cattle, some with their eyes frozen and glazed over with sand, were pinned in grisly repose against fences holding tumbleweeds and dirt. Her uncle C.C. cut open the stomach of one dead cow that had wandered onto his land. His autopsy found the stomach packed so solidly with dust that it blocked food from getting any further. Other postmortems found the same thing: animals dead from starvation caused by internal suffocation. The dust was killing everything in No Man's Land.
By late 1935, more than a thousand people, about 20 percent of the population, had pulled up stakes and left Cimarron County since the start of the drought four years earlier. They crowded into horse-drawn wagons or Model-As with worn tires, the paint long ago chipped away, and headed east to Missouri and beyond to the Carolinas, or north to Denver, to the Snake River Plateau of southern Idaho, or eastern Washington State, or west to California. Ezra and Goldie Lowery, living on their canned thistles and yucca roots at the homestead outside Boise City, vowed again to hold on, despite the horrendous year they had suffered. Their daughter, Odalee, a senior and high school classmate of Faye Folkers, started the school year with mumps on her left side. She was out for a week, then went down with mumps on the other side of her neck. In November, she came down with the measles and was quarantined for three weeks. By February, a month when there was seldom a day without a suffocating dust storm, Odalee was diagnosed with scarlet fever. She was quarantined for another two months, and the family was forced to flee the homestead. They returned on April 14, Black Sunday. Her father remained defiant.
"We may have to eat rattlesnake," he said. "But I'm not leaving."
A month later, Odalee graduated. She was class valedictorian.
Some of Hazel's friends who had joined the exodus, filing west with migrants from tenant farms in Arkansas and eastern Texas and Oklahoma, reported back in letters that California was no better than Cimarron County. No matter where they had come from, or if they had some schooling or owned land, they were called the same thing: Okie. It meant being no better than a throwaway rag. At least in No Man's Land, people had family and friends to help them through or were able to swap a service for a dozen eggs or a shank of ham, and people looked you straight in the eye, with respect.
Signs in the Central Valley of California made clear how people felt about the new arrivals. One sign read: "OKIES AND DOGS NOT ALLOWED INSIDE."
Over the next two years, 221,000 people would move to California, most of them from Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. But only 16,000 came from the actual Dust Bowl. A majority of people in the most wind-bared and lacerated counties in the southern plains did not move, or they relocated only a few hundred miles in one direction.
Hazel and her husband, Charles, were ready to get out. Yes, they had their little mortician's business. But families could not afford to pay. The Shaws would dress, help to ritualize, and bury a loved one, and then get paid in grocery scrip, or chickens, or a promissory note, or a little cash that was not nearly enough to cover expenses. The future was a black hole. Even Sunday visits to other Lucas family members were no longer an option—the sheriff warned people not to drive unless they had an emergency. Three weeks after Black Sunday, a pair of cars smashed head-on, killing the drivers. They were going only fifteen miles an hour when they collided, but the dust was so heavy it blinded the drivers. With every day, Hazel felt more buried, more depressed. Her hometown, which had rejected any relief help when the dry years started, now turned to Washington in desperation. Boise City had no pride left, no options, no future. The Cimarron County commissioners sent a telegram to the White House:
"80% OF RESIDENTS IN COUNTY IN DIRE NEED OF IMMEDIATE RELIEF TO SAVE THEM FROM SEMI-STARVATION."