LIFE WITHOUT WATER did strange things to the land. It was typical in the spring to find a tarantula in the bathtub, centipedes on the ceiling, or spiders freshly hatched from winter nests. But as the drought on the southern plains entered its second year, a profusion of bugs appeared. Insects bred and hatched through months that normally would have killed a generation in colder, wetter years. They emerged in huge numbers. Grasshoppers swarmed over wheat fields, chewing down the tender shoots left in the abandoned grounds, and massed over gardens, consuming in a few minutes food that could provide a nester with a winter's worth of canned goods. Centipedes crawled up drapes, over floors—buckets of them. They had to be swept outside with the dust. In Dalhart, Willie Dawson awoke one morning to a black tarantula with two-inch-long legs and a body the size of an apple prowling around her kitchen. She shrieked for the Doc. Later in the week, two more tarantulas appeared. It was the big dust cloud of January that had carried them to Dalhart, people in town said. In No Man's Land, black widows crawled out of woodsheds and corn stacks, over dugout floors and up the walls of frame houses. An elderly man died of a bite. A boy screamed for half a day from the pain of a similar bite. He passed out and was rushed south to the new hospital run by the Catholic nuns. The child in Boise City was lucky to live; a boy in Rolla, Kansas, died from his black widow bite.
Rabbits had the run of the land, crowding fields, yards, streets. They were an easy source of food, but they also took away food, gnawing en masse in places where some farmers still hoped to raise a crop. People saw the rabbits as a scourge, a perpetual motion of mastication, indifferent to the human alterations that were blowing away.
"BIG RABBIT DRIVE SUNDAY—BRING CLUBS"
In the pages of the Texan, John McCarty thought it was time to get rid of the big-eared menaces. People gathered in a fenced field at the edge of Dalhart, about two thousand folks armed with baseball bats and clubs. The atmosphere was festive, many people drinking corn whiskey from jugs. At last, they were about to do something, striking a blow against this run of freakish nature. They spread to the edge of the fenced section, forming a perimeter, then moved toward the center, herding rabbits inward to a staked enclosure. As the human noose tightened, rabbits hopped around madly, sniffing the air, stumbling over each other. The clubs smashed heads. The bats crushed rib cages. Blood splattered, teeth were knocked out, hair was matted and reddened. The rabbits panicked, screamed. It took most of an afternoon to crush several thousand rabbits. Their bodies were left in a bloodied heap at the center of the field. Somebody strung up a few hundred of them and took a picture.
Melt White had disobeyed his daddy and gone to the rabbit drive. He did not take part, but he watched at the edge of the slaughter. As citizens of Dalhart closed in, the boy cringed at the sounds: swinging clubs, whoops and hollers, and the anguished howls—he told his mama he heard the rabbits cry—as they died. He ran to his house with the tarpaper roof and carried with him nightmares that never left.
The rabbit drives caught on and became a weekly event in some places. In a single square mile section, people could kill up to six thousand rabbits in an afternoon. It seemed a shame to let all those dead rabbits go to waste when so many people were hungry in the cities. After one drive, in Hooker, Oklahoma, people shipped off two thousand rabbits as surplus meat. But it was hard to keep the meat from spoiling, and the logistics of butchering them proved too much. The rabbits were left to buzzards and insects or shoveled into pits and buried.
The heat of that year broke all records. One day it hit 115 degrees up in Baca County, and the Osteen dugout was unbearable. The children wanted to sleep outside, but their mother considered it dangerous, with the fields starting to fly. She had an idea: why not cool the dugout with water from the well? Using buckets, Ike and his brother got water from the windmill's holding tank and poured it over the roof. Their little home steamed like a sauna. They had just one window on either side of the dugout, which measured twenty feet by sixteen feet. And when the earth started to move, the dust covered their portholes to the outside world, making it black inside the Osteen home even at midday. One of Ike's jobs was to shovel the dust that drifted up against the dugout. He did his chores, but then he often skipped school. In 1932, Ike was fifteen, and the classroom felt like prison to him. There was no longer any money to be made plowing up people's fields at a dollar an acre. Nobody was turning over fresh ground now. Baca County was spent.
At a time when bankers were seen as thieves behind a till and government was a cold brother who would not help a family in need, an old outlaw of the High Plains came in for a second look. Black Jack Ketchum had been in the ground for more than thirty years, buried with his severed head in a little patch of dirt across the Texas line in Clayton, New Mexico. But now some people were saying maybe Black Jack wasn't such a cur after all. In these days of dust and despair, Black Jack took on new qualities. He had robbed trains, and everybody knew what bastards the railroads were. He had robbed banks, and good for him. And it was a shame, folks said, that he never got a proper resting place. Here he was, perhaps the most famous outlaw of this withered prairie, having ridden with Butch Cassidy and the Hole in the Wall Gang in between his deeds in No Man's Land. His legend expanded as Hollywood scoured the West for stories of thugs on horseback. A group of prominent citizens decided to dig up Black Jack and move him to the new Clayton Cemetery. There Black Jack would be given his proper due. They put out a call to newspapers, hoping the outlaw's notoriety could bring a few visitor dollars to a place getting a reputation for nothing but dust and failure. And while a civic moralist like John McCarty did not approve of the disinterment, he too thought Black Jack looked better when judged by modern standards.
"There is, however, one good point in reviving his history. It shows that Black Jack did his robbing in a more or less manly manner," McCarty wrote. "He was a train robber and six-gun killer and he made no bones about it. He wasn't a dirty, rotten, sniveling, stinking polecat of a gangster ... Black Jack had his good points when you compare him with the rats modern civilization is having to deal with..."
Such words did not sit well with the Herzstein family. This manly man had robbed Levi Herzstein's store and then shot him dead after pretending to surrender. He was never charged with killing Levi. Instead, he went to the gallows on a capital robbery crime—after the railroads lobbied to set the death penalty as a punishment for certain kinds of train heists. Simon and Maude Herzstein had tried to live through these dark days by holding on to a few special things. The store in Dalhart had gone under, lost in foreclosure because the Herzsteins couldn't pay the city taxes. About once a month, though, they would host a big Friday dinner party, cooking up duck or venison with a few bottles of wine left over from buying trips in the more prosperous days. It was a way to forget about the ragged wind outside.
On Sunday afternoon, September 11, 1933, nearly three thousand people gathered around a rocky scab of land at the edge of Clayton. The grave was opened, a pine box was lifted up out of the ground, and the top removed. An ex-sheriff, brought in from Tom Green County, Texas, where Black Jack had done some robbing, was called forth to take a good look.
"Yup. That's him."
And by God, Black Jack's head did not look too bad. He'd been remarkably well-preserved, thanks to the limestone layer that covered his casket. His black suit was in mint condition. His ink-black hair and his mustache were still dark and bushy. He was taken to the new cemetery and buried at some distance from the others. Although people thought Black Jack deserved a better final resting ground, they did not want him too close to the finest corpses of Clayton. They put him deep in the ground and left the grave without a tombstone. They had done right by the Ketchum boy, it was said in the papers. But to the Herzsteins, giving Uncle Levi's killer another chance to face the sky was appalling.
In the fall of 1932, many farmers did not plant a crop of next year's wheat. What was the point? They could hope for the drought to end and bring in a good harvest next year, but if the price was anywhere close to what it had been for the last two years, it meant only another shove toward bankruptcy. The challenge was to keep a smidge of self-respect while living on what you could kill or grow in a garden. Life was on hold, suspended until the rains returned. To see land that you had brought to life turn to nothing was as sad as watching a friend die of a long illness. And then to fallow that land, because hope itself was gone, was harder still.
For the Lucas clan and the Folkers and other farmers in the High Plains, it was a daily struggle not to think that more bad times were on the way. From dawn that brought yet another cloudless day, to an evening supper of wheat porridge or rabbit hind again, there was no escape from the thorns of failure. This year fulfilled the long ago warnings of Stephen Long and John Wesley Powell—that this arid land was not fit for normal agriculture. For the land had not just failed them, it had turned against them. In all of 1932, only twelve inches of rain fell in No Man's Land—barely half of what was needed, as a rough minimum, to produce a crop. The Lucas clan had kept food from the 1931 harvest, corn, maize, and wheat, as insurance. By the fall of 1932, it was gone. Most families had a few row crops, but they were shriveled by the drought. The corrosive dust drifted thick enough to bury what little natural sod was left. With the grass under sand, there was no pasturage for animals. They had nothing to feed their animals but tumbleweed, which the Folkers were already using. If you ground up the tumbleweed and salted it, Fred Folkers told his neighbors, the animals would eat it.
Hazel Lucas Shaw was living in town, still teaching at a school that could not pay anything but scrip, and her husband was trying to start a funeral home in the rental house they had moved into. When she visited her uncle C.C. Lucas on his homestead south of Boise City, she found a man struggling to survive. Hazel clung to the beauty of years past. She remembered how the country would open to so much color, the fields of coreopsis, the purple verbena, the patches of green buffalo grass.
It had all disappeared in a wash of brown. Uncle C.C. could not get the milk he normally drew from his dairy cows, and it wasn't just because the animals were hungry, living on a ration of last year's grain and this year's tumbleweeds. He examined their udders and found they were sore and reddened from the dust. The cows would not even let their calves suckle. His remedy was one that he heard from another farmer in No Man's Land—rub a little axle grease on the cows' udders, just enough to take away the chafing from the dust. By using grease, he got some milk, even if it came with nondairy drippings.
C.C. Lucas had no prospect of making money from the land. The family would have to get by on salt pork, dried beans, and a dwindling supply of canned vegetables and fruits. The children were bothered by the bugs, so many crawling, biting critters, and insects they had never seen before. Green worms, for example, on the fence, inside the house, over the porch, in the kitchen. Where did they come from? The kids would not get into bed without scanning for black widows or tarantulas. Hazel tried to get her cousins to see beyond 1932. Hazel believed in tomorrow perhaps more than any member of her extended family. She had seen hailstorms that collapsed a dugout; she had seen lightning scatter a horse team, and prairie fire come right up to the house. This arid, tortured stretch of slow time—it was just another trial, and then the purple verbena would bloom again, and the labors of No Man's Land could mean something, surely. Look at all they had accomplished in half a generation's time: going from dirtdwellers with nothing to making a decent living. To return to subsistence was something a Lucas could put up with.
The best way around the ubiquity of despair was to think of new life. Hazel wanted to start a family, but who could bring a baby into a world without hope? That's why you had to banish the negative thoughts, she said. She could will a positive day. The color would come back to life when the water returned. This drought could not last to 1933.
The dust storm that blew up from Amarillo at the start of 1932 was treated as a freak of nature, a High Plains anomaly. The weather bureau studied pictures of the duster and was fascinated by its enormity, its dark color, the way it moved unlike any other phenomena of weather. It was not a normal sandstorm and not a tornado. They still had no technical term for it.
In March the wind was often at its most fierce, and when it blew in the late winter of 1932, it picked up the earth in No Man's Land and scattered it all over the High Plains. These storms were shorter and smaller than the big duster of January, but they were similar in other ways: black, rolling, sharp and cutting on the skin. The cows bawled when a duster rolled in and hit like a swipe from the edge of a big file. The dirt got in their eyes and blinded them, got in their noses and mouths, matted up their hide, and caused skin rashes and infections. The weather bureau counted half a dozen black blizzards on the Oklahoma Panhandle in late winter of 1932. At the end of March, the sky brightened, no wind for a day. Fred Folkers walked among his fruit trees, one of the few things still alive on his dead land. Little buds had started to form. But the next day, a chill, blue norther came through; it was so cold it killed the fruit crop for a second year in a row.
April came with the winds nonstop, the fields swirling up high and rolling north. A farmer could see but barely farther than the length of his section on most days. The weather bureau started to classify dusters by visibility. A bad one, a storm in which a person could see no more than a quarter mile, was the worst. In 1932, there were fourteen of these blinding storms. The biggest one, in April, scared children at Hazel's school in No Man's Land. The sky darkened, as if the sun was blocked by an eclipse, and then—bang! bang!—like gunshot, the school windows were blown out, shattered, and the dust poured in, covering desks, the floor, faces. It was gone in a minute, leaving glass shards on the floor and the hard, tiny particles of fields that had been plowed for wheat just a few years earlier. Some of the children could not stop crying. They went home with tears turned muddy and told their parents the school had exploded that day. Afterward, some parents kept their children home. School was too dangerous.
Now the dust was no longer a curiosity but a threat; the land had become an active, malevolent force. If windblown dirt could break windows in school and make cattle go blind, what was next? Children were coughing, unable to sleep at night, hacking until their guts hurt. Something was seriously wrong with this land, but nobody had any experience with it. The county agriculture man in Boise City, Bill Baker, was a history buff, and living at the far edge of No Man's Land he was in a place that presented a host of discoveries to a curious mind. Baker found a cave in a corner of Cimarron County. After considerable excavation, a mummy was discovered inside the cave: a child, perfectly preserved. The mummy was thirty-eight inches long with a broad face and forehead, and a head of shoulder-length hair. Cornhusks, a bag stuffed with pumpkin seeds, and a small cord made of yucca plant fibers were buried with the child. The college archaeologists who finished the dig said the boy was from the Basket Maker period more than two thousand years ago. To Bill Baker, this meant people had farmed No Man's Land well before it was thought anyone had ever put a shoot in the ground. Baker took possession of the mummy and put it on display under glass in the courthouse in Boise City. The tiny boy with the tuft of hair who appeared to be sucking his thumb became a big draw in the town built on railroad fraud. To Baker, trying to make sense of a land that was a danger to people, this mummy held some secrets. No Man's Land was not an empty plain after all. There had been people living on this accursed ground, dating to the time of Christ or earlier. And yet here they were in Boise City, barely a full generation into the life of the town, and everything was going to hell, the place collapsing from within, the land lethal. The mummy's people had figured out some way to live in this place. It baffled Baker—the small cornhusks, the tools. He also knew he would not be able to find anybody who could provide answers, oral history, or a link between this mummified past and the desperation of the twentieth century. The Indians knew something, but they were gone, pushed from the plains before they could hand off a guide to living.
Sitting Bull had predicted the land would get its revenge on whites who forced the Indians off the grasslands. He saw doom from the sky. During this drought, his nephew, One Bull, tried to reverse Sitting Bull's prophecy. One Bull sent a letter from the reservation in South Dakota to a professor at the University of Oklahoma, Stanley Campbell, asking him to return the Sioux wotawe, a medicine bag with human hair, stones, dried food, and other artifacts. The rightful owners of the wotawe could influence the weather, One Bull explained.
There was another band of people who might have some answers. The Mexicans, like the Indians, were largely invisible. They had some history with the place, at least more than anyone in Boise City. Juan Cruz Lujan and his brother, Francisco, had a sheep ranch up north in Carrumpa Valley—the oldest home in Cimarron County. Lujan was born in Mexico in 1858, and as a little boy he ran away and worked as an ox team driver, traveling the Santa Fe Trail and Cimarron Cutoff, right through the heart of the Oklahoma Panhandle. Lujan remembered the Comanche, the Kiowa, the boundless prairie chickens and pronghorn antelopes, the big bison herds and the sea of grass—the whole intact, full-dimensional original High Plains. He had lived it, gloried in it, bound up his future and family in it, thanked God for it. He and his brother ran sheep in No Man's Land and set up a ranch even before the cattlemen came. They built a rock house next to a spring-fed creek. His animals were fat and woolly and didn't fuss or need much, but then, it was the best sheep country in the world. Don Juan fell in love with a rich man's girl, Señorita Virginia Valdez, daughter of the Baca family, who ran sheep all over New Mexico. They were married by a Jesuit priest who encouraged them to build a chapel on the ranch in No Man's Land. The ranch became the center for Catholics and Mexicans in Cimarron County. Children were homeschooled there, learning the ways of sheep trailing and how to read the sky. Virginia Lujan had nine children, though five of them died in childbirth or shortly thereafter. The families of ranch hands had their own families, and by the start of the Depression, the Lujan ranch was a community unto itself, with three generations. One of the ranch hands, José Garza, was born on the banks of Carrumpa Creek in a tiny shed and grew up loving horses and running sheep, bucking broncs, and praying like everyone else that Señora Lujan would have a boy to go with her family of girls. The Lujans treated Garza like a son.
When Boise City's ag man, Bill Baker, saw Don Juan Lujan and his cowboy Joe Garza in town, he asked them about the early days. Was there ever a time when it had been this dry? Had the air ever been so hot, for so long, or had the climate itself changed? Did the dust blow like this before? Had the skies ever been so agitated? Was the grass ever so diminished? Had the Cimarron River ever run so dry? Had the Rockies ever had so little snow? And ... how did people live in those days? Lujan was a storyteller, but his brow wrinkled as his face turned sad the more he talked about what had happened to the best sheep-grazing country of all. It was hard to conceal his rage. He hated what the sodbusters had done to the grasslands. He remembered the sound of a thousand bison hooves pounding over ground where Boise City now stood paralyzed and lost. He remembered buffalo grass covering every section that now lay tired and broken. Damn sure there were dry times before. He rattled off the years—1889–1890, 1893–1894, and then 1895, when only seven inches of rain fell, and 1910–1912. Droughts were a way of life in this country. But the grass was still around, and stayed put, through those dry years. Now it was gone, ripped out and thrown to the wind. The Lujan sheep could not find pasturage. The ocean of grass was down to a few islands of brown. As for this dust, it was killing the love of Lujan's life, his wife, Virginia. She was afflicted with the same kind of cough that rattled through every dugout, every tarpaper shack, every mud-walled hacienda. Same with Joe Garza's dad, Pablo. They both had bronchial fits, spitting up the residue of No Man's Land.
And though Lujan had lived in the far Oklahoma Panhandle longer than any Anglo, he and his ranch hands feared deportation. Lujan was American, but there were people in Boise City who suspected that the Lujan ranch was a refuge for Mexicans who took jobs away from Anglos. By 1930, there were about 1.5 million Latinos, mostly of Mexican ancestry, living in the United States. Sugar beet farms in southeastern Colorado and Kansas and cotton farms in Texas had attracted them to the southern plains. In the early years of the Depression, cities were shipping Hispanics out of the country. Los Angeles spent $77,000 to send 6,024 deportees to Mexico. Lujan knew everyone on his ranch, and he treated them like family. Nobody was going to be forced out, he assured them. Most of them had been born on this land. Joe Garza's dad was from San Antonio, Texas—"old Mexico," he always called it. A bigger question for Lujan was whether he could keep the ranch alive with the grass gone.
While the first dusters of 1932 were a mystery to farmers and meteorologists, a man who had spent his life studying cultivation of the earth thought he had some answers. Hugh Hammond Bennett toured the High Plains just as the ground started to blow, and he, too, had never seen anything like the black blizzards. But to Bennett, a flap-armed, big-eared, well-spoken doctor of dirt, the diagnosis seemed obvious. It was not the fault of the weather, although this persistent drought certainly didn't help. The great unraveling seemed to be caused by man, Bennett believed. How could it be that people had farmed the same ground for centuries in other countries and not lost the soil, while Americans had been on the land barely a generation and had stripped it of its life-giving layers?
"Of all the countries in the world, we Americans have been the greatest destroyers of land of any race of people barbaric or civilized," Bennett said in a speech at the start of the dust storms. What was happening, he said, was "sinister," a symptom of "our stupendous ignorance."
Hugh Bennett was a son of the soil, growing up on a 1,200-acre plantation in North Carolina that had been planted in cotton since before the Civil War. There were nine kids in the Bennett family, which was mixed Scots-Irish and English stock. As a boy, Hugh rode a mule to school using a fertilizer sack for a saddle. He spent part of every day on the family land east of the Blue Ridge Mountains, helping his father on steep terrain. He learned early on that the land would not wash away as long as they kept it terraced. His father also taught him that the soil of their farm was not simply a medium through which passed a fibrous commodity but also a living thing. His interest in the complexities of soil led him to the University of North Carolina and graduate school, where he studied and wrote about how different societies treated land. Out of school, he was part of a team hired by the government to do the first comprehensive soil survey of the United States. Big Hugh, as he was called since his teens, took to the road, camping out next to his car, taking soil surveys in every state. He knew more about the crust of the United States—from close personal inspection—than perhaps any person alive in the early twentieth century. His work also took him abroad, where he learned how old societies had grown things in the same ground for thousands of years without wasting the soil.
In the last years of the wheat boom, Bennett had become increasingly frustrated at how the government seemed to be encouraging an exploitive farming binge. He went directly after his old employer, the Department of Agriculture, for misleading people. Farmers on the Great Plains were working against nature, he thundered in speeches across the country; they were asking for trouble. Even in the late 1920s, before anyone else sounded an alarm, Bennett said people had sown the seeds of an epic disaster. The government continued to insist, through official bulletins, that soil was the one "resource that cannot be exhausted." To Bennett, it was arrogance on a grand scale.
"I didn't know so much costly misinformation could be put into a single brief sentence," he said.
He cited the land college report, which stated that Oklahoma had lost 440 million tons of topsoil, and another survey out of Texas, which said 16.5 million acres had been eroded to a thin veneer. And now that people were leaving the land to blow, it looked to Bennett as if they were walking away from an accident without accepting any responsibility. What people were doing was not just a crime against nature, he said, but would ultimately starve the nation. The land would become barren; the country would not be able to feed itself.
Americans had become a force of awful geology, changing the face of the earth more than "the combined activities of volcanoes, earthquakes, tidal waves, tornadoes and all the excavations of mankind since the beginning of history."