The Worst Hard Time

The day of the funeral began clear, with no wind. A rabbit drive was called back on after “a month-long delay” due to dusters. Little Jeanne Clark had just left the hospital in Lamar after “a long bout of dust pneumonia.” She only had dresses made of sackcloth, with the brand names of onions printed on the side. She did not want to go to church wearing the sack; other children would point and laugh. In Baca County, Ike Osteen “had a burst of energy” and used it to do chores around the dugout. The family garden was covered in a dust drift. In a few places, he found arrowheads. He could see the outlines of graves, which made him wonder about the Comanche and what they would think to find the buffalo grass gone and the land destroyed.

Baca County was having its warmest day of the year, with temperatures in the eighties. However, about eight hundred miles to the north, the Dakotas were dealing with a cold front from the Yukon Territory. The clash of warm and cold currents caused the air to turn violent. In two hours, temperatures dropped more than thirty degrees. By mid-morning, windblown soil advanced from South Dakota to Nebraska, and the sky grew dark. The weather bureau could not explain what was happening. The storm that had made it to the East coast the year before rode out on a jet stream—this storm was moving south with the cold front, but it was darker than any other that had advanced on the prairie. It looked like a wall of muddy water.

Robert Geiger, an Associated Press reporter from Denver, went to No Man’s Land with the photographer Harry Eisenhard. They were looking for anecdotes from locals about the black blizzards that blew through the Southern Plains almost daily. They planned on going to the Oklahoma and Texas Panhandles. Meanwhile, the advancing dust storm “was reported to be two hundred miles wide, with high winds like a tornado.” The sun had been eclipsed. A small boy who had been playing in the fields got lost and suffocated on the airborne dust.

At 2:30 PM, Dodge City, Kansas went black. South of Elkhart, people were gathering for a rabbit drive. With cattle gone, chickens going blind and hungry, and no wheat, people were starting to can rabbit meat, along with pickled tumbleweed. Ike Osteen was five miles away from his homestead when he saw rabbits and birds fleeing south. It seemed to be a desperate migration. It struck him as odd that there was no wind, but the sky was still bright. He scanned the horizon. Then, he saw it—"the mother of all dusters.” Ike and the two schoolmates with him were blinded and struggled to breathe. They crawled to a farmhouse that was black inside. Ike could hear the voices of the others, but he could not see them. He could not see his own hand.

The Lucas double funeral was held at St. Paul’s Methodist Church in Boise City that morning. More than two hundred people were in the church. Faye Folkers, Hazel Shaw’s brightest student, was there. The funeral procession started in the direction of Texhoma. Hazel and Charles stayed behind to bury their baby in Boise City, but they later learned that the Boise City Cemetery was covered in sand. Hazel and Charles then decided to bury Ruth Nell in Enid, and to wait until Monday to go east. The procession started at 3:00 PM. After an hour, everyone came to a halt. The Lucas men, dressed in their best clothes, got out and started digging sand from a drift that blocked the road.

In northern No Man’s Land, Joe Garza was taking advantage of the clear, sunny day to find stray cattle. He was thirty-five years old and his father had just died in Clayton. The cows were acting strangely and Joe’s horse pawed the ground, “nervous and sniffing.” Then, Joe saw an enormous formation—“a tidal wave of roiling black”—only one-quarter of a mile away. The blackness frightened him, and now, it was cold. Suddenly, Joe heard a cry out in the distance, It was the Guyago boy, a sheepherder. He was crying. The boy said that the dust cloud had knocked him down. Using the voice of the other ranch hand, Ernest, as a guide, Garza and the boy crawled back to safety.

At around 5:15 PM, the funeral procession, composed of about fifty people, was six miles outside of Boise City. The cars were driving through the flattest part of No Man’s Land. When the Lucas clan saw the black cloud approaching, they debated about what to do. They thought that it would be disrespectful to turn around, so they “closed ranks with the hearse in the middle and raced south, so the storm would not hit the engines first.” C.C. Lucas got drinking water from canvas bags next to the radiator. Everyone poured water into scarves, shirts, and handkerchiefs, and the children crawled under the cars with the damp clothes tied to their faces. Everyone got on the ground or got inside of a car.

The duster picked up more power and intensity as it moved south. The earth went black, and people saw flashes of electricity around their cars. Those flashes provided the only light in the overwhelming darkness. Around 6:30, the winds finally calmed to the point of not knocking anyone down. People were soon able to see their hands in front of their faces. Half a dozen men took off their coats and joined hands. They then walked the road to guide the hearse and other cars to Boise City.

People were in the midst of the rabbit drive in the northeast of town when the dust storm hit. At the Folkers’ homestead, Katherine and her son crouched down, unable to light their lantern. Black dust showered their walls and trickled through the ceiling. Meanwhile, the Associated Press team was crossing the state line into Oklahoma. The wall of dirt was closing in on them, and Eisenhard took a picture. Bob Geiger estimated that the cloud was several thousand feet. They tried to outrun it, going sixty miles per hour on a dirt road, but that was not fast enough. Their car went into a ditch. They pushed it out and continued on, finally making it to the Crystal Hotel in Boise City. Geiger had no answers for guests in the lobby who overwhelmed him with questions about the duster. He just wanted to get back to Denver to print the pictures.

Thomas Jefferson Johnson was walking home from the funeral when the storm hit. He got knocked down, and crawled forward along the road on his stomach. When his family found him later, his eyes were full of black dirt and he could not see. His vision never recovered. Meanwhile, Hazel Shaw was packing for the next day’s burial of Ruth Nell. Her four-year-old niece, Carol, was staying with them that afternoon. Suddenly, Hazel could not find Carol. Hadn’t slept since she took her dying child to the hospital the week before—now, her niece was missing. Charles grabbed a large flashlight and searched outside. He thought the girl was lost for good, but then voices in the dark told them that she was safe. She had run home when she saw the dust cloud.

Aviators like Roy Butterbaugh, the Boise City newspaper publisher, and Laura Ingalls saw the cloud. Butterbaugh and his buddy decided not to fly, but Ingalls saw it from above. The formation was “a deep purple” and “stretched so far” that one could not see the end of it. Ingalls recalled it being “the most appalling thing” she had ever seen in all of her years of flying.

The Volga Germans were just leaving church. They wanted to enjoy the sun and clear air. After four years of drought, the Ehrlichs were out of grain and George Ehrlich was too overwhelmed by grief to keep the homestead afloat. His only surviving son, Willie, took control of it instead. On that Sunday, Willie had his calf out for a walk, looking for grass. Willie’s sister then suggested that he recover the calf, for it looked as though it would rain. Willie said that what hung overhead was no rain cloud. He was picking up the calf when the dust cloud knocked him down. The storm had blown open the barn door. He crouched down in a corner and waited until midnight, when he could recognize the world again. He never found the calf, which he had to drop along the way.

The White family was preparing for evening church services. Lizzie had been talking about leaving Dalhart. She was crumbling emotionally, but they could not leave—Bam was too old. Meanwhile Melt had just found out from an aunt about his indigenous ancestry. Initially, he tried to deny it. The indigenous people were run off the land and routinely mocked. Kids at school made fun of him for his skin, calling him “Mexican” or “nigger.” Melt was Cherokee, Irish, and English through Bam, and Apache and Dutch through Lizzie. He was told it was disgraceful to be part-Native American, particularly Apache—“they were the meanest, sorriest tribe in the world” and only wanted to drink and fight, his relatives said. Melt looked outside and said that they would be unable to go to church. Bam looked, then he hurried back into the house. By then, the dust had overwhelmed them.

The dust blizzard fell on Dalhart at around 6:20 PM. Cars died in front of the DeSoto Hotel. A nine-year-old boy wandered in, screaming that he had gone blind. John McCarty was reading a book when the page turned black. Dust entered his office and settled there. A woman in southern Dallam County called the newspaper people in Amarillo to alert them to “the biggest duster of all.” Inside of a blackened room in Pampa, Texas, 110 miles southeast of Dalhart, the folk singer Woody Guthrie thought of the first lines to a song about the world coming to an end. The duster produced enough static electricity to power New York City.